10 ms·

Show HN: Switch from Medium to your own blog

494 points by mathieudutour 7y ago

duiker101 7y ago
I don't have a blog (medium or anything) so unfortunately I don't have a use for this, but I LOVED the gif. It wasn't an attempt to show "how easy it is to do with one command" but rather a real flow of how it all goes, I appreciate it, well done!
- restingrobot 7y ago
  While I think the usage of a gif is awesome, I am a huge fan of actually allowing people to see what is happening. The purpose of the gif was to show how it works, but he moved so fast I could barely read anything or follow him.
  - rootkea 7y ago
    > he moved so fast I could barely read anything or follow him. Same here. So 1. I downloaded the gif 2. ffmpeg -i screencast.gif foo.mp4 Now watching in vlc at decreased playback speed. (Press `-`)
- ukyrgf 7y ago
  The thing is, it's a command line tool that requires the user to go out and manually do just about everything. Export the files, set up the repo, create a Netlify account, configure everything there, hook it into GitHub, etc. In the end, all the tool really does is convert files to Markdown and then use Gatsby as an SSG. If you already had the knowledge to do everything else, why not just do that yourself and not be stuck with somebody else's opinionated choices?
  - tobr 7y ago
    I’ve built a few sites with Gatsby and Netlify, so I might qualify as having “the knowledge to do everything else”. Haven’t tried the tool, but I can’t imagine that I would get the end result of the GIF in less than a day if I had to figure it all out on my own. There’s a lot of decisions and research and little hiccups to get through in a thing like this. And even if you use the tool, it looks like you have every opportunity to do it your own way if you want to.
- laacz 7y ago
  The one of many problems with gifs is that you can't pause or rewind them.
  - quickthrower2 7y ago
    That problem could easily be solved by browsers though? Treat an animated gif like an mp4
    - jamaicahest 7y ago
      Or just skip the GIF and create an MP4 file? No need to try and shoehorn GIF into what MP4 can do perfectly well.
      - StaringFrog 7y ago
        Yes... except that you can't embed a video in github README
  - Seirdy 7y ago
    mpv has builtin support for gifs via ffmpeg.
fareesh 7y ago
Great gif. This should be how everyone does readmes.
- cosmic_quanta 7y ago
  I've tried doing this screen-capture-to-gif thing before but it was always frustrating. I'd love to hear about the workflow to make a gif like this.
  - lewisj489 7y ago
    ShareX makes it very easy. https://getsharex.com/ https://getsharex.com/
    - duiker101 7y ago
      Wow I never heard of this and it looks awesome! Thanks for the share!
  - mathieudutour 7y ago
    I've used the default MacOS screen recording (cmd + shift + 5) and then edited/speed up some parts with iMovie. Then I transform the video into a gif using https://github.com/mathieudutour/dotfiles/blob/master/bin/mov-to-gif https://github.com/mathieudutour/dotfiles/blob/master/bin/mo... Hope that helps!
    - thomascgalvin 7y ago
      I used to do the same, but I've had MacOS's default software crash with long-ish (about an hour) content. I switch to Open Broadcaster Software[1] after that; free and open source, and very well made. The learning curve isn't that steep, either, if you're just doing regular screen/audio capture. [1]
  - timvisee 7y ago
    For terminal based things I've been using `asciinema`. There are various options to play/render such recordings, such as to an interactive SVG. SVGs are lot smaller than GIFs in file size, and are even scalable. See one of my projects for example: https://github.com/timvisee/ffsend#ffsend-wip https://github.com/timvisee/ffsend#ffsend-wip
eugenhotaj 7y ago
I honestly don't get posts like these. IMHO the main selling point of Medium is not that you can easily set up a blog, there's plenty of platforms that let you do that easily, or great tools like OP's for setting up your own. The point is that there is already a large audience you can reach with your posts, and Medium actively works to distribute your posts to people who would be interested in them. The equivalent here would be a "switch from YouTube to your own video hosting site in a few minutes." I mean sure, you could, and it probably wouldn't be that hard, but that's not the point.
- cjslep 7y ago
  Why does it have to be a trade-off? Something like WriteFreely gives you both your own blog and (via the Fediverse) an audience. Don't want to run your own? Then pay for a Write.as account to have Matt run it for you.
- onion2k 7y ago
  The point is that there is already a large audience you can reach with your posts... There was a large audience. Medium have introduced a paywall that you could dismiss with a click, but now they've started enforcing that paywall and stopping you reading more than a couple of articles a month. The audience who have chosen not to pay will fall away precipitously over the next few weeks to the point where people are going so see no traffic on their posts at all. Authors need to choose to either support Medium or leave for a different platform now. The glut of 'how-to-leave-Medium' posts are a response to that.
  - AlanSE 7y ago
    This comment needs more visibility. Everyone is stumbling by this stuff and missing the context. I got a spat of emails about organizations leaving Medium and was like "okay whatever", but then I discovered that basically everything is now paywalled. I had a subscription to Medium in the past, and if I knew they were paywalling articles in general, I would have canceled right away. The point was for me to publish writings so they would be generally available (and not get bogged down in details). It seems that's no longer offered. The idea that someone would hit a paywall trying to get to my articles is infuriating. I hate everything about this. We're constantly bombarded with unwanted sharing. I get advertisements based on websites I visit, and there's nothing I can do about it. My activity is just free for the taking for advertisers. But heaven forbid I try to share something constructive to the rest of the world.
fiveoak 7y ago
Honestly I really appreciate tools like this exist but I'll probably keep using Medium out of laziness. I don't want to have to worry about maintaining my own blog and I'm cheap so I don't really want to pay for hosted Ghost/Wordpress since I'm not trying to make money off of my infrequent dumb blog posts. The cheapest Ghost plan is $29/mo :(
- detaro 7y ago
  One of the benefits of static sites like those: They don't need continuous maintenance like e.g. WP would.
- sudosudopasswd 7y ago
  If youre too lazy to maintain a webpage what gives any credence to what you have to say? Lazy ain't a virtue so I'm not listening
- AdmiralAsshat 7y ago
  You can always use a Github Page. As long as you have a GH account, it will host the page for you.
- DanHulton 7y ago
  Ghost is pretty easy to set up on a $5/month Linode box, for what it's worth. That's where I host mine. Definitely took longer than entering a couple forms on Medium, but if you consider both as a % of time you'd spend writing, it shrinks to effectively nothing pretty quickly.
- kristianp 7y ago
  This tool migrates to netlify, not Ghost/Wordpress. Netlify is free for 100GB of bandwidth.
sgarrity 7y ago
Well done. Would love to see a similar process that works for a Medium Publication (which has multiple authors, etc.).
- mathieudutour 7y ago
  Interesting, do you know if it's possible to export the content of a Medium publication?
outime 7y ago
The fact that the first thing you see here is a CLI video already puts off most of the people who write in Medium and could hypothetically consider moving away. Since I got downvotes, let me clarify. People who use the terminal can probably handle an eventual migration without much hassle but it'd be good to consider non-technical people for future releases. Otherwise it's a fine tool.
- wilg 7y ago
  You're getting downvoted rightly because your comment is completely ridiculous. This is a little open source script for transferring Medium articles elsewhere. There is no reason to believe that this project is meant to completely address "supporting people who want to move away from Medium". It's fine to make something that does something simple like this. Perhaps you should create this application you seem to think should be made.
  - outime 7y ago
    I'm sorry that you found my comment "completely ridiculous". On the other hand I admit that it sounded way too negative and I've just amended that to reflect that I have nothing against the tool, just wanted to suggest that it'd be good to consider non-technical people in the future.
indigodaddy 7y ago
FWIW, the formatting of the example blog referenced in the README looks stunningly terrible on mobile.
- hustlinhack 7y ago
  There's one issue with the formatting of the tags? Cool your jets.
proy24 7y ago
Aaah this reminds me of noob me who thought I could just build a blogging platform of my own. Here are some non-trivial features that Medium provides to writers which we just don't notice. 1- Distribution channel No one is gonna remember the name/url of your blog, Medium allows discovery. 1- Autosave draft Unless you plan to write your post in one go, in one sitting with an extremely reliable internet connection, you are gonna need this. 3- Social plugin integration- Sure start writing oAuth integrations for each of the hundreds of social plugins out there. .....
- pmlnr 7y ago
  > 1- Distribution channel Write searchable posts on topics people actually search for. Post it on Reddit, HN, etc. Those are specifically for distribution. > 2- Autosave draft Write it offline, copy paste it for online. Btw WordPress has had this for 10(?) years or something similar. > 3- Social plugin integration There are existing solutions for this, see IFTTT, Zapier, etc.
- mritchie712 7y ago
  Does anyone actually go to Medium to find content though? I don't think I've ever been on their homepage.
artur_makly 7y ago
..well at the very least it is a form of backup/archiving no?
mskvsk 7y ago
To people wondering why you would want to move to a standalone solution while Medium provides you with distribution and community - it does not (anymore). Well, not to the extent that justifies ceding the control over the representation of your content. Take a look at this experience https://www.freecodecamp.org/forum/t/we-just-moved-off-of-medium-and-onto-freecodecamp-news-heres-how-you-can-use-it/279929 https://www.freecodecamp.org/forum/t/we-just-moved-off-of-me... Tl;dr: Medium's practice of paywalling articles and preferential treatment of those articles over public ones kills the reach of your content. Also, they lock you in by removing the feature of attaching your own domain name. Also, their weird upvote mechanism. Also, the dysfunctional comment system. I can go on and on.
cheptsov 7y ago
Would be also great to see the experience of writing and publishing new posts and/or updating published posts. Otherwise, kudos for doing this. The GIF is amazing!
phantom_oracle 7y ago
The cycle of these SV companies is interesting. They start off with a bang and become "darlings" in the initial stages, then they reach mass-market appeal, attempt to monetize (some of them do so in the most unethical ways) and start to become loathed by the very people who touted them in the beginning. Let's compile a list: - Facebook - Twitter - LinkedIn - Quora - Medium (You can add to it to see how far we go)
- medecau 7y ago
  The Peter Thiel recipe from Zero to One
- bluetidepro 7y ago
  To add to the list: - Instagram - Pinterest - most Google products
  - filoleg 7y ago
    Out of curiosity, what happened to Pinterest? I was never an active user, and the only thing I observed was the mainstream interest in it fall, so it got out of spotlight, but i dont remember anything bad actually happening that triggered it.
    - bluetidepro 7y ago
      A lot like Quora, I think a lot of people see their tactics as super hostile to users. Things like bait and switching to force you to sign up to see the content. Tons of spam on the site. I know a lot of people hate that they have just dumped so much trash into Google image results, again, forcing you to signup when you actually want to see the content. A lot of dark UX patterns like those seem to be the biggest complaint I've personally seen and experienced.
- mritchie712 7y ago
  Does anyone really loathe LinkedIn? My inbox always has some spam, but it's by far the best way to get a quick summary of most peoples professional experience.
lichenwarp 7y ago
Pardon the interruption! Before you read this thread please close another popup, don't forget to clap!
Abishek_Muthian 7y ago
I recently switched my blog from Medium to custom blog, reason being among other things (such as Policies) it felt slow to load on Medium. I had a custom domain in Medium before the feature was shutdown for others, so after I manually copied the posts, I used the same URL slug as in the original Medium posts and deleted the medium posts. The SEO didn't get affected, same posts which had most visitors in medium have same number of visitors at my own host. Perhaps this was the reason Medium removed the support for custom domains, those who didn't have it cannot move the posts to new domain and expect same SEO results.
grx 7y ago
Why? Sadly, there's not much motivation described in the README. You state "Let's move your Medium content to your very own website" and then you push it to Github and Netlify, which are yet another silos. Good work with the export, but migrating the content to the next vendor lock-in should be optional. Not to forget that these platforms also collect data about your visitors.
- anchpop 7y ago
  How does Github "collect data about your visitors"? The repository is cloned, built and served by Netlify's server. And since I doubt Netlify is injecting any js into my site, I also question the extent to which they can track users.
  - dceddia 7y ago
    Netlify is serving the content, so at the very least, they (and/or the CDN they store the files on) will have a server-side access log of every visitor. Maybe that's not "tracking" per-se, but, if enough sites are hosted on Netlify, they could correlate the visits. As far as I know, Netlify doesn't make this data available to users hosting sites on the platform. My own (perhaps paranoid) theory as to why Netlify is able to provide so much for free is that they're selling the access log data, but I haven't seen any proof of that either, so who knows. Another theory is that storing all those access logs would be huge and maybe they just store nothing...
- jpomykala 7y ago
  and Gatsby... now you need to maintain this. It’s much better to use something simple like Jekyll. You don’t need all these fancy stuff like GraphQl, SCSS, React etc. And Jekyll can be served directly from Github.
blocked_again 7y ago
Honest question. Do people still read blog posts these days? I feel like twitter has made me so lazy that I can hardly consume any long content. I hardly even read the articles posted in HN but do go through the comments since they are easily digestible. Is it just me?
- pacifika 7y ago
  You’re looking for context to the content. That’s normal in a distrustful media landscape.
- calvertdw 7y ago
  Some ideas can't be fully represented in a short paragraph. You can get a surprising amount of knowledge out of a few pages of text. I developed the patience to read slightly longer texts recently and it has been refreshing and rewarding.
- ahaferburg 7y ago
  I do from time to time. Depends on the authors ability to make it clear in the first paragraphs that the post is worth reading. In case you're worried about having lost the ability to read longer texts: Find one of those book that you can't put down. A physical book, away from the screens. I used to read a lot as a kid, then stopped. I'm glad I picked it up again. But do start with something easy to read.
peter_retief 7y ago
I have my own blog but also use Medium, I like what they do and wish they could be better at making money
andr 7y ago
I hope that everyone uses this. If I was Netlify, I'd pay Mathieu to develop this further (e.g. web UI for people not handy with CLI). What broke Medium for me was their paywall, paid subscriptions, and all that crap. Suddenly, instead of Medium facilitating an author's work reaching readers, it became an impediment in its way.
- ohadpr 7y ago
  The CLI version is pretty cool, if you'd like a more point-and-click experience try: https://www.stackbit.com/medium/ https://www.stackbit.com/medium/ (Disclaimer: we created this a few weeks ago) It uses the same Medium export process and lets you pick what Site Generator to use (e.g. Gatsby, Hugo, Jekyll) and more importantly it lets you pick between a variety of CMS like Contentful, NetlifyCMS, Forestry and DatoCMS. Oh there are also several Blogging themes to pick with and your new imported blog can be up and running in 1-2 minutes.
welder 7y ago
Related, I wrote a Python library[1] that takes MD/HTML/TXT as input and gives you estimated read time for that content. That combined with Flask and you've got a great blog with read time calculated going forward, while exporting from Medium looks to only preserve read time for past posts not future ones. 1. https://github.com/alanhamlett/readtime https://github.com/alanhamlett/readtime
w_s_l 7y ago
this is awesome. I ended up paying like $99 USD just to have a custom domain pointed to it. When I asked if I could switch the domain they said "that will be another $99 USD please" ...I don't even know why I am writing on medium
danenania 7y ago
This is fantastic!! I'm going to give it a try before long--thanks for making it! Also love the gif.
Vordimous 7y ago
So I have been putting together a way for people to more easily make their own blogging platform. It would kind of mimic a social media platform, but since everything is committed to a repository using the JAMstack it could easily be converted to a full website or in your case you could simply delete the repository or any number of your posts because they are just files in your repository. Any feedback would be wonderful. https://your-media.netlify.com/post/make-your-own-media/ https://your-media.netlify.com/post/make-your-own-media/ Everything is owned by the end user. This is only providing a recipe for people to use. I will also mention that https://www.stackbit.com/ https://www.stackbit.com/ is doing basically the same thing but more from a “Make life easier for Website designers” perspective.
darekkay 7y ago
What happens with all the comments? Are they migrated as well? It should at least be mentioned somewhere. Obviously, it is harder to set up dynamic content (like comments) for static sites. I've blogged about many solutions to this problem [1]. [1] https://darekkay.com/blog/static-site-comments/ https://darekkay.com/blog/static-site-comments/
magical_mishka 7y ago
Smart, catching on the "hate Medium & I'm leaving it" trend
ests 7y ago
Is there anything similar for swotching from Wordpress.com?

494 points by mathieudutour 7y ago

I don't have a blog (medium or anything) so unfortunately I don't have a use for this, but I LOVED the gif. It wasn't an attempt to show "how easy it is to do with one command" but rather a real flow of how it all goes, I appreciate it, well done!

restingrobot 7y ago
While I think the usage of a gif is awesome, I am a huge fan of actually allowing people to see what is happening. The purpose of the gif was to show how it works, but he moved so fast I could barely read anything or follow him.
- rootkea 7y ago
  > he moved so fast I could barely read anything or follow him. Same here. So 1. I downloaded the gif 2. ffmpeg -i screencast.gif foo.mp4 Now watching in vlc at decreased playback speed. (Press `-`)
ukyrgf 7y ago
The thing is, it's a command line tool that requires the user to go out and manually do just about everything. Export the files, set up the repo, create a Netlify account, configure everything there, hook it into GitHub, etc. In the end, all the tool really does is convert files to Markdown and then use Gatsby as an SSG. If you already had the knowledge to do everything else, why not just do that yourself and not be stuck with somebody else's opinionated choices?
- tobr 7y ago
  I’ve built a few sites with Gatsby and Netlify, so I might qualify as having “the knowledge to do everything else”. Haven’t tried the tool, but I can’t imagine that I would get the end result of the GIF in less than a day if I had to figure it all out on my own. There’s a lot of decisions and research and little hiccups to get through in a thing like this. And even if you use the tool, it looks like you have every opportunity to do it your own way if you want to.
laacz 7y ago
The one of many problems with gifs is that you can't pause or rewind them.
- quickthrower2 7y ago
  That problem could easily be solved by browsers though? Treat an animated gif like an mp4
  - jamaicahest 7y ago
    Or just skip the GIF and create an MP4 file? No need to try and shoehorn GIF into what MP4 can do perfectly well.
    - StaringFrog 7y ago
      Yes... except that you can't embed a video in github README
- Seirdy 7y ago
  mpv has builtin support for gifs via ffmpeg.

fareesh 7y ago

Great gif. This should be how everyone does readmes.

cosmic_quanta 7y ago
I've tried doing this screen-capture-to-gif thing before but it was always frustrating. I'd love to hear about the workflow to make a gif like this.
- lewisj489 7y ago
  ShareX makes it very easy. https://getsharex.com/ https://getsharex.com/
  - duiker101 7y ago
    Wow I never heard of this and it looks awesome! Thanks for the share!
- mathieudutour 7y ago
  I've used the default MacOS screen recording (cmd + shift + 5) and then edited/speed up some parts with iMovie. Then I transform the video into a gif using https://github.com/mathieudutour/dotfiles/blob/master/bin/mov-to-gif https://github.com/mathieudutour/dotfiles/blob/master/bin/mo... Hope that helps!
  - thomascgalvin 7y ago
    I used to do the same, but I've had MacOS's default software crash with long-ish (about an hour) content. I switch to Open Broadcaster Software[1] after that; free and open source, and very well made. The learning curve isn't that steep, either, if you're just doing regular screen/audio capture. [1]
- timvisee 7y ago
  For terminal based things I've been using `asciinema`. There are various options to play/render such recordings, such as to an interactive SVG. SVGs are lot smaller than GIFs in file size, and are even scalable. See one of my projects for example: https://github.com/timvisee/ffsend#ffsend-wip https://github.com/timvisee/ffsend#ffsend-wip

eugenhotaj 7y ago

I honestly don't get posts like these. IMHO the main selling point of Medium is not that you can easily set up a blog, there's plenty of platforms that let you do that easily, or great tools like OP's for setting up your own. The point is that there is already a large audience you can reach with your posts, and Medium actively works to distribute your posts to people who would be interested in them. The equivalent here would be a "switch from YouTube to your own video hosting site in a few minutes." I mean sure, you could, and it probably wouldn't be that hard, but that's not the point.

cjslep 7y ago
Why does it have to be a trade-off? Something like WriteFreely gives you both your own blog and (via the Fediverse) an audience. Don't want to run your own? Then pay for a Write.as account to have Matt run it for you.
onion2k 7y ago
The point is that there is already a large audience you can reach with your posts... There was a large audience. Medium have introduced a paywall that you could dismiss with a click, but now they've started enforcing that paywall and stopping you reading more than a couple of articles a month. The audience who have chosen not to pay will fall away precipitously over the next few weeks to the point where people are going so see no traffic on their posts at all. Authors need to choose to either support Medium or leave for a different platform now. The glut of 'how-to-leave-Medium' posts are a response to that.
- AlanSE 7y ago
  This comment needs more visibility. Everyone is stumbling by this stuff and missing the context. I got a spat of emails about organizations leaving Medium and was like "okay whatever", but then I discovered that basically everything is now paywalled. I had a subscription to Medium in the past, and if I knew they were paywalling articles in general, I would have canceled right away. The point was for me to publish writings so they would be generally available (and not get bogged down in details). It seems that's no longer offered. The idea that someone would hit a paywall trying to get to my articles is infuriating. I hate everything about this. We're constantly bombarded with unwanted sharing. I get advertisements based on websites I visit, and there's nothing I can do about it. My activity is just free for the taking for advertisers. But heaven forbid I try to share something constructive to the rest of the world.

fiveoak 7y ago

Honestly I really appreciate tools like this exist but I'll probably keep using Medium out of laziness. I don't want to have to worry about maintaining my own blog and I'm cheap so I don't really want to pay for hosted Ghost/Wordpress since I'm not trying to make money off of my infrequent dumb blog posts. The cheapest Ghost plan is $29/mo :(

detaro 7y ago
One of the benefits of static sites like those: They don't need continuous maintenance like e.g. WP would.
sudosudopasswd 7y ago
If youre too lazy to maintain a webpage what gives any credence to what you have to say? Lazy ain't a virtue so I'm not listening
AdmiralAsshat 7y ago
You can always use a Github Page. As long as you have a GH account, it will host the page for you.
DanHulton 7y ago
Ghost is pretty easy to set up on a $5/month Linode box, for what it's worth. That's where I host mine. Definitely took longer than entering a couple forms on Medium, but if you consider both as a % of time you'd spend writing, it shrinks to effectively nothing pretty quickly.
kristianp 7y ago
This tool migrates to netlify, not Ghost/Wordpress. Netlify is free for 100GB of bandwidth.

sgarrity 7y ago

Well done. Would love to see a similar process that works for a Medium Publication (which has multiple authors, etc.).

mathieudutour 7y ago
Interesting, do you know if it's possible to export the content of a Medium publication?

outime 7y ago

The fact that the first thing you see here is a CLI video already puts off most of the people who write in Medium and could hypothetically consider moving away. Since I got downvotes, let me clarify. People who use the terminal can probably handle an eventual migration without much hassle but it'd be good to consider non-technical people for future releases. Otherwise it's a fine tool.

wilg 7y ago
You're getting downvoted rightly because your comment is completely ridiculous. This is a little open source script for transferring Medium articles elsewhere. There is no reason to believe that this project is meant to completely address "supporting people who want to move away from Medium". It's fine to make something that does something simple like this. Perhaps you should create this application you seem to think should be made.
- outime 7y ago
  I'm sorry that you found my comment "completely ridiculous". On the other hand I admit that it sounded way too negative and I've just amended that to reflect that I have nothing against the tool, just wanted to suggest that it'd be good to consider non-technical people in the future.

indigodaddy 7y ago

FWIW, the formatting of the example blog referenced in the README looks stunningly terrible on mobile.

hustlinhack 7y ago
There's one issue with the formatting of the tags? Cool your jets.

proy24 7y ago

Aaah this reminds me of noob me who thought I could just build a blogging platform of my own. Here are some non-trivial features that Medium provides to writers which we just don't notice. 1- Distribution channel No one is gonna remember the name/url of your blog, Medium allows discovery. 1- Autosave draft Unless you plan to write your post in one go, in one sitting with an extremely reliable internet connection, you are gonna need this. 3- Social plugin integration- Sure start writing oAuth integrations for each of the hundreds of social plugins out there. .....

pmlnr 7y ago
> 1- Distribution channel Write searchable posts on topics people actually search for. Post it on Reddit, HN, etc. Those are specifically for distribution. > 2- Autosave draft Write it offline, copy paste it for online. Btw WordPress has had this for 10(?) years or something similar. > 3- Social plugin integration There are existing solutions for this, see IFTTT, Zapier, etc.
mritchie712 7y ago
Does anyone actually go to Medium to find content though? I don't think I've ever been on their homepage.

artur_makly 7y ago

..well at the very least it is a form of backup/archiving no?

mskvsk 7y ago

To people wondering why you would want to move to a standalone solution while Medium provides you with distribution and community - it does not (anymore). Well, not to the extent that justifies ceding the control over the representation of your content. Take a look at this experience https://www.freecodecamp.org/forum/t/we-just-moved-off-of-medium-and-onto-freecodecamp-news-heres-how-you-can-use-it/279929 https://www.freecodecamp.org/forum/t/we-just-moved-off-of-me... Tl;dr: Medium's practice of paywalling articles and preferential treatment of those articles over public ones kills the reach of your content. Also, they lock you in by removing the feature of attaching your own domain name. Also, their weird upvote mechanism. Also, the dysfunctional comment system. I can go on and on.

cheptsov 7y ago

Would be also great to see the experience of writing and publishing new posts and/or updating published posts. Otherwise, kudos for doing this. The GIF is amazing!

phantom_oracle 7y ago

The cycle of these SV companies is interesting. They start off with a bang and become "darlings" in the initial stages, then they reach mass-market appeal, attempt to monetize (some of them do so in the most unethical ways) and start to become loathed by the very people who touted them in the beginning. Let's compile a list: - Facebook - Twitter - LinkedIn - Quora - Medium (You can add to it to see how far we go)

medecau 7y ago
The Peter Thiel recipe from Zero to One
bluetidepro 7y ago
To add to the list: - Instagram - Pinterest - most Google products
- filoleg 7y ago
  Out of curiosity, what happened to Pinterest? I was never an active user, and the only thing I observed was the mainstream interest in it fall, so it got out of spotlight, but i dont remember anything bad actually happening that triggered it.
  - bluetidepro 7y ago
    A lot like Quora, I think a lot of people see their tactics as super hostile to users. Things like bait and switching to force you to sign up to see the content. Tons of spam on the site. I know a lot of people hate that they have just dumped so much trash into Google image results, again, forcing you to signup when you actually want to see the content. A lot of dark UX patterns like those seem to be the biggest complaint I've personally seen and experienced.
mritchie712 7y ago
Does anyone really loathe LinkedIn? My inbox always has some spam, but it's by far the best way to get a quick summary of most peoples professional experience.

lichenwarp 7y ago

Pardon the interruption! Before you read this thread please close another popup, don't forget to clap!

Abishek_Muthian 7y ago

I recently switched my blog from Medium to custom blog, reason being among other things (such as Policies) it felt slow to load on Medium. I had a custom domain in Medium before the feature was shutdown for others, so after I manually copied the posts, I used the same URL slug as in the original Medium posts and deleted the medium posts. The SEO didn't get affected, same posts which had most visitors in medium have same number of visitors at my own host. Perhaps this was the reason Medium removed the support for custom domains, those who didn't have it cannot move the posts to new domain and expect same SEO results.

grx 7y ago

Why? Sadly, there's not much motivation described in the README. You state "Let's move your Medium content to your very own website" and then you push it to Github and Netlify, which are yet another silos. Good work with the export, but migrating the content to the next vendor lock-in should be optional. Not to forget that these platforms also collect data about your visitors.

anchpop 7y ago
How does Github "collect data about your visitors"? The repository is cloned, built and served by Netlify's server. And since I doubt Netlify is injecting any js into my site, I also question the extent to which they can track users.
- dceddia 7y ago
  Netlify is serving the content, so at the very least, they (and/or the CDN they store the files on) will have a server-side access log of every visitor. Maybe that's not "tracking" per-se, but, if enough sites are hosted on Netlify, they could correlate the visits. As far as I know, Netlify doesn't make this data available to users hosting sites on the platform. My own (perhaps paranoid) theory as to why Netlify is able to provide so much for free is that they're selling the access log data, but I haven't seen any proof of that either, so who knows. Another theory is that storing all those access logs would be huge and maybe they just store nothing...
jpomykala 7y ago
and Gatsby... now you need to maintain this. It’s much better to use something simple like Jekyll. You don’t need all these fancy stuff like GraphQl, SCSS, React etc. And Jekyll can be served directly from Github.

blocked_again 7y ago

Honest question. Do people still read blog posts these days? I feel like twitter has made me so lazy that I can hardly consume any long content. I hardly even read the articles posted in HN but do go through the comments since they are easily digestible. Is it just me?

pacifika 7y ago
You’re looking for context to the content. That’s normal in a distrustful media landscape.
calvertdw 7y ago
Some ideas can't be fully represented in a short paragraph. You can get a surprising amount of knowledge out of a few pages of text. I developed the patience to read slightly longer texts recently and it has been refreshing and rewarding.
ahaferburg 7y ago
I do from time to time. Depends on the authors ability to make it clear in the first paragraphs that the post is worth reading. In case you're worried about having lost the ability to read longer texts: Find one of those book that you can't put down. A physical book, away from the screens. I used to read a lot as a kid, then stopped. I'm glad I picked it up again. But do start with something easy to read.

peter_retief 7y ago

I have my own blog but also use Medium, I like what they do and wish they could be better at making money

andr 7y ago

I hope that everyone uses this. If I was Netlify, I'd pay Mathieu to develop this further (e.g. web UI for people not handy with CLI). What broke Medium for me was their paywall, paid subscriptions, and all that crap. Suddenly, instead of Medium facilitating an author's work reaching readers, it became an impediment in its way.

ohadpr 7y ago
The CLI version is pretty cool, if you'd like a more point-and-click experience try: https://www.stackbit.com/medium/ https://www.stackbit.com/medium/ (Disclaimer: we created this a few weeks ago) It uses the same Medium export process and lets you pick what Site Generator to use (e.g. Gatsby, Hugo, Jekyll) and more importantly it lets you pick between a variety of CMS like Contentful, NetlifyCMS, Forestry and DatoCMS. Oh there are also several Blogging themes to pick with and your new imported blog can be up and running in 1-2 minutes.

welder 7y ago

Related, I wrote a Python library[1] that takes MD/HTML/TXT as input and gives you estimated read time for that content. That combined with Flask and you've got a great blog with read time calculated going forward, while exporting from Medium looks to only preserve read time for past posts not future ones. 1. https://github.com/alanhamlett/readtime https://github.com/alanhamlett/readtime

w_s_l 7y ago

this is awesome. I ended up paying like $99 USD just to have a custom domain pointed to it. When I asked if I could switch the domain they said "that will be another $99 USD please" ...I don't even know why I am writing on medium

danenania 7y ago

This is fantastic!! I'm going to give it a try before long--thanks for making it! Also love the gif.

Vordimous 7y ago

So I have been putting together a way for people to more easily make their own blogging platform. It would kind of mimic a social media platform, but since everything is committed to a repository using the JAMstack it could easily be converted to a full website or in your case you could simply delete the repository or any number of your posts because they are just files in your repository. Any feedback would be wonderful. https://your-media.netlify.com/post/make-your-own-media/ https://your-media.netlify.com/post/make-your-own-media/ Everything is owned by the end user. This is only providing a recipe for people to use. I will also mention that https://www.stackbit.com/ https://www.stackbit.com/ is doing basically the same thing but more from a “Make life easier for Website designers” perspective.

darekkay 7y ago

What happens with all the comments? Are they migrated as well? It should at least be mentioned somewhere. Obviously, it is harder to set up dynamic content (like comments) for static sites. I've blogged about many solutions to this problem [1]. [1] https://darekkay.com/blog/static-site-comments/ https://darekkay.com/blog/static-site-comments/

magical_mishka 7y ago

Smart, catching on the "hate Medium & I'm leaving it" trend

ests 7y ago

Is there anything similar for swotching from Wordpress.com?