Medium is not the home for your ideas • Hacker News Board

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#161

Post by rapnie » Wed, Jul 22, 2020, 8:21 AM UTC

Quite interesting is that there are a bunch of blogging softwares that not only publish to the web, but also federate with Mastodon and other fediverse applications.

Most well-known is WriteFreely.org (written in Go) that can be a good replacement for Medium (hosted version is Write.as that comes with a paid subscription). But there are also new, more specialized apps such as FediReads and Readlebee that are Amazon Goodreads alternatives.

Here's a list of blogging apps in various stages of development:

https://git.feneas.org/feneas/fediverse/-/wikis/watchlist-fo...

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#162

Post by nickcotter » Wed, Jul 22, 2020, 8:25 AM UTC

kuu wrote: post #136

willvarfar wrote: post #112

For tech-minded people, a static site generator and github-pages is a great solution. Zero cost. Zero ads etc. Not likely to change or go away. Easy to move to paid for hosting Or GitHub’s next competitor if that is ever needed etc.

I guess that the issue here could be GitHub policies, maybe they don't like your post 'because reasons' and you're in the same situation as with Medium (I understand it's not as common). The ideal case is that you own the platform.

No doubt, but it's easier to move if that happens.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#163

Post by nickcotter » Wed, Jul 22, 2020, 8:27 AM UTC

ethiclub wrote: post #137

classics2 wrote: post #102

Is it really so hard to spin up an aws machine with a plain old lamp stack to serve this kind of content? Its incredibly cheap and simple to do.

Yes, for many (most?) non-technical folk. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge

Even if you are well-versed in how to do it, it can still be a time sink you may not be able to afford.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#164

Post by mhss » Wed, Jul 22, 2020, 8:29 AM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #145

mindfulhack wrote: post #127

I want to run with this sentiment to a certain extreme: This reminds me of Cloudflare blocking that pro-nazi website at the DNS level - not because the content was illegal, but because of social or other reasons. What this means is even your own domain and web server can be censored in devastating ways, based purely on personal or cultural disagreement. Of course I'm not supporting nazism, but it's a dangerous preced…

> Of course I'm not supporting nazism Nazism is the easy target. The precedence is removal of something legal by a moral/social decision by a corporate entity. This is dangerous. In the 50s, had they had internet, it could be leftist or communist sympathizers' blogs (under the red scare). In the 60s it could be blacks civil rights blogs (imagine a conservative southern CDN), In the 70s/80s it could be pro-gay writing…

>>> Nazism is the easy target. The precedence is removal of something legal by a moral/social decision by a corporate entity. This is dangerous.

Do we want companies to do just what's legal or what's moral? in the end even laws are supposed to be trailing morality and disagreements are expected on what's moral and what's not.

This is again the same old debate of whether is some sort of fundamental right to be served by Cloudflare or have your content hosted by Twitter. I do not like all forms of censorship but I also don't want private companies to be forced to host just about any content people want to publish.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#165

Post by winter_blue » Wed, Jul 22, 2020, 8:29 AM UTC

The most valuable gem of advise in this article is at the end:

> Update: As pointed out in the comments section, Medium has an import tool which allows you to add a canonical link from your Medium post to your original blog post.

> This process ensures that Google does not think of your blog post as a duplicate. Thanks to Nicolas and Matthias for this correction.

This is an excellent way to do things. Publish on your blog first, and then mirror the same post(s) on Medium.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#166

Post by nicbou » Wed, Jul 22, 2020, 8:29 AM UTC

MangoCoffee wrote: post #141

"It’s always better to own your platform" - 100% i listen to some Joe Rogan's podcast when he got some interesting guests. i don't remember which one but Joe mentioned Twitter ban Zuby for a reply to someone with "OK, dude". i look up Zuby and yup. Twitter ban Zuby for saying "OK, dude" to someone. how the fuck is "OK, dude" hateful? Joe said Zuby is the nicest guy that he ever meet and Joe is right. they come for Zu…

> the cancel culture in the West

Is it really in the West, or just in the United States? Perhaps I'm just not paying attention, but I don't recall anything similar happening in my country. At least it definitely doesn't seem to have the same importance.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#167

Post by axegon_ » Wed, Jul 22, 2020, 8:30 AM UTC

rhn_mk1 wrote: post #150

axegon_ wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Um... No, it doesn't. > I write a post in markdown, commit and run a pelican-provided script that uploads the generated site to the hosting server. The script-running could be done with a hook. This is exactly what I don't want to deal with. Sure, I could use a ci service but this is a typical case of over-engineering a simple problem.

Something must turn the .md into HTML, and something must also publish it. You end up with 2 choices: the above one, or sth like GitLab pages, where you need to provide a CI script but then can just commit & push.

Yep, you're right, something must turn the markdown into an html. In my case, I let the browser do that and by doing so, I avoid the hassle around builds, cis which is what I didn't want to deal with. For something so brutally simple anyway.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#168

Post by tomjen3 » Wed, Jul 22, 2020, 8:31 AM UTC

lostlogin wrote: post #149

MangoCoffee wrote: post #141

"It’s always better to own your platform" - 100% i listen to some Joe Rogan's podcast when he got some interesting guests. i don't remember which one but Joe mentioned Twitter ban Zuby for a reply to someone with "OK, dude". i look up Zuby and yup. Twitter ban Zuby for saying "OK, dude" to someone. how the fuck is "OK, dude" hateful? Joe said Zuby is the nicest guy that he ever meet and Joe is right. they come for Zu…

> the current Western society is in a very sad state. To play devils advocate, when was ‘western culture’ great? Pretty much any time period that comes to mind has a rather large set of inconvenient exceptions.

But those exceptions wheren't because we did too much western culture, but because we did too little. E.g the evil of slavery wasn't because we respected the value of individual rights too much, but because we respected them too little.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#169

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jul 22, 2020, 8:32 AM UTC

axegon_ wrote: post #126

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pelican [1] works this way, and I love it for my blog/website. I write a post in markdown, commit and run a pelican-provided script that uploads the generated site to the hosting server. The script-running could be done with a hook. [1] https://blog.getpelican.com/

Um... No, it doesn't. > I write a post in markdown, commit and run a pelican-provided script that uploads the generated site to the hosting server. The script-running could be done with a hook. This is exactly what I don't want to deal with. Sure, I could use a ci service but this is a typical case of over-engineering a simple problem.

[deleted]

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#170

Post by semicolonandson » Wed, Jul 22, 2020, 8:32 AM UTC

I'm working with a team that provides booking systems for COVID-19 testing. The software is legit, works with some of the nation's best labs, and has even been used by the government.

Seems like the kind of software that Apple/Google might be inclined to fast-track given the current state of affairs?

Wrong.

Neither Apple nor Google approved the apps, so the team spent 8 weeks going back and forth with them about what seemed (to me at least) like totally ineffectual, CYA security theatre.

Instead we ported the code to a web-app on a domain we owned and could start helping people with symptoms immediately.

Own your platform.