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Why ElementaryOS Left Medium

blog.elementary.io

121–130 of 136 posts

Re: Why ElementaryOS Left Medium

#121
post #2

I always thought it odd that a team like ElementaryOS with a clearly defined "ethical code and goal" would choose Medium, which is an anti-consumer and anti-privacy company (e.g. try accessing Medium on a mobile phone with a smaller screen). Good on them for changing.

Yes -- good on them changing, and bravo to them for calling it out and saying why. In my opinion they put a lot of effort into making this post, and it shows.

Re: Why ElementaryOS Left Medium

#122
post #32

You know what's creepy ? "You read a lot. We like that." Or install our mobile app and get more content, or signup and get more content we figured with our fancy algorithm for you. Here's the thing, Medium never worked for me. I had over ~300 followers and if I published something none of them would see it, no reaction, no visit, no read at all and I repeated the same thing over and over again with no luck. I'd only…

> I had over ~300 followers and if I published something none of them would see it

i hate this. it's the same with youtube. if i "follow" an author, or "subscribe" to a channel, it's because i want that creator's content; not content by other creators related to the same topic.

Re: Why ElementaryOS Left Medium

#123

My problem with Jekyll (or other static generators) is that it's not as straightforward as anything with a web gui, like wordpress or ghost (or medium or tumblr or...). You still need to handle things manually (e.g. the yaml front matter), the preview is not "out of the box", different plugins/extensions may add unpredictable behaviour, you need to setup a build/deploy pipeline, etc. - the experience is just not stre…

I'm using Pelican [0] and found it really easy to setup and use.

Re: Why ElementaryOS Left Medium

#125

Why should everyone care why X left Medium? There's at least a couple of articles like this every month. If you're not happy with a service, just stop using it.

Personally I like it when people and/or companies announce they've switched from service (architecture, etc) A to service B and then give a good account of why they made that decision, how they then established themselves on B, etc. Reading such articles helps broaden my knowledge about both A and B. Seeing responses to such articles on places like HN helps me deepen that knowledge.

I've seen Medium post links on various social media, clicked on them and read the articles (or got the paywall nag thing), but I never went beyond the articles to investigate what Medium itself was all about. Now - thanks to this article, and the comments it's generated on HN - I know everything I want to know about Medium, alongside some useful pointers for possible tools to set up my own static-site blog.

"Don't announce; just flounce" is often good advice for people who want the world to know what they're up to, just because they think they're important. But I'm happy to see people ignore that advice if they offer me a compelling backstory to go alongside their announcement.

Re: Why ElementaryOS Left Medium

#126

I myself have left Medium and cancelled my subscription. When asked, I told them it was annoying to see the modal popup asking me to sign in every time I looked at Medium from my work computer. The popups, as mentioned in the linked article are annoying. As is the increase in the number of articles you have to pay to read. Not to mention the fact that the trolls have discovered Medium, and the quality of writing ther…

Your blog is a huge breath of fresh air. I genuinely miss blogs of this style. Easy to navigate, easy to read, quick to load. Love it.

I’m quite proud of it. Not only does it use 100% open source fonts for the rendering, it also renders on pretty much any browser made. The stylesheets are set up so the same HTML + CSS looks good on both desktop and mobile browsers (we use different CSS for mobile, but there’s no nonsense like m.samiam.org). The webfonts have been carefully hinted and subsetted to be of minimal size, and look good on pretty much any browser (I made sure they look good in Chrome + Windows, even on a low DPI display, which has had a lot of font rendering issues).

For example, the http → https redirect is set up so the redirect is not done in browsers which do not support Javascript (and may not support HTTPS); older versions of Internet Explorer which do not support modern TLS encryption also remain on the http website. The stylesheets do not “gracefully degrade” (in the sense I don’t try to have the site look mostly the same in antiques like IE6, IE7, or IE8), but the site is fully compatible with Internet Explorer 9 and above and any other mainstream browser from 2010 on. It is still completely readable (albeit with a different look) in older versions of Internet Explorer and in browsers without any CSS support (and, of course, it also can be read in the Lynx text-only browser).

I have tested it in Internet Explorer 5 and above, Opera 12 (the last version to use the Presto rendering engine before they moved on to WebKit), Dillo (depending on the version, it may need to have CSS disabled), Chrome, Firefox, Safari, you name it. It can be read by pretty much any browser that exists (the Unicode will look a little strange in stuff like Mosaic from 1994, but the site is still readable).

Re: Why ElementaryOS Left Medium

#127

Yeah, so basically modals, banners, reminders to use the app etc. (vide https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/cdn-origin/uploads/2019/06/... ) are new toolbars of the late 2010s ( http://i.imgur.com/X7ipc.png ). I don't like the direction where the Web is currently heading. Shutting down open APIs, forcing users to use the one and only official app (Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Reddit's starting to do so more and more),…

Well, the fundamental problem is that Capital comes in and builds a really great Thing, a Thing that may not have been built without Capital, but then Capital wants a Return, which causes the Thing to decay. The thing Hackers can do, as in the OPs article, is to salvage the good ideas that the initial efforts of Capital managed to prove, and leave out the rest. This won't work for individuals, in general, because wri…

> and they leave behind valuable information for us

Leaving information so far :

1. https://svbtle.com

2. https://posthaven.com

3. https://www.blogger.com

...

Not sure, but self-hosting was ( is ) the only way for me to sleep safe.

Re: Why ElementaryOS Left Medium

#128

Yeah, so basically modals, banners, reminders to use the app etc. (vide https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/cdn-origin/uploads/2019/06/... ) are new toolbars of the late 2010s ( http://i.imgur.com/X7ipc.png ). I don't like the direction where the Web is currently heading. Shutting down open APIs, forcing users to use the one and only official app (Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Reddit's starting to do so more and more),…

There needs to be an app that has the ability to connect ( via oAuth, whatever ) with DigitalOcean / AWS and that can generate a static website out of a WordPress(-like) editor, keeping the state in the cloud - again DO or whatever in a managed database.

The app should cost Sadly this app will never have an IPO or growth rate worth investing, but it will fix the problem ( for a while ).

Re: Why ElementaryOS Left Medium

#129
post #73

My problem with Jekyll (or other static generators) is that it's not as straightforward as anything with a web gui, like wordpress or ghost (or medium or tumblr or...). You still need to handle things manually (e.g. the yaml front matter), the preview is not "out of the box", different plugins/extensions may add unpredictable behaviour, you need to setup a build/deploy pipeline, etc. - the experience is just not stre…

A good compromise is something like Netlify CMS[0], which adds a GUI on top of a static site generator so you can write posts through a web interface. AFAIK it works with a variety of static generators, so you have a few choices. Of course, you're tied to the netlify infrastructure. [0]: https://www.netlifycms.org

I used it. Nice but incomplete, and still needs manual tinkering.

Re: Why ElementaryOS Left Medium

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah my dream blog is basically Ghost that deploys static posts when I hit Publish/Update. I’ve been slowly working on something like that for myself.

Have you looked into doing just that? There are a number of options and more arriving all the time. https://ghost.org/docs/api/v2/gatsby/ https://ghost.org/docs/api/v2/eleventy/ https://ghost.org/integrations/netlify/

This looks promising. I'll check it out.
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