
Medium suspended our account and blocked access to all our published stories - ColinWright
https://mastodon.xyz/@Liberapay/99744324870271197
======
scrollaway
Hey everyone, if you're looking for a fantastic blog engine, I want to tell
you about Ghost: [https://ghost.org](https://ghost.org)

I found Ghost while looking for a new blog engine for my company. My first
instinct was to use Medium as well, but I ended up hitting a lot of issues
because it was impossible for us to customize it (add custom javascript,
charts, disable the lame "highlights", custom domain was not free, etc...).

1\. Ghost is open source, developed by a foundation in the open. They make
their revenue open, their issue tracker, their code, everything.

2\. Ghost is self-hostable, as well as hosted on a paid plan. The paid plan is
a little pricy ([https://ghost.org/pricing/](https://ghost.org/pricing/)) but
I recommend it if this is for a company blog.

3\. Ghost is beautiful out of the box. Here is the default theme:
[https://blog.ghost.org](https://blog.ghost.org) \-- Here is a slightly
customized theme:
[https://articles.hsreplay.net](https://articles.hsreplay.net)

4\. Ghost has an excellent featureset. It's powered by Markdown and has a
wonderful markdown editor in its admin/authorship interface. It also supports
authors, editors, contributors, drafts, publishing schedules, tags, etc.

Seriously, try it out. I'm not affiliated, just a huge fan. I want to see more
people use and support these fantastic open source tools, rather than complain
about Medium like there's no alternative.

~~~
alpb
As many others indicated, static sites are much better unless you need dynamic
features. Static sites make deployments much easier, doesn't depend on any
OS/runtime, doesn't lock you in to a particular database. You just write
markdown and with little to no modification, the same thing could just work on
Hugo, or Jekyll.

~~~
scrollaway
I use Jekyll; I used Hugo and Pelican in the past. They solve a very specific
use case. But if you want to allow guest posting on your blog, a static site
will not do. You need something that has drafts, that has a proper editor,
that has a UI you can add and invite people to. Ghost solves that.

~~~
shaqbert
You need a headless CMS like Contentful[0]. They have a free developer tier
which is great for static sites, especially when you pair it with the super
awesome React based static site generator GatsbyJS[1].

[0]: [https://www.contentful.com/](https://www.contentful.com/) [1]:
[https://www.gatsbyjs.org/docs/gatsby-
starters/](https://www.gatsbyjs.org/docs/gatsby-starters/)

~~~
__bee
would go with Ghost or Hosted Jekyll, `Contentful` is not a good solution for
individual/small/medium teams.

~~~
jdavis703
I was an early user of Contentful. Before I introduced it, we had non-techies
editing YAML or Markdown files and committing them to Git and deploying them
using Jenkins (yeah that went about as well as you'd expect).

After countless hours supporting this system I decided to move over a couple
of the content pages to Contentful (here's one example:
[https://issuu.com/m/success/madsounds](https://issuu.com/m/success/madsounds)).
I didn't need to support anyone after making that move. As techies we tend to
think things like Git are easy, but it's not (that's part of the reason we get
paid the big bucks(

Also eventually basically all the company's CMS needs were moved over to
Contentful. From my experience it scaled well for both small and medium-sized
teams.

------
smg
A blanket statement like 'Medium is bad' does not have enough nuance. Medium
is for profit centralized service. You are trading freedom for convenience and
access to an audience. It is for you to decide if this tradeoff is profitable.

For me, having Medium as the sole repository of my content does not seem like
the right tradeoff. Maintaining a static site with a CDN costs less than 5$ a
month. Having complete control over the content is far more valuable than the
audience that Medium brings. Mirroring posts to Medium can still allow me to
reach that audience.

~~~
api
Why do you even need a CDN? GitHub will host static sites for free and
updating is a git push. S3 will as well for pennies a month unless your site
is huge.

~~~
osteele
I don't believe you can use HTTPS with a custom domain (a domain that doesn't
end in github.io or amazonaws.com), with GitHub pages or S3.

Two free choices I'm aware of, for hosting at a URL that both future-proofs
your choice of hosting provider and provides end-to-end encryption to site
visitors, are the free CloudFlare plan in front of GitHub or S3 (or any other
static hosting service), and the free hosting plan on Netlify.

~~~
EpicEng
You can, we use S3 at my company to host a site used by pathologists to sign
out reports. How we did that... I'd have to ask my coworker, but we have https
and a custom domain.

~~~
grogenaut
Aws cert manager (acm) now does this for any domain you can verify

~~~
osteele
It looks[1] like you can use Cert Manager with CloudFront[2], but not directly
with S3.

CloudFront is very cheap[3], but it is not free. (For that matter, S3 itself
is cheap but not free.) It's therefore a solution to “I'm employed in a
developed nation and don't want to notice that I'm paying for hosting”, but
not to “I have literally no money to spare for hosting because a year is less
than coffee” or “I want my content to stay up without my having to remember to
keep a valid credit card on file somewhere”.

[1] [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/acm/latest/userguide/acm-
service...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/acm/latest/userguide/acm-
services.html)

[2] CloudFront ≠ CloudFlare. Nobody in this thread has been confused about
this, but it tends to trip people up.

[3] I ran tech ops for a company whose site was, on launch day, around the
55th-most-popular site on the internet. I think our CloudFront bill was $300
for that day.

------
Hedja
Always publish on your own platform then syndicate it across all the relevant
social media providers to get exposure.

It's a huge pain, especially now that most platforms are closed and don't
provide automation (APIs, RSS), but it's really the most flexible solution.

It also makes syndicating to new providers a lot less painful since you'll
have some standard raw form (e.g. Markdown) which you can create a manual or
automated pipeline for.

Considering Liberapay is using Mastodon, I expected them to already know what
they're getting themselves into. Especially with Medium's thickening walls.

~~~
alanh
Standard reminder that Markdown, while pleasant to author in, is perhaps one
of the least standard formats ever (every implementation does things their own
way; see Babelmark 2) and not a great archive format, largely as a result.
(Markdown files don’t have version or flavor information embedded)

I hear org-mode is a good alternative. In the mean time, consider storing a
permanent .html version upon publication of markdown

~~~
steindavidb
Commonmark is a wonderful and well defined markdown standard (ie the one
GitHub uses)

~~~
seandougall
Cited in the spirit of good humor, but not irrelevant:
[https://xkcd.com/927/](https://xkcd.com/927/)

~~~
sincerely
Serious question - how is it not irrelevant? Should it be posted any time
people discuss the pros and cons of various standards?

~~~
alanh
To be fair, this is exactly what happened, since CommonMark did not cause all
Markdown users and implementors to converge.

------
Shywim
I don't even understand why someone who has a hosting would want to write on
medium when they can host their own blog, especially when in the case of
liberapay and mastodon they say they are fighting for freedom but choose to
wirte their posts in a closed, centralized service which also has user-hostile
behavior.

~~~
forgotmypw
I rarely click medium.com links, or any of their associated domains,
hackernoon.com, etc.

The website _sucks_. It's crippled without JS, and squirmy and laggy when JS
is enabled. Either way, it's very heavy on the network pipe.

Medium is in business of driving traffic, which means the content is likely to
be mediocre.

It's content that is looking for an audience, as my comment's sibling states.
Which means that it is probably not that compelling, otherwise the audience
would find _it_.

It's written by someone who can't be bothered to set up their own website
without all of these mis-features, nor understands the importance of doing so.

And for all of these reasons, the opinion of someone who publishes on Medium
is worth a lot less to me.

The same goes for businessinsider.com, wsj.com, patch.com, nymag.com and all
those other shitty sites that make me regret visiting them the moment I
arrive. There can't be anything relevant enough on there that I can't live
without. Just a big waste of my time and network resources.

I've blacklisted them in my hosts file, and haven't looked back.

~~~
pmarreck
> It's crippled without JS

It's an SPA. What did you expect? That's the new M.O., unless you're a 90's
relic like myself, in which case I appreciate your point but times change.

~~~
Zak
There are some use cases for which SPAs are a huge leap forward, greatly
improving the user experience. A lot of modern web applications don't and
shouldn't behave like a collection of pages, after all.

A blog is not one of these use cases; it is exactly a collection of pages.

~~~
et-al
Not to mention, as a SPA, Medium is a total failure.

Trying to read a string of comments on Medium results in a bunch of
unnecessary clicks and page reloads. I guess it's upping their click count..

~~~
acqq
I have thought it was intentional, to reduce the number of comments and
motivate the writers to write their own real big posts instead.

The way I see it, medium doesn't want to be a forum, but to have people write
the full articles. Even those who respond.

~~~
et-al
I can see that. But it's tiresome as a reader.

------
rcthompson
Reading further down the thread, it seems they were suspended for violation of
Medium's policy on cryptocurrencies... despite the fact that they have never
written about cryptocurrencies.

~~~
minimaxir
Medium has a policy on cryptocurrency? Given the amount of problematic thought
pieces submitted to HN from it (and the no-so-subtle advertisements for the
author’s own crypto), you wouldn’t know it.

~~~
rcthompson
Here's the post where they quote the message Medium sent them:
[https://mastodon.xyz/@Liberapay/99744414079487371](https://mastodon.xyz/@Liberapay/99744414079487371)

And here's the policy page it links to: [https://help.medium.com/hc/en-
us/articles/360000646167](https://help.medium.com/hc/en-
us/articles/360000646167)

~~~
minimaxir
Ah, that policy page was added _a week ago_ (the update date is visible on the
mobile site). Even if that policy was violated, it’s a jerk move to _ban_ for
infractions prior to that date.

~~~
SuperNinKenDo
Probably a pre-emptive move triggered by FOSTA and that other one that starts
with S who's name I forgot.

~~~
rcthompson
I don't think FOSTA/SESTA have anything to do with cryptocurrencies.

------
bmarquez
I never understood why people who can use self-hosted wordpress and domain
names would decide to give up control and put content on Medium. The stories
featured on the front page seem a bit of an ideological bubble (I doubt any
conservative bloggers would get any traction there.)

And the whole "log in to your email to log on" is IMO horrible design. I put
Gmail in a separate browser to mitigate cookie tracking, having to log on to
email then copy the login link to my main browser is much more annoying than
using a password manager like every other site.

~~~
philfrasty
That is a bit like saying "I never understood why people who can self-host
video put it on YouTube". Most times your content will never reach a
significant audience (if this is your goal), platforms like
Medium/YouTube/Flickr/500px make discovery easier.

~~~
post_break
You're going from a simple CMS to video hosting is like saying why ride a
bicycle when you can build a lamborghini from scratch. Sure some people have
the bank roll to try and launch a youtube, very few, but everyone can afford
to spin up a wordpress or some other sort of CMS on a one click host.

------
xab9
I never liked medium, their comment UX is weird and annoying, the whole thing
is just faceless, brandless and feels generic.

Mabye I'm old, but I find shared hosting with one click deployment of
wordpress a better choice, but heck, most of the blogs I end up reading
nowdays are tech blogs written by bright people who for some reason will not

1\. deploy an existing blog engine to a shared host

2\. host a blog on a vps

3\. write a rudimentary blog engine

4\. write a static generator (how much time could that be? a day?)

Yep, searching may be tricky, especially with rendered sites, but it's doable
and I literally never used the search function on medium... but whatever.
Maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree.

If you really want to publish something and you're a lazy bum, just throw up a
github repo, or a gist, it's still 100% more flexible than medium.

~~~
user5994461
wordpress offers free hosting for unlimited traffic. You don't need to set up
anything.

The smallest blog takes a long time to setup. I understand developers who
don't want to run web services at work only to come home and run other web
services.

------
ssimpson
Static site generator + static site hosting + JavaScript based comment system
like disqus is a great combo. You can generate in a container off markdown
using something like Hugo and host on S3. I’ve got free tier werker pulling my
repo, building it, then deploying it to CloudFiles. All I do is commit the
markdown changes to github.

~~~
fyfy18
If you are concerned about the privacy of your readers, using Disqus probably
isn't such a good idea:

[https://replyable.com/2017/03/disqus-is-your-data-worth-
trad...](https://replyable.com/2017/03/disqus-is-your-data-worth-trading-for-
convenience/)

~~~
JoshMnem
Two alternatives are:

[https://github.com/posativ/isso](https://github.com/posativ/isso)

and Discourse on a subdomain ($5/month for a Digital Ocean server).

~~~
KajMagnus
Another alternative is Talkyard (I'm developing it):

[https://www.talkyard.io/blog-comments](https://www.talkyard.io/blog-comments)
— there's serverless hosting (with privacy. No ads, no tracking), + it's open
source like Isso.

------
Deimorz
Looks like their account has been reinstated now:
[https://mastodon.xyz/@Liberapay/99745922397657868](https://mastodon.xyz/@Liberapay/99745922397657868)

------
alanh
I expected the other side of this link to be a thinkpiece that maybe having
one company host and track all of our blog reading activity isn't smart in a
post-Cambridge Analytica world (or even a post-Snowden world, but whatever).

It’s actually saying that maybe giving a company control over your own blog
isn’t always so smart. True.

For these reasons it seems dumb to me that Mastodon itself (not the author of
this post on mastodon) blogs on Medium. Like a global warming activist jetting
around a lot, it just shows one not putting their money where their mouth is.

------
bookofjoe
Am I the last TypePad user? I never see it mentioned anywhere, including this
entire comment thread. Based on my blog traffic in recent years, it would
appear that, like De Niro rants in "The Deer Hunter" — "I'm the only one
here."

~~~
Alex3917
I still use TypePad. I actually like it much more than Medium, much better
typography imho.

------
madez
The Mastodon website works great without JS, unlike Twitter. Nice!

------
ryandrake
It's getting harder and harder for me to muster any sympathy for these
"Company X suspended my account and now I can't do Y" sob stories. As long as
it's not your server, running software you control, you are taking the risk
that whoever is providing that service will go out of business, capriciously
close your account, censor you, ban you, etc., whether or not you're paying
for it. Moreover, if your business actually relies on this service and you
haven't accounted for this risk or prepared a mitigation plan? WTF!

How many examples of this happening do we need before we start acknowledging
and taking the risk seriously, rather than crying about it after it happens?
The sooner self-hosting comes back into fashion, the better.

~~~
quotemstr
What happens when your DDoS-protection reverse proxy deems your words
wrongthink and drops you, allowing anyone with $50 to flood your server? What
happens when your registrar drops your account and steals your domain name so
that you can't transfer it elsewhere? What happens when you get BGP
blackholed? And what happens when all the modern-day puritans on Twitter
approve of these actions?

What happens when the oh-so-responsible Twitter crowd decides that the above
actions are mandatory under some CS "code of ethics" they made up? What
happens if they can back up their words with an industry blacklist?

You're screwed.

We have a massive society-wide problem with censorship and moving to small-
scale private infrastructure won't help.

~~~
zaarn
You can always start to host on a Tor onion service, though that is admittedly
the last straw.

------
rdiddly
Theory:

1) Medium has SESTA/FOSTA concerns.

2) Medium constructs a broad, but also shallow/naive, search for warning
terms.

3) Since darkweb pornographers accept cryptocurrencies, all crypto-related
terms are included in the search.

4) One of those terms is "decentralized," which is also a property of
Mastodon.

5) Mastodon gets auto-banned.

~~~
gkya
It's liberapay that they've banned, not mastodon.

------
EGreg
I never understood why people trust their data, identity and brand to others
to have ultimate power over. Whether it's facebook.com/yourbrand or
twitter.com/blah or medium.com/pleasedonthurtme

I realize that these days people may want something more than Wordpress, they
want some social networking layer. So I did something about it. I opened a
company and 7 years we worked on an open source platform to once and for all
solve this stupid situation. Take a look and I'd be curious to get your
feedback:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI)

~~~
isostatic
> I never understood why people trust their data, identity and brand to others
> to have ultimate power over.

>
> [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI)

No further comment

------
adarsh_thampy
I have no idea why businesses think that it's a good idea to let third-party
sites control their primary website pages. I have written at length here about
this issue >> [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/basecamp-moved-blog-medium-
yo...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/basecamp-moved-blog-medium-you-probably-
shouldnt-adarsh-thampy/)

The point is, everyone is moving to medium because they have great UX plus
they already have an in0built audience. But what happens when they have to
start making money? We all know what happened to Facebook pages.

------
djsumdog
Any official word from Medium? I want to know what their excuse will be.

------
matiasz
Matthew Butterick made this argument years ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9063177](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9063177)

------
lifeformed
Can someone provide any context? What were they writing about?

~~~
ohtwenty
Mentioned elsewhere in these comments but they got deleted for violating a no-
cryptocurrency that medium added a week ago.

also they never wrote about cryptocurrencies, they're a free alternative to
things like patreon, and only accept payment directly through the bank (i've
used them once)

------
jdbiggs
Host your own. I trust medium like I trust Facebook - they're a walled garden
and the walls are getting higher.

------
tomrod
I wish the creator of dadgum started a no-frills blog hosting business, a
Medium competitor that loads in milliseconds due to text being the medium.

------
amriksohata
What do people use medium for? To duplicate their blog posts? Can you put any
content on it? Even controversial topics?

------
baxtr
We use Jekyll and it’s just awesome.

~~~
busterarm
It was funny to me seeing so many people recommend less robust, less tested
static site generators than Jekyll.

------
epeus
If you like the medium editing you and want it for your own site, have a look
at quill.p3k.io

------
JoshMnem
I wish people would stop using Medium, especially for programming blogs. The
UI is terrible (footer bar, animated pop-ups, monoculture design, paywalls),
and I don't like landing on Medium sites. Publishing on the Web is supposed to
be decentralized.

If you're going to write a tech blog use a static site generator like
Metalsmith, Hugo, Hexo, Middleman, Jekyll, or Pelican, and deploy it for free
on Netlify.com.

~~~
kaushalmodi
If someone is writing a programming blog AND using a static site generator
like Hugo, etc., that also builds up the author's credibility as a programmer
in my view. But that's just me.

------
jacquesm
Serves you right for handing control over your content to another party. So,
now that the account has been reinstated I figure you must be busy executing
your migration plan? Or will you leave it like it was until the next time it
suddenly disappears like this?

------
navjack27
I'm partial to using netlify and Publii for my blog.

------
api
Medium is a magazine with unpaid writers.

~~~
pavlov
That's not true. I made about $200 from a Medium article published last month
to their membership program. It's not an amazing amount of money, but better
than I expected for a single post.

~~~
api
Yeah, that's a living wage for a writer.

------
phkahler
Is there anywhere you can blog under a pseudonym?

------
RobGav
This is why I use Publii [https://getpublii.com](https://getpublii.com)

It's open source, free static CMS with GUI and free themes.

You can easily sync your website with Netlify, GitHub Pages, Google Cloud, S3
or SFTP.

~~~
ryanar
Set up publii for a non-technical client, it looked like everything the client
needed, but a few stumbling blocks

1) Themes are too limited, there are <10 and the path to customization is not
simple. This is a chicken and egg problem, if publii grows, more themes come
into the marketplace, but only having a few themes limits growth.

2) Even though it has a pretty good GUI, it is still confusing for non-
technical people, and I struggled a lot with it too, mostly because there
aren't tooltips next to fields to explain them (e.g. what is the difference
between a "title" and a "label" for a link?)

I'll have to unfortunately move to something else for my client, and revisit
publii at a later time.

~~~
RobGav
Great feedback, I will send it to the authors. Publii is is still in beta so
your comments will be helpful.

PS: In fact, there are 10 themes at this moment but show me the same quality,
free themes that come with other static generators.

------
pjc50
Is there any sign of an explanation as to why Liberapay was banned?

------
chx
No one even considers that Medium might be right and we might be better off
without Liberapay aka Gratipay aka Gittip. May I remind you of
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7844457](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7844457)

------
GenYCubeJockey
Happy Medium user here for several years. Even have been paid >$5 USD for work
hosted there. Yes, I have skin in the game, and yes I'm positioning myself as
a semi-advocate.

Today's better lesson: LibraPay is too cheap to fork over money for effective
legit marketing, so they're going the GoldiBlox route and trying to pick a
fight to make themselves look good and get press. I mean they can totally
respond to this post with a list of how much they've spent in hard currency to
market their brand versus the traffic they've gotten from throwing mud at
Medium...

~~~
1over137
$5 USD?? Is that a typo?

~~~
isostatic
More than you get paid for HN posts I guess

