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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

#3

Post by TaylorAlexander »

I’ve been running a self hosted instance of ghost for years now (link in my profile). It’s great! My stuff just sits there, never at risk of a policy change banning my work. I can write whatever I want. The URLs are easily memorized and I hand them out all the time.

I don’t run analytics. I have no idea how many people have read my writing. I’m okay with that. I actually thought nobody reads my site but one day a piece I had just published hit hacker news, so I guess somebody is watching. I keep the content so I can refer people to it, and as a record of my thinking over time. I share the links when relevant in an online discussion.

I highly recommend it! I should say, I was inspired by Paul Graham and his essays. Just keeping it simple and putting good ideas out there. Oh and I licensed all my work as CC0, so anyone can copy it for any purpose.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#4

Post by wishinghand »

Kirby and other similar PHP based flat file CMS software is super easy to run. If I were to get back into making sites for people, I'd just use Kirby, Bulma/Tailwind, and Alpine.js.

It can run on shared hosts like Siteground, Lithium, Green Geeks, Hostgator, as well as VPS platforms like Digital Ocean. The admin interface for making new posts is great, separating it from static site generators. It uses a modified Markdown called Kirbytext which is additive. If you write pure Markdown you'll see it rendered as expected.

No database means no worrying about getting hacked (at least in terms of SQL injection).

If you don't want to build it yourself, there's themes for sale too, despite how niche Kirby is. My own blog is a Kirby theme I bought because I knew if I built it myself, I'd never finish.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#5

Post by nsonha »

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."

Which is fine, a lot of people putting their ideas out there are more concerned with the level of reach/impact than whether they own a webpage nor that it lives forever.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#7

Post by detaro »

It's telling that Medium stopped allowing custom domains. Their brand over yours, and no way of cleanly migrating elsewhere when they start log-in walls etc.

(Of course their brand is now kinda poisoned by "log-in wall" and lots of low-quality "think-pieces", so you don't really want to be associated with theirs - which was somewhat different when Medium started)

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#8

Post by dvtrn »

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."

Owning your content and self-publication is one of the principles of the indieweb[0]. This is as relevant of a discussion I think to plug it. When it comes to alternatives to the social media/algorithm-ified/data-hungry web-that in my opinion we should have gotten-it’s the IndieWeb.

[0] https://indieweb.org/principles

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#9

Post by Quiza12 »

nsonha wrote: post #5
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."

Which is fine, a lot of people putting their ideas out there are more concerned with the level of reach/impact than whether they own a webpage nor that it lives forever.

That's me in a nutshell. I've built a regular audience for my writing over the years. As the author suggests though, it might be a good idea to have a mirror.
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