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One point that people seem not to be mentioning here: Medium offers some discoverability. Self-hosting doesn't. That's only a concern if you care about how man
by thenomad 10y ago
One point that people seem not to be mentioning here: Medium offers some discoverability. Self-hosting doesn't.
That's only a concern if you care about how many people read your blog, but if you do, it's a concern.
Medium's also very readable. If you choose your own theme for your blog, the chances are you'll hit a theme that's "less readable". Often, programming blogs are a LOT less readable. So that's worth considering too.
(All other points made elsewhere about control of your content, compatibility with FOSS philosophy, etc, are good ones too and I won't repeat them here.)
Cross-posting to both a self-hosted blog and Medium isn't a bad solution. Or use a custom domain, as suggested.
- bksenior 10y agoThis is the only important point. The question is 1% technology and 99% audience.
- cocktailpeanuts 10y agoI agree with this, BUT. I think when we say "audience", it can mean different things. For example, Medium has potential to bring a huge "instant" audience, but there's a difference between instant audience and long term audience. I just went and took a look at all the large open source projects, and they all have their own blog on their own domain. AND, what comes next is important. They have: 1. RSS feed button 2. Link to subscribe to the blog via email I think these are important in the long term if you are thinking about looking at your open source project from a long term point of view. Medium may give you instant traffic, but most of them don't really care about what you have to say. Whereas having your own custom domain with a way for people to subscribe via RSS or email will give you a long term audience who are actually genuinely interested in your project. And with those formats it is very likely that your message will reach them, compared to medium where it may just flow away from their timeline without them ever noticing.
- thenomad 10y agoGoing back to the original point, we're actually talking about slightly different things: you're talking about audience retention (making sure that someone comes back), not discoverability (making sure they find you in the first place). Neither an RSS feed nor a subscribe link enable people to find you in the first place. They do, however, make it more likely that they'll come back after finding you. You should absolutely also build retention techniques into your Medium posts. And your custom blog. And anywhere else where you care about people reading your content, and keeping on reading it.
- nishs 10y agoMedium has RSS support [0]. Although it has no place in the UI (as far as I know). You could add a link to your RSS feed to the bottom of each post as a workaround, but this is far from ideal. I agree that self-hosting + custom domain is better in this aspect. [0] https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/214874118-RSS-Feeds-of-publications-and-profiles https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/214874118-RSS-Feed...
- bksenior 10y agoThis is the only important point. The question is 1% technology and 99% audience.