
Ask HN: Would you still start a Medium.com publication today? - anon1094
I see popular publications like HackerNoon.com and freeCodeCamp.org actively moving away from Medium.com into their own platforms.<p>If you wanted to start a publication would you still recommend Medium? If not, what&#x27;s another option?
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lmiller1990
I started on Medium way back (2-3 years ago) since it was easy and the UX was
relatively clean. The main benefit I continue to enjoy is a large audience;
lots of people find my articles who might not otherwise have. I think it's
best to maintain your own personal blog, but crosspost to medium (maybe a week
after, with a backlink to your original post on your own blog).

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digital_voodoo
There is a large choice of publication platforms.

I'm not tech-savvy enough and mostly don't have enough free time to fiddle
with the installation of Ghost, Hugo and Co. But at least I know they exist.

For the time being, I've installed Wordpress on my own hosting and with my own
domain name. It's not ideal, but I considered Medium when setting up my
professional blog, and decided against it for the above-mentioned reasons.

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mindcrime
I wouldn't have started a publication on Medium yesterday, still wouldn't
today, and won't tomorrow. Say "no" to closed/walled-garden ecosystems, for
the love of FSM.

Other option? Self-host using Apache Roller or something. It's not like there
aren't 12,000 F/OSS blog/CMS/wiki/etc. systems out there one could use for
this sort of thing.

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soulchild37
No, always own your platform, Medium has shit UX (forced popup that ask user
to sign up, plus top sticky banner sometimes). And now Medium has started to
put paywall on articles, and the profit sometimes doesn't go to the author.

You can use Jekyll / Hugo to generate your blog staticly and host in on Github
Pages or your own server. If these are too much effort, simply sign up for a
wordpress blog , it works well too.

[https://www.alwaysownyourplatform.com](https://www.alwaysownyourplatform.com)

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ElFitz
They also apparently (would love confirmation) are now blocking mobile users
from reading from their browser :/

At least they did it to me ^^'

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21133799](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21133799)

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softwaredoug
Absolutely not.

I want to own my content as much as possible. Tech startups like Medium seem
to have a habit of silently changing TOS and eroding my rights.

Jekyll / Wordpress are not THAT hard to use, and there’s a lot of free options
these days.

If you care about your publication I fee it behooves you to learn a system
that you have under your control - not opt into a pseudo social media site
like medium. (Face it, they’re going to end up a “blogging as social media”
platform)

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Jefro118
No, because you don't have full control. I've just started using Ghost and
it's pretty good. The self hosted version was extremely easy to set up on
DigitalOcean, or you can go with the hosted version and get a few advantages
from that.

