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Medium is not the home for your ideas

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Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#271

Post by marcosdumay »

krtkush wrote: post #82
quattrofan wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My irony alarm just went off...

Because I mentioned GitHub? The thing is GitHub is just a wrapper. All my data is still with me and I can switch to GitLab in about a hours time. Also, unlike Medium, GitHub does not put a quota on number of free articles per month nor does it cover 1/4th of the page with a permanent pop-up asking the reader to sign up. I feel GitHub pages and Medium are not the same thing.

> The thing is GitHub is just a wrapper.

If you own the domain name, yes. Otherwise, no.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#272

Post by hunter2_ »

zby wrote: post #130
xpe wrote: post #2

The core argument against Medium is: "Until you host your content on your platform, they will always live at the mercy of the company hosting the platform."

The question is what does it really mean to have 'your own platform'? Does it mean that you need to have your own server at your bedroom? Or is it enough to rent one at a server room, or a shared host or maybe just rent some web space? What with your internet connectivity? Or just electicity - do you need to generate your own? You always depend on someone and in theory that someone can take your blog down. I think th…

Paying helps, but even then, they are usually terms against abusive behavior. It seems that what constitutes abuse reduces as you go up the chain (for example: perhaps a social network forbids false information and worse, perhaps a hosted CMS forbids hate speech and worse, perhaps a VPS/colo/residential forbids only very illegal activity) but it's always there to some extent. Maybe it's about human abuse and maybe it's about technical/network abuse, but there is something forbidden.

Is it possible (not feasible, but possible) to put something on the internet that relies on nobody else at all?

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#273

Post by [deleted] »

edsimpson wrote: post #260
badsectoracula wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another easy solution, both for hosting and ownership, is using a static site generator/editor. I like desktop-based visual WYSIWYG tools so i use Publii[0] (example[1], though i really need to write something more :-P or at least move some older articles i had in now-defunct blogs that were hosted by others). I'm not a big fan of the program though (i dislike how it is based on Electron while not even taking advanta…

+1 for Publii. I struggled to get non-technical users to use a static site generator like Hugo but the WYSIWYG tools of Publii made it very easy to move users over.

[deleted]

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#274

Post by hunter2_ »

detaro wrote: post #41
cm2187 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But unless you own a datacentre, you are always using someone else's platform, whether it is a cloud provider, a colocation or anything in between.

But most of them are easily replaced if they go bad. Even domains are of course technically rented, but your own domain is among the most stable identifiers we have on the internet - people owning domains over decades is commonplace. If my domain registrar, my DNS provider, my hosting company, ... go "bad" I can just move and my readers won't notice. Even if you are on hosted wordpress etc, you can archive your site…

Reclaiming a domain from a registrar that has "gone bad" actually sounds pretty difficult. If they were so inclined, they could refuse to give you the transfer code, and they could renew it so it doesn't expire.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#275

Post by corobo »

axegon_ wrote: post #267
iamacyborg wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I DON'T want to do either of that. Add a file, push it and know everything has worked. That's precisely what Netlify offers you.

Netlify simply adds an abstraction layer over a task which I don't want to be performed __AT_ALL__. I don't care if I'm doing it myself or someone else is on a server somewhere on my behalf. It is utterly stupid to have all that to serve a static file.

So write HTML and push that directly to your webserver.. what do you want from the world haha

Forgive me for suggesting the first thing that popped into mind, could you run the generator script locally and also push the /public dir which your server then serves directly?

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#276

Post by syshum »

joosters wrote: post #184

Even though Medium reinstated my profile, I stopped publishing on the platform and moved to my blog again. There's some history re-writing going on here. The tweet from Medium about unblocking his account was in July 2018 - the author replied with 'Happens. No worries. Thanks for resolving the issue guys', so they clearly weren't too bothered about this at the time. They then went on to post over ten further articles…

>>so they clearly weren't too bothered about this at the time.

I dont know if that is true, simply because they did not rant and rave like it common with cancel culture today does not mean they were not bothered

It almost never results in a good outcome to tell your current service provider your intentions to leave before you are actually ready to pull the trigger to leave

Stoicism is a virtue in these situations

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#278

Post by kritiko »

nicbou wrote: post #176
axegon_ wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the content is of any real value, I'd be more than happy to pay for it with money. 10 bucks? Sure, here you go. A much better option than getting emails such as "20 lessons I learned from my job interview" or whatever.

Everyone says they'd do that, but I find really hard to believe. I create rare, valuable information that saves people money and headaches. On a good month, 2% of my revenue will come from donations. Usually, it's 0%. At best, it pays for a meal and a beer. This website has 135k page views per month. If that's how much I get from teaching people how to navigate German bureaucracy, I doubt you'll make anything from yo…

Maybe you just need to package it differently? I know I've bought Kindle books on similar issues and that there are people who work as consultants doing such things. Not to say that you necessarily want to become a consultant, but you don't even necessarily need to create new content... just stick some of it behind a paywall or in an ebook.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#279

Post by ex_amazon_sde »

aabbcc1241 wrote: post #245
jiggawatts wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the best static site generator that meets the following requirements: a) Doesn't use node.js. b) Has built-in syntax highlighting for C#, SQL, PowerShell and Rust at a minimum. c) Is also good at "photo journals" or galleries. I played around with Hugo, but the themes were ugly and it was very weak at managing pictures associated with an entry instead of the entire site.

Who do you want to avoid node.js? It's dependencies are too big? It cannot be hosted by cheap webhost? It's not secure ?

All of those.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#280

Post by gwd »

beervirus wrote: post #254
gwd wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I shouldn't have to pay money to get around a pay wall for a project's technical documentation. But that's on the project, not Medium; and if they want to be paid for the work that goes into their documentation, what's the problem? I mean, seriously, Medium is $5/month, for loads of advertising-free content. Why not just subscribe?

Why not just reward this user-hostile behavior??

Sorry, seem to have been mixing two messages:

For one, if you don't like a project using a freemium service for its documentation, then take it up with the project, not with Medium.

Secondly, documentation isn't free; is it really that unreasonable for projects to want to be funded for the work they're doing? Medium is pretty cheap. If you're running into your Medium limit regularly, why not just subscribe?Complaining that you have to pay $5/mo to access a resource you use a lot, when you're probably paying $50/mo for internet anyway, seems a bit unreasonable.

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