14 ms·

I moved this blog from Medium, here

gfykvfyxgc 5y ago
If you want people to read your writing, don’t put it in a walled garden.
- giuliomagnifico 5y ago
  Yes, I agree. The only trouble is where all the people are inside this garden…. (that -fortunately- is not the case of Medium but other socials are very centralized in one name: Meta). For that every little effort to open the fences of some gardens is precious. Translated: go away from any sort of centralized web.
- jfengel 5y ago
  If you want people to pay you for writing, you end up doing something. Right now "something" seems to consist of walling it off, begging for donations, or running ads. Everybody would love a better option. If all you want is to be read, you have more options. But it's still hard for people to find you, since everyone else has the exact same options. Turns out lots of people will write for free.
xmorse 5y ago
If you are searching for a Medium alternative checkout Notaku https://notaku.website/product/blog https://notaku.website/product/blog It uses Notion as CMS, the blog posts are stored in a Notion database with additional properties like description .etc Disclaimer: I am the author, let me hear any feedback if you try it
- valryon 5y ago
  This is one letter swap from something very popular but completely different…
- ohmahjong 5y ago
  Absolutely _not_ to be confused with Nutaku (NSFW).
  - xmorse 5y ago
    Didn't know anything about it
- Syonyk 5y ago
  I moved my blog off Google-hosted Blogger a year or so ago, and the last thing I wanted was another place that would go directions I don't care for and have to migrate off again. Moving blog hosts is a huge pain in everything. I went to self-hoseted/self-rendered Jekyll, with Discourse embedding handling comments, and it's been working fairly well so far. Cloudflare caching covers traffic spikes fairly competently, and if I want to host the content on something else, I literally just have to upload the rendered files. As a bonus, it now works perfectly well without cookies or Javascript. Not perfectly, there are some JS features that improve things, but it should render and be entirely readable, with images, without JS.
  - xmorse 5y ago
    This is one of the reasons i am not implementing a rich text editor and instead i am using Notion as CMS. A lot of individuals and companies are already using Notion and this makes it easier for them to write blog posts with it. I know that for developers like me and you markdown is everything we need but non technical people need something more high level, just the act of embedding an image in markdown is very difficult for them
- CitrusFruits 5y ago
  Looks cool! I'm not a much of a blogger so I'm probably not your target audience, but I've love to see more of an ecosystem around notion. I would say I'm personally aittle dubious of the only two options being free and $50 a month. You might want to consider another price point in there in between. Although I'd do see that you're still in beta so I recognize the prices might not be final anyways.
aklemm 5y ago
Every effort to maintain a personal website is inspiring. I love it. There's still a better balance to be had re: maintenance vs. autonomy, and I hope a hosting/publishing service finds that someday and offers it in a way that attracts a broad following.
- pyrophane 5y ago
  While Medium is a bit simpler to use than some other blogging/publishing platforms, the difference isn't all that much. Wasn't the real reason to post on Medium more about monetization and discovery?
  - aklemm 5y ago
    Yeah, I think monetization and discovery were drivers to Medium. Apparently that comes with a lot of trade-offs in terms of autonomy. It was hard enough to play ball with Google as an independent site, and I'm not sure people find that worthwhile at all any more.
  - boxed 5y ago
    It wasn't for me. It was: - it looked good - it was very easy to just write - the lack of customization meants I didn't get stuck for hours and hours trying to find a template or choose a statist site generator, or tweak CSS, choose images, etc. Ultimately I moved to github pages where at least I had to get jekyll (which is kinda crap imo, but works), but I have spent a lot of time tweaking it and I still don't like the design. (https://kodare.net https://kodare.net if you want to see)
    - ta988 5y ago
      I like your design, simple and efficient. Could put some separations for your upper right links, if you add an rss link I'll follow that.
      - boxed 5y ago
        There is an RSS feed at the standard place so just shoving the url into your RSS reader will work.
cedsam 5y ago
did you consider github pages?
- giuliomagnifico 5y ago
  Yes but GitHub is “another garden”, surely is way more open than Medium but you still have to rely on other resources (Microsoft), you are not the true owner of your content. Instead, using my own VPS I can have the full control on my blog (yeah there are still the laws obviously). Anyway Jekyll has some limitations with GitHub, but is a lot easier to setup, especially for the comments and builds.
  - hiptobecubic 5y ago
    Given that you have all your content locally and can push whatever you want as long as it's static, it seems like the only part you "don't own" is the maintenance.
    - giuliomagnifico 5y ago
      Not quite. If you write something that violates the TOS of GitHub your content can be removed, also if someone flags you for some reason. You rely always on a third party service.
      - shagie 5y ago
        GitHub pages with a custom domain? And then if you do run afoul of GitHub you could move your Jekyll site to somewhere else. Until then, you've got hosting and maintenance handled by someone else.
        hiptobecubic 5y ago
        Sorry, yes, this is mostly what I meant. If you have your own domain you can pretty easily just move things around.
- 5y ago
softwarebeware 5y ago
Good on you! Medium can go ahead and go out of business in my opinion. It makes the web worse rather than better ImE, like Pinterest.
- ycombinete 5y ago
  I’m out of the loop on this. What’s wrong with medium?
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    It tries to paywall content to recoup its millions in VC investment.
  - ivanmontillam 5y ago
    Some of the greatest posts are paywalled, and the user experience for it it's terrible. The benefit of Medium is the exposure and that if you're good enough, you can actually be paid via Medium Partners Program, but on the other hand, these benefits are at the expense of decentralization and owning your content. You don't own your content when you publish on Medium. Once it happened to me that a post wasn't open to read and it claimed I could read it for free if I signed up. Then I went ahead and signed up, and it was still paywalled[0]. The experience was frustrating. [0]: https://mobile.twitter.com/IvanMontillaM/status/1348007592069627906 https://mobile.twitter.com/IvanMontillaM/status/134800759206...
    - jpalomaki 5y ago
      Could it be that the possibility of making some money with the content actually encourages people to create better content?
      - ivanmontillam 5y ago
        Yes, I'm not against profitting off your content, though you can make money with your own blog as well, with the upfront cost of having to build your own audience, of course. I'm not saying it's easy, just saying it's also possible without the need giving away your content rights/ownership. What I am against it's to clickbait your readers into "Sign up to read for free", then you sign up and find out you still have to pay. It leaves you with a poor taste impression, because of the bait and switch dark pattern right there, after you've given out your precious personal information at the sign up form.
colinarms 5y ago
Another Medium alternative is Papyrus: https://papyrus.so https://papyrus.so. Privacy-first, simplicity and speed are the core tenets. Export posts at any time, send posts via newsletters, and no feature-bloat. Disclaimer: I built Papyrus because I was fed up with Medium, Wordpress and Substack.
- cultofmetatron 5y ago
  I saw that their content editor looks to have better support for code editing. I'm sold
  - colinarms 5y ago
    Yup - we're using rich-markdown-editor for the content editor. Full support for code and syntax highlighting. GitHub: https://github.com/outline/rich-markdown-editor https://github.com/outline/rich-markdown-editor, editor demo: https://rich-markdown-editor-demo.onrender.com/?path=/story/editor--default https://rich-markdown-editor-demo.onrender.com/?path=/story/...
    - 2Gkashmiri 5y ago
      richmarkdown looks archived. do you know any active forks or an alternative?
- p4bl0 5y ago
  > Privacy-first, simplicity and speed are the core tenets. Export posts at any time, send posts via newsletters, and no feature-bloat. Then why oh why would you jump on the web3/NFT train?
  - hiptobecubic 5y ago
    Growth?
    - coldtea 5y ago
donatj 5y ago
Mediums descent from shining exemplar of good to questionably evil was sudden.
- hiptobecubic 5y ago
  I never understood why it was a shining example of good in the first place. It is a blogging platform. What else does it do?
  - throwhauser 5y ago
    It did somehow manage to have a lot of good content, but it made it too difficult to access. I haven't looked at any Medium stuff in a long time, but if I recall correctly highlighting text wouldn't allow you to copy it, but would allow you to tweet it. Infuriating if you want to save a link to it and a snippet someplace for your own use.
  - krastanov 5y ago
    For some reason everyone around me was treating it for a while as if it was a curated source of high quality writing (and I have seen people brag about writing Medium articles). I am still confused how anyone saw it as anything more than a blogging platform.
  - wepple 5y ago
    It was a very minimalistic and tidy UX in an age of pop ups, ads, bloated menus, unecessary features, etc. it was great for reading and for writing Then it became all of those things. It has the distinct stench of a growth team making all the classic short term moves to boost DAU
    - yreg 5y ago
      Was it? I remember it as a platform that always tried to force me to signup for a free account even just to read a blog post. It appeared in the age of Blogger, Tumblr and Posterous which were much less hostile.
  - 5y ago
toastercat 5y ago
Adding another alternative here: https://write.as/ https://write.as/ Free, easy, federated, ostensibly open-source and self-hostable: https://github.com/writefreely https://github.com/writefreely
- stoplight 5y ago
  Sadly, it appears they have discontinued the free plan: > But anyone who hasn’t created an account by December 31 [2021] at 11:59pm Eastern won’t be able to create an account via our open registration flow. Instead, they’ll need to choose a paid account, or get a Free account through another channel. Read on for details. https://write.as/blog/changing-free-registrations https://write.as/blog/changing-free-registrations
  - toastercat 5y ago
    Sad indeed. Fortunately, there are several public instances one can join (https://writefreely.org/instances https://writefreely.org/instances), and again, still self-hostable. Alternatively, there is also: https://bearblog.dev/ https://bearblog.dev/ https://rwtxt.com/ https://rwtxt.com/ https://dev.to/ https://dev.to/ Or of course you can use a static-site generator and host on Neocities or Github Pages, but that's less simple than the above solutions.
mcntsh 5y ago
I remember when Medium first came out, it was "all about the words". Today it couldn't be further from that. Medium articles are slow, janky, filled with pop ups and paywalls. The faster Medium dies the better.
- slig 5y ago
  Can't wait for they to go the way of Posterous.
  - gnicholas 5y ago
    It would be funny if Medium were acquired by Twitter, given Ev’s history with both companies. Relatedly, long live Posthaven!
chiefalchemist 5y ago
> Additionally, if you create or log into your Medium account through a third-party platform (such as Apple, Facebook, Google, or Twitter), we will have access to certain information from that platform, such as your name, lists of friends or followers, birthday, and profile picture, in accordance with the authorization procedures determined by such platform This isn't a Medium issue. It's the "price you pay" for the convenience of such social-based authentication.
ivanmontillam 5y ago
Congratulations. A big win for Internet decentralization! (It's not sarcasm, I'm all in for having your own space on the Internet). I invite you to try Grav CMS[0], it's what I use for my personal blog[1]. Grav is a flat-file CMS, it doesn't use RDBMS. It's highly performant. I also have CloudFlare in front of it, but it was already faster than the typical WordPress you see elsewhere. Grav also adheres to the latest PHP version, so you don't have to carry along legacy syntax around like other CMSes. Its error pages are comprehensive and the stack traces are actually readable. I personally think it's the best out there technically speaking, the best of both worlds (Flat-file and at the same time, dynamic instead of compiling the build every new post), the only drawback is that its plugin ecosystem it's still in the early stages, so if you're to create marketing landing pages or similar, you'll still fall short there. [0] https://getgrav.org https://getgrav.org [1] https://www.ivanmontilla.com https://www.ivanmontilla.com EDIT: Typos.
- giuliomagnifico 5y ago
  I’ll give a look, thanks for the info!
- shantnutiwari 5y ago
  As someone who is not a PHP developer-- I couldnt even get Grav installed. There is a lot of assumptions in the install process. After 40 minutes of error message after error message, and googling obsure PHP dev tools/practices, I just quit. So yes, use Grav, if you already deep in PHP world.
  - ivanmontillam 5y ago
    Sad to hear that was your experience. It's supposed to work just by extracting the .zip or .tar into the 'public_html' directory. At least that was my experience, I run it from the cheapest cPanel shared hosting I could find (the ones of $3/month). My cPanel shared hosting provider also provides me with SSH access, and I got used to it as well. I could have gone with the VPS route, but the typical cPanel hosting come with sensible defaults that just works like it's supposed to. What I did was to download one of these skeletons (prefilled with data) and start from there. It's almost 99.9% guaranteed to work that way. The Admin plugin helps a lot to reduce that obscurity you mention. Full disclosure: I'm not a PHP developer as well, I know nothing from it, I only know Python, some C++11 onwards and Delphi.
quaintdev 5y ago
> Yes, finally I’ve found the time to buy a VPS and host a Jekyll blog with a nice comment system Do we really need comment section on blogs? The blog comments are not particularly helpful to have any discussion at least not the way one can have here on HN, reddit, Twitter, etc,. Besides the poor user interface, the users have to sign up to comment. Why would they sign up when they can have discussions on above platforms? If one does not implement sign up but allow users to comment just by entering username (like the way this blog did) then people start abusing the comment section. I think HN/Reddit comment section should be used for discussions although I would prefer if it could be embedded in blog somehow. I understand that this is terrible idea if reddit/hn chose to be walled gardens someday but then do we have other better solution?
- reedciccio 5y ago
- ivanmontillam 5y ago
  > I think HN/Reddit comment section should be used for discussions although I would prefer if it could be embedded in blog somehow. I've thought of this as well, but then I read on the HN Guidelines that: Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff occasionally, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity. [0] So unless every post you have complies with HN Guidelines, I don't think we'll ever see this. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - theamk 5y ago
    All the rules say is you should not submit your own blog posts yourself. But if someone else submits it, you are welcome to link to it, and perhaps even embed (I think there is an API to access HN data?) I can imagine a "smart" blog which periodcally checks HN if the post has been submitted (or maybe verifiers visitors' Refere headers?) If no submission is found, the "comments" link points to HN submission page. If yes, the "comments" link points to existing discussion.
efitz 5y ago
What about substack? It solves all the problems that the OP raises
- detaro 5y ago
  How does substack solve the first point?
stavros 5y ago
If you want a blog of your own, no need to get a VPS or anything. You can just fork my repo here: https://gitlab.com/stavros/quicksite https://gitlab.com/stavros/quicksite You can even edit your posts right on GitLab, so you don't need knowledge of git.
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
  It's not your 'own' blog if you run it on someone's service.
  - Karunamon 5y ago
    On the contrary. If it's on a git repo you have a copy of, it doesn't matter who's service is being used. Migration becomes trivial. This is probably the single greatest upside of static site generators.
    - Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
      If you have a copy of it, you have a backup. Which is good, but not really groundbreaking. You still depend on the hosting provider who lets you keep your stuff on their servers.
      - Karunamon 5y ago
        The internet is an interconnected series of "someone's service". Your definition is so broad as to be a meaningless tautology. I host my blog on web space that I pay for. If they stop hosting me, I move. This takes literally one line in a post commit hook to effect.
        Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
        the degree of using 'someone's service' when you host your own VPS on your own domain is quite a bit different from when you are using gitlab.
CarrotCodes 5y ago
I'm a big fan of the GitHub Pages + Jekyll + Cloudflare "stack" for getting a fast, cheap (free, usually) website or blog up and running. If you're strong in a particular ecosystem you can switch Jekyll out for something like Hugo, but Jekyll continues to be rock solid for my purposes, and there's usually a guide or plugin for additional features.
- hiptobecubic 5y ago
  Why bother with cloudflare here?
  - comprev 5y ago
    DNS hosting?
  - CarrotCodes 5y ago
    I'll usually want to use a custom domain, like carrot.blog, in front of a GitHub Pages site. But it's not strictly necessarily if you're OK with something.github.io
  - KerryJones 5y ago
    I just setup a new site using Cloudflare Pages + Hugo, that's the entire stack. It's free and great.
collaborative 5y ago
Similarly, I recently moved away from Wix to my own bare bones implementation that looks exactly the same Went from an insights score of 31/100 to 100/100 Only chose Wix to start with because I had no time to set up a website (at all)
qudat 5y ago
These articles always prompt people to share what blogging platforms they recommend. I decided to create a list that references all of the medium alternatives. Happy to add others that people know about. https://listifi.app/u/erock/blogging-platforms https://listifi.app/u/erock/blogging-platforms
imagetic 5y ago
I am currently in the process of moving things over from hosted services to Hugo / Netlify. For the last month I've been messing around with various ssg's and jamstack solutions. I spent a week tinkering with 11ty and loved a lot of my time with it and would love to explore it more, but after a few days it ended up being far too complex, since my goal is to focus on publishing work over personal website development. Sometime I always struggle to find a balance with and why services/social media probably won out for me for so many years. Hugo has just been a more straight forward approach. Like the author, I've been thinking a lot about my work and where it's published/owned/controlled by and determined that I want to port all my relevant social post over the years back to my website for archival purposes. Maybe a Posts/Feed type website, more like tumblr, that is self contained and relatively simple to move/manage and maintain.
- giuliomagnifico 5y ago
  > I spent a week tinkering with 11ty and loved a lot of my time with it and would love to explore it more, but after a few days it ended up being far too complex Yes, unfortunately is not easy, if you want a more fast and easy way is use GitHub Pages. With Jekyll is very fast to set up (like 15-20 mins), I think it's the same with Hugo (I've never deleved in Hugo). You don't have the full control on your content like if it's hosted on your server, because you have to rely on GitHub, but you have your content and is a lot better than any other blogging platform and is also easier to maintain. For me was a goal to understand how Jekyll works self-hosted, I love learn new thing, that's also why I moved my blog to my VPS.
prima-facie 5y ago
If you don't mind getting your hands dirty you can publish a static blog using Github Actions + AWS S3 + Cloudflare for cheap - the only cost being the price of the domain per year. https://wooptoo.com/blog/github-actions/ https://wooptoo.com/blog/github-actions/
- Railworks2 5y ago
  One could simplify the entire thing and use GitHub pages or CloudFlare pages to host Jekyll sites directly from a GitHub repository
  - prima-facie 5y ago
    Github pages requires the repo to be public - which might not work for everyone. CF pages is pretty cool, thanks!
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
adrianvoica 5y ago
OP, please, spellcheck your articles. I found so many typos and spelling errors in that article, I don't even know where to start. So, I'll just start with this: please use a spellchecker - they're free! Otherwise, keep up the good work and be free (self-host / own your stuff)! There's a back-to-roots movement going on, where people want to own their stuff. The more, the better!
- giuliomagnifico 5y ago
  Thanks! Looks very interesting!
- rambambram 5y ago
  I found it refreshing, to be honest. It didn't take long for me to find out what "sintax" and "shure" meant. ;)
- giuliomagnifico 5y ago
  Thanks, I checked and edited, hope now has less errors, sorry but english is not my first language.
  - Jarwain 5y ago
    I like to recommend the grammarly extension to my coworkers and they find it very helpful
  - sumanthvepa 5y ago
    There are still a few grammatical errors in the post. But do not worry about fixing them. It was clear that English is not your first language. That is perfectly alright. The meaning of your post was very clear. And that is all that matters.
    - giuliomagnifico 5y ago
      No I want to improve my English and learn. I checked again and I found some “lots/a lots/sintax/plural/etc..." errors, and I fixed them. Now I installed https://languagetool.org https://languagetool.org and I will use it before write tects...ehm texts =) Thanks for the comments and help!
yreg 5y ago
Earlier this week SundaeSwap, the first DEX on Cardano launched its production, which was a big event for them. On the day of the launch Medium blocked their blog which contained vital information. The crypto people often say "If you don't hold the keys, you don't own the coins". Something similar could be said about using platforms like Medium.
aftergibson 5y ago
I did this at the end of last year, exported all my data from medium, ran medium-2-md, cleaned up a few posts and was away. I now use Pelican with GitHub Pages and any new posts are generated from a single org file. It’s a really frictionless workflow. You can even have medium import your new posts with a link back to your own site and if you want your site to look like medium, medius is a nice theme but needed a little tweaking to get it working with the latest pelican version. All in all a fairly painless migration.
githubholobeat 5y ago
Anyone on Medium writing about programming languages trends should also be pre-screened and have their own original (non-forked) source code repository listed on their profile. Each time I see a Medium article in form of "Top [insert number] [insert topic] to [insert a verb]", it nudges me ever closer to canceling my subscription.
quickthrower2 5y ago
An idea for someone. Set up a site "adiosmedium.com" or whatever with a list of these blogs, and an RSS aggregator link of all of them. Take submissions based on old medium link and new blog link. Proof being a post on the medium link saying "i'm moving to ...", and a clear history of good posting. Fun low/no-code project for someone maybe!
fleddr 5y ago
I think the hate for Medium is really overstated, it's quite absurd for people wanting it to die altogether, just because it has some annoying UX. Everybody wanting to mess with self hosting a blog very much should do so, but to some it's just a minor side thing of low importance, and in that case, Medium serves a purpose. It's free and you can even link your domain to it, also for free. The writing experience is quite good and you can publish your articles for free or behind the paywall. There's no ads. We really live in the age of entitlement to not be thankful that it is an option, even if it's not for you. Instead, we wish for it to "die". Subjective as it is, the new blog is harder to read and looks worse than the new one. It has no internal search. It won't feed into any recommendation engine, there's no audience management, feature pages, newsletters (I assume) and a whole bunch of things you get at Medium. It's now impossible to follow the blog automatically, except for the very small group of people still using RSS readers. So what have you achieved exactly? You spent time to make something worse, not better. If it's just for technical tinkering, fine. If it's to "liberate your content", this too is a vague claim. Medium doesn't delete content and has an export option allowing you to back up posts should you want to. Again, this is not a love letter to Medium.
michaelcampbell 5y ago
Secure Connection Failed An error occurred during a connection to giuliomagnifico.blog. PR_END_OF_FILE_ERROR The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified. Please contact the website owners to inform them of this problem. Fun.
- giuliomagnifico 5y ago
  Ehm, which URL? It works on my browsers. Maybe I was editing a post, try to refresh the page,
seumars 5y ago
Medium UX is also quite terrible – the website doesn't even allow you to copy text to the clipboard which is infuriating every single time.
popfastful 5y ago
- danielhlockard 5y ago
  This really seems like spam. None of these apps are real and your "product" is kind of sad really.
tuananh 5y ago
i went from jekyll to hugo recently. it makes everything so much better and faster.
XCSme 5y ago
If you host anywhere a LAMP stack: I built a very basic markdown-based blog in PHP: https://github.com/Cristy94/markdown-blog https://github.com/Cristy94/markdown-blog The idea is that Apache/PHP handle the loading/displaying of markdown files from a directory, so to add a new post you just create a new markdown file. It's very basic, but it's easy to customize with a bit of HTML/CSS/PHP.
Jasonrams 5y ago

If you want people to read your writing, don’t put it in a walled garden.

giuliomagnifico 5y ago
Yes, I agree. The only trouble is where all the people are inside this garden…. (that -fortunately- is not the case of Medium but other socials are very centralized in one name: Meta). For that every little effort to open the fences of some gardens is precious. Translated: go away from any sort of centralized web.
jfengel 5y ago
If you want people to pay you for writing, you end up doing something. Right now "something" seems to consist of walling it off, begging for donations, or running ads. Everybody would love a better option. If all you want is to be read, you have more options. But it's still hard for people to find you, since everyone else has the exact same options. Turns out lots of people will write for free.

If you are searching for a Medium alternative checkout Notaku https://notaku.website/product/blog https://notaku.website/product/blog It uses Notion as CMS, the blog posts are stored in a Notion database with additional properties like description .etc Disclaimer: I am the author, let me hear any feedback if you try it

valryon 5y ago
This is one letter swap from something very popular but completely different…
ohmahjong 5y ago
Absolutely _not_ to be confused with Nutaku (NSFW).
- xmorse 5y ago
  Didn't know anything about it
Syonyk 5y ago
I moved my blog off Google-hosted Blogger a year or so ago, and the last thing I wanted was another place that would go directions I don't care for and have to migrate off again. Moving blog hosts is a huge pain in everything. I went to self-hoseted/self-rendered Jekyll, with Discourse embedding handling comments, and it's been working fairly well so far. Cloudflare caching covers traffic spikes fairly competently, and if I want to host the content on something else, I literally just have to upload the rendered files. As a bonus, it now works perfectly well without cookies or Javascript. Not perfectly, there are some JS features that improve things, but it should render and be entirely readable, with images, without JS.
- xmorse 5y ago
  This is one of the reasons i am not implementing a rich text editor and instead i am using Notion as CMS. A lot of individuals and companies are already using Notion and this makes it easier for them to write blog posts with it. I know that for developers like me and you markdown is everything we need but non technical people need something more high level, just the act of embedding an image in markdown is very difficult for them
CitrusFruits 5y ago
Looks cool! I'm not a much of a blogger so I'm probably not your target audience, but I've love to see more of an ecosystem around notion. I would say I'm personally aittle dubious of the only two options being free and $50 a month. You might want to consider another price point in there in between. Although I'd do see that you're still in beta so I recognize the prices might not be final anyways.

aklemm 5y ago

Every effort to maintain a personal website is inspiring. I love it. There's still a better balance to be had re: maintenance vs. autonomy, and I hope a hosting/publishing service finds that someday and offers it in a way that attracts a broad following.

pyrophane 5y ago
While Medium is a bit simpler to use than some other blogging/publishing platforms, the difference isn't all that much. Wasn't the real reason to post on Medium more about monetization and discovery?
- aklemm 5y ago
  Yeah, I think monetization and discovery were drivers to Medium. Apparently that comes with a lot of trade-offs in terms of autonomy. It was hard enough to play ball with Google as an independent site, and I'm not sure people find that worthwhile at all any more.
- boxed 5y ago
  It wasn't for me. It was: - it looked good - it was very easy to just write - the lack of customization meants I didn't get stuck for hours and hours trying to find a template or choose a statist site generator, or tweak CSS, choose images, etc. Ultimately I moved to github pages where at least I had to get jekyll (which is kinda crap imo, but works), but I have spent a lot of time tweaking it and I still don't like the design. (https://kodare.net https://kodare.net if you want to see)
  - ta988 5y ago
    I like your design, simple and efficient. Could put some separations for your upper right links, if you add an rss link I'll follow that.
    - boxed 5y ago
      There is an RSS feed at the standard place so just shoving the url into your RSS reader will work.

cedsam 5y ago

did you consider github pages?

giuliomagnifico 5y ago
Yes but GitHub is “another garden”, surely is way more open than Medium but you still have to rely on other resources (Microsoft), you are not the true owner of your content. Instead, using my own VPS I can have the full control on my blog (yeah there are still the laws obviously). Anyway Jekyll has some limitations with GitHub, but is a lot easier to setup, especially for the comments and builds.
- hiptobecubic 5y ago
  Given that you have all your content locally and can push whatever you want as long as it's static, it seems like the only part you "don't own" is the maintenance.
  - giuliomagnifico 5y ago
    Not quite. If you write something that violates the TOS of GitHub your content can be removed, also if someone flags you for some reason. You rely always on a third party service.
    - shagie 5y ago
      GitHub pages with a custom domain? And then if you do run afoul of GitHub you could move your Jekyll site to somewhere else. Until then, you've got hosting and maintenance handled by someone else.
      - hiptobecubic 5y ago
        Sorry, yes, this is mostly what I meant. If you have your own domain you can pretty easily just move things around.
5y ago

softwarebeware 5y ago

Good on you! Medium can go ahead and go out of business in my opinion. It makes the web worse rather than better ImE, like Pinterest.

ycombinete 5y ago
I’m out of the loop on this. What’s wrong with medium?
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  It tries to paywall content to recoup its millions in VC investment.
- ivanmontillam 5y ago
  Some of the greatest posts are paywalled, and the user experience for it it's terrible. The benefit of Medium is the exposure and that if you're good enough, you can actually be paid via Medium Partners Program, but on the other hand, these benefits are at the expense of decentralization and owning your content. You don't own your content when you publish on Medium. Once it happened to me that a post wasn't open to read and it claimed I could read it for free if I signed up. Then I went ahead and signed up, and it was still paywalled[0]. The experience was frustrating. [0]: https://mobile.twitter.com/IvanMontillaM/status/1348007592069627906 https://mobile.twitter.com/IvanMontillaM/status/134800759206...
  - jpalomaki 5y ago
    Could it be that the possibility of making some money with the content actually encourages people to create better content?
    - ivanmontillam 5y ago
      Yes, I'm not against profitting off your content, though you can make money with your own blog as well, with the upfront cost of having to build your own audience, of course. I'm not saying it's easy, just saying it's also possible without the need giving away your content rights/ownership. What I am against it's to clickbait your readers into "Sign up to read for free", then you sign up and find out you still have to pay. It leaves you with a poor taste impression, because of the bait and switch dark pattern right there, after you've given out your precious personal information at the sign up form.

colinarms 5y ago

Another Medium alternative is Papyrus: https://papyrus.so https://papyrus.so. Privacy-first, simplicity and speed are the core tenets. Export posts at any time, send posts via newsletters, and no feature-bloat. Disclaimer: I built Papyrus because I was fed up with Medium, Wordpress and Substack.

cultofmetatron 5y ago
I saw that their content editor looks to have better support for code editing. I'm sold
- colinarms 5y ago
  Yup - we're using rich-markdown-editor for the content editor. Full support for code and syntax highlighting. GitHub: https://github.com/outline/rich-markdown-editor https://github.com/outline/rich-markdown-editor, editor demo: https://rich-markdown-editor-demo.onrender.com/?path=/story/editor--default https://rich-markdown-editor-demo.onrender.com/?path=/story/...
  - 2Gkashmiri 5y ago
    richmarkdown looks archived. do you know any active forks or an alternative?
p4bl0 5y ago
> Privacy-first, simplicity and speed are the core tenets. Export posts at any time, send posts via newsletters, and no feature-bloat. Then why oh why would you jump on the web3/NFT train?
- hiptobecubic 5y ago
  Growth?
  - coldtea 5y ago

donatj 5y ago

Mediums descent from shining exemplar of good to questionably evil was sudden.

hiptobecubic 5y ago
I never understood why it was a shining example of good in the first place. It is a blogging platform. What else does it do?
- throwhauser 5y ago
  It did somehow manage to have a lot of good content, but it made it too difficult to access. I haven't looked at any Medium stuff in a long time, but if I recall correctly highlighting text wouldn't allow you to copy it, but would allow you to tweet it. Infuriating if you want to save a link to it and a snippet someplace for your own use.
- krastanov 5y ago
  For some reason everyone around me was treating it for a while as if it was a curated source of high quality writing (and I have seen people brag about writing Medium articles). I am still confused how anyone saw it as anything more than a blogging platform.
- wepple 5y ago
  It was a very minimalistic and tidy UX in an age of pop ups, ads, bloated menus, unecessary features, etc. it was great for reading and for writing Then it became all of those things. It has the distinct stench of a growth team making all the classic short term moves to boost DAU
  - yreg 5y ago
    Was it? I remember it as a platform that always tried to force me to signup for a free account even just to read a blog post. It appeared in the age of Blogger, Tumblr and Posterous which were much less hostile.
- 5y ago

toastercat 5y ago

Adding another alternative here: https://write.as/ https://write.as/ Free, easy, federated, ostensibly open-source and self-hostable: https://github.com/writefreely https://github.com/writefreely

stoplight 5y ago
Sadly, it appears they have discontinued the free plan: > But anyone who hasn’t created an account by December 31 [2021] at 11:59pm Eastern won’t be able to create an account via our open registration flow. Instead, they’ll need to choose a paid account, or get a Free account through another channel. Read on for details. https://write.as/blog/changing-free-registrations https://write.as/blog/changing-free-registrations
- toastercat 5y ago
  Sad indeed. Fortunately, there are several public instances one can join (https://writefreely.org/instances https://writefreely.org/instances), and again, still self-hostable. Alternatively, there is also: https://bearblog.dev/ https://bearblog.dev/ https://rwtxt.com/ https://rwtxt.com/ https://dev.to/ https://dev.to/ Or of course you can use a static-site generator and host on Neocities or Github Pages, but that's less simple than the above solutions.

mcntsh 5y ago

I remember when Medium first came out, it was "all about the words". Today it couldn't be further from that. Medium articles are slow, janky, filled with pop ups and paywalls. The faster Medium dies the better.

slig 5y ago
Can't wait for they to go the way of Posterous.
- gnicholas 5y ago
  It would be funny if Medium were acquired by Twitter, given Ev’s history with both companies. Relatedly, long live Posthaven!

chiefalchemist 5y ago

> Additionally, if you create or log into your Medium account through a third-party platform (such as Apple, Facebook, Google, or Twitter), we will have access to certain information from that platform, such as your name, lists of friends or followers, birthday, and profile picture, in accordance with the authorization procedures determined by such platform This isn't a Medium issue. It's the "price you pay" for the convenience of such social-based authentication.

ivanmontillam 5y ago

Congratulations. A big win for Internet decentralization! (It's not sarcasm, I'm all in for having your own space on the Internet). I invite you to try Grav CMS[0], it's what I use for my personal blog[1]. Grav is a flat-file CMS, it doesn't use RDBMS. It's highly performant. I also have CloudFlare in front of it, but it was already faster than the typical WordPress you see elsewhere. Grav also adheres to the latest PHP version, so you don't have to carry along legacy syntax around like other CMSes. Its error pages are comprehensive and the stack traces are actually readable. I personally think it's the best out there technically speaking, the best of both worlds (Flat-file and at the same time, dynamic instead of compiling the build every new post), the only drawback is that its plugin ecosystem it's still in the early stages, so if you're to create marketing landing pages or similar, you'll still fall short there. [0] https://getgrav.org https://getgrav.org [1] https://www.ivanmontilla.com https://www.ivanmontilla.com EDIT: Typos.

giuliomagnifico 5y ago
I’ll give a look, thanks for the info!
shantnutiwari 5y ago
As someone who is not a PHP developer-- I couldnt even get Grav installed. There is a lot of assumptions in the install process. After 40 minutes of error message after error message, and googling obsure PHP dev tools/practices, I just quit. So yes, use Grav, if you already deep in PHP world.
- ivanmontillam 5y ago
  Sad to hear that was your experience. It's supposed to work just by extracting the .zip or .tar into the 'public_html' directory. At least that was my experience, I run it from the cheapest cPanel shared hosting I could find (the ones of $3/month). My cPanel shared hosting provider also provides me with SSH access, and I got used to it as well. I could have gone with the VPS route, but the typical cPanel hosting come with sensible defaults that just works like it's supposed to. What I did was to download one of these skeletons (prefilled with data) and start from there. It's almost 99.9% guaranteed to work that way. The Admin plugin helps a lot to reduce that obscurity you mention. Full disclosure: I'm not a PHP developer as well, I know nothing from it, I only know Python, some C++11 onwards and Delphi.

quaintdev 5y ago

> Yes, finally I’ve found the time to buy a VPS and host a Jekyll blog with a nice comment system Do we really need comment section on blogs? The blog comments are not particularly helpful to have any discussion at least not the way one can have here on HN, reddit, Twitter, etc,. Besides the poor user interface, the users have to sign up to comment. Why would they sign up when they can have discussions on above platforms? If one does not implement sign up but allow users to comment just by entering username (like the way this blog did) then people start abusing the comment section. I think HN/Reddit comment section should be used for discussions although I would prefer if it could be embedded in blog somehow. I understand that this is terrible idea if reddit/hn chose to be walled gardens someday but then do we have other better solution?

reedciccio 5y ago
ivanmontillam 5y ago
> I think HN/Reddit comment section should be used for discussions although I would prefer if it could be embedded in blog somehow. I've thought of this as well, but then I read on the HN Guidelines that: Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff occasionally, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity. [0] So unless every post you have complies with HN Guidelines, I don't think we'll ever see this. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- theamk 5y ago
  All the rules say is you should not submit your own blog posts yourself. But if someone else submits it, you are welcome to link to it, and perhaps even embed (I think there is an API to access HN data?) I can imagine a "smart" blog which periodcally checks HN if the post has been submitted (or maybe verifiers visitors' Refere headers?) If no submission is found, the "comments" link points to HN submission page. If yes, the "comments" link points to existing discussion.

efitz 5y ago

What about substack? It solves all the problems that the OP raises

detaro 5y ago
How does substack solve the first point?

stavros 5y ago

If you want a blog of your own, no need to get a VPS or anything. You can just fork my repo here: https://gitlab.com/stavros/quicksite https://gitlab.com/stavros/quicksite You can even edit your posts right on GitLab, so you don't need knowledge of git.

Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
It's not your 'own' blog if you run it on someone's service.
- Karunamon 5y ago
  On the contrary. If it's on a git repo you have a copy of, it doesn't matter who's service is being used. Migration becomes trivial. This is probably the single greatest upside of static site generators.
  - Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
    If you have a copy of it, you have a backup. Which is good, but not really groundbreaking. You still depend on the hosting provider who lets you keep your stuff on their servers.
    - Karunamon 5y ago
      The internet is an interconnected series of "someone's service". Your definition is so broad as to be a meaningless tautology. I host my blog on web space that I pay for. If they stop hosting me, I move. This takes literally one line in a post commit hook to effect.
      - Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
        the degree of using 'someone's service' when you host your own VPS on your own domain is quite a bit different from when you are using gitlab.

CarrotCodes 5y ago

I'm a big fan of the GitHub Pages + Jekyll + Cloudflare "stack" for getting a fast, cheap (free, usually) website or blog up and running. If you're strong in a particular ecosystem you can switch Jekyll out for something like Hugo, but Jekyll continues to be rock solid for my purposes, and there's usually a guide or plugin for additional features.

hiptobecubic 5y ago
Why bother with cloudflare here?
- comprev 5y ago
  DNS hosting?
- CarrotCodes 5y ago
  I'll usually want to use a custom domain, like carrot.blog, in front of a GitHub Pages site. But it's not strictly necessarily if you're OK with something.github.io
- KerryJones 5y ago
  I just setup a new site using Cloudflare Pages + Hugo, that's the entire stack. It's free and great.

collaborative 5y ago

Similarly, I recently moved away from Wix to my own bare bones implementation that looks exactly the same Went from an insights score of 31/100 to 100/100 Only chose Wix to start with because I had no time to set up a website (at all)

qudat 5y ago

These articles always prompt people to share what blogging platforms they recommend. I decided to create a list that references all of the medium alternatives. Happy to add others that people know about. https://listifi.app/u/erock/blogging-platforms https://listifi.app/u/erock/blogging-platforms

imagetic 5y ago

I am currently in the process of moving things over from hosted services to Hugo / Netlify. For the last month I've been messing around with various ssg's and jamstack solutions. I spent a week tinkering with 11ty and loved a lot of my time with it and would love to explore it more, but after a few days it ended up being far too complex, since my goal is to focus on publishing work over personal website development. Sometime I always struggle to find a balance with and why services/social media probably won out for me for so many years. Hugo has just been a more straight forward approach. Like the author, I've been thinking a lot about my work and where it's published/owned/controlled by and determined that I want to port all my relevant social post over the years back to my website for archival purposes. Maybe a Posts/Feed type website, more like tumblr, that is self contained and relatively simple to move/manage and maintain.

giuliomagnifico 5y ago
> I spent a week tinkering with 11ty and loved a lot of my time with it and would love to explore it more, but after a few days it ended up being far too complex Yes, unfortunately is not easy, if you want a more fast and easy way is use GitHub Pages. With Jekyll is very fast to set up (like 15-20 mins), I think it's the same with Hugo (I've never deleved in Hugo). You don't have the full control on your content like if it's hosted on your server, because you have to rely on GitHub, but you have your content and is a lot better than any other blogging platform and is also easier to maintain. For me was a goal to understand how Jekyll works self-hosted, I love learn new thing, that's also why I moved my blog to my VPS.

prima-facie 5y ago

If you don't mind getting your hands dirty you can publish a static blog using Github Actions + AWS S3 + Cloudflare for cheap - the only cost being the price of the domain per year. https://wooptoo.com/blog/github-actions/ https://wooptoo.com/blog/github-actions/

Railworks2 5y ago
One could simplify the entire thing and use GitHub pages or CloudFlare pages to host Jekyll sites directly from a GitHub repository
- prima-facie 5y ago
  Github pages requires the repo to be public - which might not work for everyone. CF pages is pretty cool, thanks!

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

adrianvoica 5y ago

OP, please, spellcheck your articles. I found so many typos and spelling errors in that article, I don't even know where to start. So, I'll just start with this: please use a spellchecker - they're free! Otherwise, keep up the good work and be free (self-host / own your stuff)! There's a back-to-roots movement going on, where people want to own their stuff. The more, the better!

giuliomagnifico 5y ago
Thanks! Looks very interesting!
rambambram 5y ago
I found it refreshing, to be honest. It didn't take long for me to find out what "sintax" and "shure" meant. ;)
giuliomagnifico 5y ago
Thanks, I checked and edited, hope now has less errors, sorry but english is not my first language.
- Jarwain 5y ago
  I like to recommend the grammarly extension to my coworkers and they find it very helpful
- sumanthvepa 5y ago
  There are still a few grammatical errors in the post. But do not worry about fixing them. It was clear that English is not your first language. That is perfectly alright. The meaning of your post was very clear. And that is all that matters.
  - giuliomagnifico 5y ago
    No I want to improve my English and learn. I checked again and I found some “lots/a lots/sintax/plural/etc..." errors, and I fixed them. Now I installed https://languagetool.org https://languagetool.org and I will use it before write tects...ehm texts =) Thanks for the comments and help!

yreg 5y ago

Earlier this week SundaeSwap, the first DEX on Cardano launched its production, which was a big event for them. On the day of the launch Medium blocked their blog which contained vital information. The crypto people often say "If you don't hold the keys, you don't own the coins". Something similar could be said about using platforms like Medium.

aftergibson 5y ago

I did this at the end of last year, exported all my data from medium, ran medium-2-md, cleaned up a few posts and was away. I now use Pelican with GitHub Pages and any new posts are generated from a single org file. It’s a really frictionless workflow. You can even have medium import your new posts with a link back to your own site and if you want your site to look like medium, medius is a nice theme but needed a little tweaking to get it working with the latest pelican version. All in all a fairly painless migration.

githubholobeat 5y ago

Anyone on Medium writing about programming languages trends should also be pre-screened and have their own original (non-forked) source code repository listed on their profile. Each time I see a Medium article in form of "Top [insert number] [insert topic] to [insert a verb]", it nudges me ever closer to canceling my subscription.

quickthrower2 5y ago

An idea for someone. Set up a site "adiosmedium.com" or whatever with a list of these blogs, and an RSS aggregator link of all of them. Take submissions based on old medium link and new blog link. Proof being a post on the medium link saying "i'm moving to ...", and a clear history of good posting. Fun low/no-code project for someone maybe!

fleddr 5y ago

I think the hate for Medium is really overstated, it's quite absurd for people wanting it to die altogether, just because it has some annoying UX. Everybody wanting to mess with self hosting a blog very much should do so, but to some it's just a minor side thing of low importance, and in that case, Medium serves a purpose. It's free and you can even link your domain to it, also for free. The writing experience is quite good and you can publish your articles for free or behind the paywall. There's no ads. We really live in the age of entitlement to not be thankful that it is an option, even if it's not for you. Instead, we wish for it to "die". Subjective as it is, the new blog is harder to read and looks worse than the new one. It has no internal search. It won't feed into any recommendation engine, there's no audience management, feature pages, newsletters (I assume) and a whole bunch of things you get at Medium. It's now impossible to follow the blog automatically, except for the very small group of people still using RSS readers. So what have you achieved exactly? You spent time to make something worse, not better. If it's just for technical tinkering, fine. If it's to "liberate your content", this too is a vague claim. Medium doesn't delete content and has an export option allowing you to back up posts should you want to. Again, this is not a love letter to Medium.

michaelcampbell 5y ago

Secure Connection Failed An error occurred during a connection to giuliomagnifico.blog. PR_END_OF_FILE_ERROR The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified. Please contact the website owners to inform them of this problem. Fun.

giuliomagnifico 5y ago
Ehm, which URL? It works on my browsers. Maybe I was editing a post, try to refresh the page,

seumars 5y ago

Medium UX is also quite terrible – the website doesn't even allow you to copy text to the clipboard which is infuriating every single time.

popfastful 5y ago

danielhlockard 5y ago
This really seems like spam. None of these apps are real and your "product" is kind of sad really.

tuananh 5y ago

i went from jekyll to hugo recently. it makes everything so much better and faster.

XCSme 5y ago

If you host anywhere a LAMP stack: I built a very basic markdown-based blog in PHP: https://github.com/Cristy94/markdown-blog https://github.com/Cristy94/markdown-blog The idea is that Apache/PHP handle the loading/displaying of markdown files from a directory, so to add a new post you just create a new markdown file. It's very basic, but it's easy to customize with a bit of HTML/CSS/PHP.

Jasonrams 5y ago