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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

#41

Post by detaro »

cm2187 wrote: post #23
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."

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 as is and move, preserving the URLs. That's not the case with Medium etc where your content lives under their domain.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#42

Post by Animats »

Also, Google might add negative signals for your website, thinking that you copy-pasted an article from Medium on your blog.

Google never did get serious about provenance. They scrape so often that they should be able to tell who's the original. I've seen Wikipedia copy sites outrank the real Wikipedia.

As a backup, you should be able to submit a hash to a time-stamping notary service and have Google pick up on that.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#44

Post by vishnu_ks »

Folks looking for a Medium alternative, please checkout https://diff.blog. It's an aggregator of developer and engineering blogs I built an year back. It has been growing steadily since. The reason why I built this was to solve the problem of disoveralibilty of self hosted blogs. It's hard for bloggers with self hosted blogs to reach a big audience. So a lot of them end up moving to a platform like Medium which gives them the audience. But they in turn give up their identity and content. diff.blog aims to fix that by solving the discoverabilty problem of self hosted blogs. Though dif.blog is not anywhere near in terms of the audience size of Medium at the moment. But hopefully it will come close one day.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#45

Post by jjcm »

Another thing I would echo here is that you don't necessarily need a CMS / WYSIWYG editor to run a great blog. A tiny script that dynamically compiles your markdown flavour of choice and has a nginx reverse proxy in front of it will be able to survive a reddit frontpage hit on a $5/mo vps, and it will be dead simple to set up.

If you're looking to move off Medium, give it a try. If anyone is interested I'm happy to share the mini server I wrote to compile pug aka jade / stylus, which is what I use for my blog.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#46

Post by louwrentius »

jjcm wrote: post #45

Another thing I would echo here is that you don't necessarily need a CMS / WYSIWYG editor to run a great blog. A tiny script that dynamically compiles your markdown flavour of choice and has a nginx reverse proxy in front of it will be able to survive a reddit frontpage hit on a $5/mo vps, and it will be dead simple to set up. If you're looking to move off Medium, give it a try. If anyone is interested I'm happy to s…

This is what I do with my (now solar powered) blog. Markdown, Pelican and rsync.

I was using a digital ocean droplet for 5$ a month.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#47

Post by binsh »

cm2187 wrote: post #23
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."

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.

It always comes back to capital, sure. Technically your ISP could disappear tomorrow, or your region's power could go out. _Then what?_ There's always some bit of internet infrastructure you don't own or that necessitates money. But infrastructure is different. As long as you pay (and aren't doing anything particularly illegal), your server will probably continue to exist. And if not, you just buy or rent a computer in a different data center, or even set up a server on a spare computer at home. But you're much less likely to have your hosting provider pull sketchy Medium-style nonsense than, well, Medium.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#48

Post by manquer »

jjcm wrote: post #40
realusername wrote: post #10

Another reason I host my own articles is that Medium is very heavy to load. Yes their design is great, but it's something that is achievable with a very small amount of CSS. This might not matter for a lot of people but I don't like how slow their platform is.

I actually found it to be not that terrible in comparison to some other sites that are out there today. Medium loads 17 scripts totalling about 2.4MB of js. For comparison, reddit loads 78 scripts totalling 7.5 MB. Is it heavy for such a simple blog? Yes absolutely. Is it heavy for a modern React app? Not really. I think the crux of it is that we often rely too much on heavy frameworks for React even for simple thing…

For an app like medium, client side react with that many dependencies is perhaps not the right approach in the first place?

Server Side Rendering(react or w/o react) would be a better way to do serve their content and have the added benefit support users who have no js support (noScript , terminal based browsers, screen readers? etc)

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#50

Post by input_sh »

I've been thinking of mirroring the first few paragraphs on Medium and then adding something like "visit my own blog to read the rest of the article", basically (ab)using Medium as an acquisition channel.

Do you know of anyone that did something similar?

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