[HN Gopher] I moved this blog from Medium, here
___________________________________________________________________
I moved this blog from Medium, here
Author : giuliomagnifico
Score : 172 points
Date : 2022-01-23 13:23 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (giuliomagnifico.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (giuliomagnifico.blog)
| qudat wrote:
| 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
| keb_ wrote:
| Adding another alternative here: https://write.as/
|
| Free, easy, federated, ostensibly open-source and self-hostable:
| https://github.com/writefreely
| quaintdev wrote:
| > 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?
| vlmutolo wrote:
| I agree that having comment sections on blogs can be
| problematic. Nobody wants to make an account on a random blog
| site just to make a comment, and you need explicit accounts to
| stop spam. Comment histories are also nice to have.
|
| There's an interesting middle ground in this space called
| Cactus Comments [0]. They're part of the Matrix ecosystem. The
| idea is to create a Matrix "room" for every post so that anyone
| with a Matrix account can comment in that room. Then, at the
| bottom of the post there's a preview of the most recent
| messages in the room, along with (optionally) a text box for
| anonymous comments.
|
| Admittedly, setting this up to be self-hosted is pretty
| involved, especially if you're not already with Matrix. But the
| Cactus people make it easy to get started with their (free)
| public servers.
|
| [0]: https://cactus.chat/demo/
| rabbits77 wrote:
| I agree completely. I disable all comments on my blogs and if
| people want to discuss then Twitter or Reddit seem to make much
| more sense.
|
| Otherwise you end up spending a ton of time just removing spam,
| never mind trying to make sense of and respond to the comments
| that may get randomly left years after the original post.
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| I couldn't disagree more. Comments have been a plus on every
| blog I've run. I've learned from my readers, been able to
| answer their questions and even become friends with a few of
| them.
|
| The idea that every blog comment system should be run by a
| multi-billion dollar company like Facebook, Reddit or YC is
| _fundamentally at odds with the open web_.
| rdtwo wrote:
| I do wish there was a way to just transfer ids better between
| systems. I don't really want to b have users create an
| account every time but no good way to prevent spam. Maybe
| h-capcha but even that is cheap to spam.
| amelius wrote:
| Perhaps Mastodon could be a solution?
| jagger27 wrote:
| As much as it pains me to mention it here, as I
| wholeheartedly do not support it for a number of important
| reasons, something like Metamask and an identity on a
| blockchain could work for this.
|
| The more obvious solution is OAuth (or OpenID Connect), and
| there are plenty of providers that aren't Apple, Google,
| Microsoft, Twitter, or GitHub.
| rdtwo wrote:
| Yeah I don't really care about I'd but the problem is
| spam. Maybe phone text authentication is an alternative,
| idk how much that costs to implement though.
| fhackenberger wrote:
| About 5c per msg, a bit lower for some countries, a bit
| higher for others.
| rdtwo wrote:
| Is there no service out there where you can just buy a
| number and use it for text validation
| 7steps2much wrote:
| You could build one yourself by grabbing some hardware
| that includes a modem and grabbing a sim card from a
| local provider with "unlimited" text messages.
|
| Might violate ToS though
| quaintdev wrote:
| > The idea that every blog comment system should be run by a
| multi-billion dollar company like Facebook, Reddit or YC is
| fundamentally at odds with the open web.
|
| Agree but don't you think there needs to be a better way at
| handling comments on web. What I do not want is:
|
| 1. sign up on every blog just to comment
|
| 2. something like discuss either
|
| Maybe a federated comment section?
| jrockway wrote:
| Back when blogs were a thing, my solution was to require
| all comments to be PGP signed. No spam, and the people
| commenting on my blog all liked that sort of thing, so it
| worked quite well.
|
| The software still exists:
| https://github.com/jrockway/angerwhale ("last commit: 15
| years ago". holy shit.)
| pjerem wrote:
| I comment on some blogs where I just need to enter an
| username, optionally my mail address and no account
| creation required at all.
|
| I don't know how those blogs manage spam but there is just
| none. So it's totally doable.
|
| An option I see is to just store a random token in a cookie
| and require pre-publish moderation for the first n posts
| from this token.
|
| Your regular commenters are probably just using the same 1
| or 2 devices to read your blog.
| kingcharles wrote:
| The holy grail the Internet has been looking for since the
| Web was launched is a single-sign-on that doesn't suck in
| some fundamental way. It is definitely a huge friction
| point for commenting on a random blog that you might only
| visit one time.
|
| I totally agree that you shouldn't outsource your blog
| comments to someone else though, because what happens when
| Facebook decides their commenting system isn't profitable
| anymore and kills the product? Half the content on _your_
| web site suddenly vanishes.
| theptip wrote:
| > Maybe a federated comment section?
|
| I'd love to see this. For a long time I've been wishing for
| some sort of social overlay on top of the web - why can't I
| comment with my community on existing articles? Make in-
| line annotations and share them? See my friends'
| annotations as I read articles? Etc.
|
| This could be a browser plug-in or perhaps an iframe over
| the original content. It could even be implemented as a
| protocol that browsers support ("go to your configured
| overlay server(s) and load content for the page you are
| on") if it were successful enough. This sort of feature
| gets better the more streamlined and "baked in" it is.
| clairity wrote:
| > > "Maybe a federated comment section?"
|
| > "I'd love to see this. For a long time I've been
| wishing for some sort of social overlay on top of the web
| - why can't I comment with my community on existing
| articles?"
|
| that's what disqus wanted to be, and we've largely
| rejected that because of the privacy and anonymity issues
| with disqus.
|
| a year and a half ago, i did a bit of a dive into
| webmentions[0] and bridgy[1] as a federated alternative,
| but that doesn't seem to have taken off yet.
|
| [0]: https://indieweb.org/webmention [1]:
| https://brid.gy/
| edgyquant wrote:
| Yeah because such a system should be a standardized layer
| of the web not something controlled by a single company.
| The underlying authentication should probably be stored
| on a distributed ledger or set by the government. I've
| long thought that social security numbers will end up as
| a predecessor to this as the government is already the
| one entity that knows everything about us (and you could
| still have private browsing that didn't use this layer.)
| smoldesu wrote:
| ActivityPub would work well for this, as there are
| several implementations of the standard, it can be self-
| hosted, and is already used in the comment sections of
| some video sites. I wonder if someone has already written
| an HTML embed that does this exact thing for arbitrary
| sites...
| theptip wrote:
| > that's what disqus wanted to be
|
| I see what you mean, but perhaps the key difference I see
| is that if this is a federated protocol, then you bring
| your own identity network (for example, someone in
| another sub-thread mentioned that Matrix could support
| this usecase). Presumably FB would implement this
| protocol if it was popular enough, and replicate FB
| comments, but the cipherpunks could use a Matrix server
| or whatever privacy-preserving method they prefer. By
| promoting it to the level of a protocol you can get
| multiple implementations/networks, but without forcing
| the communities to be un-discoverable to each other.
| (E.g. I might be fine with everybody seeing my public
| post, but prefer not to have every website capture my
| Disqus ID by virtue of me viewing the page. A bridged
| privately-run overlay could meet that requirement.)
|
| > webmentions[0] and bridgy[1]
|
| Perfect, thanks - that looks like at least the next
| evolutionary step towards what I'm envisioning.
|
| I think that until native browser-support is added (if it
| ever gets there), bridging posts back to "non-protocol-
| speakers" by posting comments to the blog itself is
| probably the smart move. That way you don't split your
| community. But I'd love to see a world where the comments
| and content are disaggregated, so that I can just filter
| out the garbage "public" comments, or participate in
| them, depending on my mood.
| egypturnash wrote:
| This is a lot of what OpenID was designed for; use an
| identity managed by your site or someone you trust to sign
| in and own comments elsewhere.
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| If you don't want to sign up, then just lurk!
|
| I often go from just reading the posts to reading posts and
| comments to talking about the site elsewhere to signing up
| and just posting there.
|
| Having used federated comment systems, they've been a
| complete loss. They increase page load times, lead to more
| low-quality drive-by comments and then inevitably
| eventually start trying to load their ads on my page.
|
| The one exception is crypto sites, where people just log in
| with their wallet creds. Those are pseudonymous, shared
| across sites and have very frictionless UX. That would be a
| highly polarizing choice for a non-crypto-focused site,
| though.
| 3np wrote:
| Got any links to such crypto sites where they're used for
| auth for comments and social? It's something I've been
| theorizing for years, would be great to see in the wild.
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| https://bitclout.com
| 3np wrote:
| Cheers. It looks like it directly answers my question but
| not quite what I had in mind (pushes for linking Google
| account and email; requires phone number verification for
| the "free" signup airdrop to get the platform-specific
| coins required to participate; frankly looks quite
| sketchy and faux-decentralized)
| cuteboy19 wrote:
| It's the equivalent of sharing your bank account number
| with scammysitedotcom. Even if there are no security
| implications, sharing your entire financial history with
| any website is very privacy hostile.
| 3np wrote:
| Not necessarily. You should use a different account
| (preferably one with 0 transaction history, if no on-
| chain txes are needed) than your main financial account
| (and really, anyone not living paycheck to paycheck
| should have more than one of those in the first place.
| Cold/hot, have a separate one for any defi activities,
| use a new one for each L2, etc)
|
| Just like you may not have the same email for job
| applications and dodgy e-commerce, or bring all your cash
| and cards with you in a purse to the nightclub.
|
| (GP did say "shared across sites", which should be a very
| deliberate decision and not the default. UX needs to
| improve to have better privacy by default. I could
| imagine Metamask defaulting to generating and connecting
| a unique address for each domain, requiring manually
| selecting accounts to have them shared)
| tfsh wrote:
| Comment based systems built on top of existing platforms
| such as Matrix may be interesting.
|
| For want of a better word there's a "misconception" that
| the Matrix protocol can only be used for chat apps, but
| instead it's defined a fully open, federated and encrypted
| event transmission service which can be used for any type
| of multiuser application.
| mxuribe wrote:
| 100% THIS! I believe (hope!) that as more people
| understand that the matrix protocol is *not only* a chat
| protocol, but far more than that, then we will see many
| more different ideas flourish. There are already ideas
| for leveraging matrix for a blog...so why not for
| commenting, and other scenarios?
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| anthropodie wrote:
| This is already implemented https://cactus.chat/
|
| Relevant discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26371813
| hiptobecubic wrote:
| What is wrong with discuss? Seems like exactly what you're
| asking for.
| ecliptik wrote:
| You can use Mastodon for comments on static sites with a
| bit of javascript.
|
| https://joelchrono12.netlify.app/blog/how-to-add-mastodon-
| co...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25570268
| ivanmontillam wrote:
| > _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
| theamk wrote:
| 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.
| edgyquant wrote:
| I think so that way people stumbling on it etc can give
| feedback to the writer. I often will hit some technical blog
| that mostly answers my question and then someone in the
| comments will correct the author or even ask a question that
| further expands on what the blog post is about.
| reedciccio wrote:
| giuliomagnifico wrote:
| Yes we need it because on some posts, like a tutorial, can be
| useful ask to the original poster some infos.
|
| You don't have to sign up, I disabled it, you can also make an
| anonymous comment.
|
| PS: if we don't need the comments, then why you commented here?
| :-)
| quaintdev wrote:
| > PS: if we don't need the comments, then why you commented
| here? :-)
|
| I never said we don't need comments. We probably do not need
| it on blog.
|
| > You don't have to sign up, I disabled it, you can also make
| an anonymous comment.
|
| As I mentioned in my comment the disadvantage of that is
| people abuse it.
| design-of-homes wrote:
| " _Do we really need comment section on blogs?_ "
|
| I used to write a blog and the comments that readers posted
| were always a valuable part of the blog. Comments don't require
| sign-up depending on the settings of your blog (mine did not
| require sign-up).
|
| Blogs without the ability to post comments are often static
| site blog generators - one of the reasons why I don't use them.
| (I don't consider embedding Disqus a suitable option for
| comments - a unpleasant experience for readers.)
|
| A frequent occurrence: a blog has no commenting ability and
| instead the blog author encourages readers to discuss their
| blog entry on Twitter(?!), or Hacker News or some other
| discussion forum. For some authors discussion is not very
| important - it's more about sharing the story to as many sites
| as possible.
| mattarm wrote:
| HN and Reddit are already walled gardens today, in the sense
| that they are in no way federated with other sites, and they
| both reserve the right to delete content at any point. There
| isn't much different between a blog that links to a Facebook
| post asking people to "discuss this post on Facebook" than
| doing the same with HN or Reddit.
| theamk wrote:
| Hard disagree.
|
| There are plenty of reasons to avoid Facebook specfically -
| tracking across the web, real name policy, per-user
| algorithmic feed, selling info, and many other things. None
| of them apply to HN, and I am pretty sure most of them don't
| apply to reddit either.
| coffeefirst wrote:
| My favorite way to do this is to encourage people to email me
| their comments. If anyone has something to add to the
| discussion I may ask for permission to quote them in a
| "Responses" sections, or more often, if they write their own
| post I'll link to it.
|
| Why do this? Well, for one, it gives me absolutely quality
| control over my website. I am the final arbiter of what I want
| to present and how I want to present it.
|
| But this also changes the _shape_ of the comments; it is not a
| public remark into the void, it is a letter to the author. I
| 've been amazed and the quality and thoughtfulness in some of
| these notes.
| theamk wrote:
| And this is why websites like HN exist, and why people use
| them to discover new blogs :)
|
| A lot of times I am reading something, and think: "That's a
| dangerous advice! Don't do this unless you really have to!"
| If I post this as HN comment, I will get somr responses,
| maybe confirming my point, or perhaphs saying that I am wrong
| and that original advice was good after all. And either way,
| future readers will be able to read whole discussion and make
| their own judgement.
|
| But if the author asks people to email, I will not bother.
| Unless my arguments are so good as to convince original
| author, they will just "disappear" - no one else will read
| them or respond to them.
| cedsam wrote:
| did you consider github pages?
| giuliomagnifico wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Sorry, yes, this is mostly what I meant. If you have your
| own domain you can pretty easily just move things around.
| ahelwer wrote:
| I use gitlab pages which lets you use any static site generator
| (not just jekyll) and is otherwise just as good as github
| pages. I use hugo for ahelwer.ca although I really should get
| around to putting effort into learning/customizing the site
| instead of using the default gitlab theme.
| etimberg wrote:
| I believe GitHub pages is getting close to allowing any SSG
| to be used via GitHub actions.
| https://github.blog/changelog/2021-12-16-github-pages-
| using-...
| softwarebeware wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I'm out of the loop on this. What's wrong with medium?
| Nextgrid wrote:
| It tries to paywall content to recoup its millions in VC
| investment.
| ivanmontillam wrote:
| 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/13480075
| 9206...
| jpalomaki wrote:
| Could it be that the possibility of making some money with
| the content actually encourages people to create better
| content?
| ivanmontillam wrote:
| 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.
| stavros wrote:
| 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
|
| You can even edit your posts right on GitLab, so you don't need
| knowledge of git.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| It's not your 'own' blog if you run it on someone's service.
| Karunamon wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| theamk wrote:
| You are always going to depend on someone - web host, or
| VPS host, or colo service, or ISP (if the server is in
| your house). Not to mention domain registrar.
|
| The webpage is "yours" as long as you are the one in
| control of content, can migrate anywhere else without
| users knowing, and third parties can only disable your
| site but not edit. Both github pages and machine in the
| basement satisfy that rule.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| 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!
| adrianvoica wrote:
| 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!
| rambambram wrote:
| I found it refreshing, to be honest. It didn't take long for me
| to find out what "sintax" and "shure" meant. ;)
| giuliomagnifico wrote:
| Thanks, I checked and edited, hope now has less errors, sorry
| but english is not my first language.
| aftergibson wrote:
| 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.
| imagetic wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| [deleted]
| mcntsh wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Can't wait for they to go the way of Posterous.
| gnicholas wrote:
| It would be funny if Medium were acquired by Twitter, given
| Ev's history with both companies.
|
| Relatedly, long live Posthaven!
| gfykvfyxgc wrote:
| If you want people to read your writing, don't put it in a walled
| garden.
| giuliomagnifico wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| CarrotCodes wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Why bother with cloudflare here?
| comprev wrote:
| DNS hosting?
| CarrotCodes wrote:
| 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
| colinarms wrote:
| Another Medium alternative is Papyrus: 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.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| That NFT hype makes it look like yet another get-rich-quick
| pyramid scheme to me. Can you please clearly explain exactly
| what you're using NFTs for that you couldn't easily and less
| destructively implement some better way, without burning so
| much coal, causing cancer, and destroying the environment?
|
| If your business can't grow and succeed without shilling NFTs,
| then you don't have anything of actual value. NFTs aren't magic
| pixie dust that make everyone rich. Unless you're running a
| money laundering operation.
| meowface wrote:
| It's odd to me that people focus so much on Ethereum NFTs'
| environmental impact. It's certainly not good, but it's
| currently nowhere close to Bitcoin's consumption, and within
| 1 - 3 years will likely be reduced to the cost of running
| something like the Tor network: https://ethereum.org/static/6
| b5219d652112f88202e9768e27f5db1.... (Especially since there's
| no specific marginal energy cost to minting or trading an
| NFT, so it can't be compared to something like choosing
| whether or not to drive a combustion engine car.)
|
| To me the massive concern is all the financial fuckery.
| Anyone trying to shoehorn tokens (fungible, non-fungible, or
| semi-fungible) into something is almost always the reddest of
| flags.
|
| For one, the proposed "token-gating" makes no sense. What's
| to prevent someone from buying one token and then sharing the
| private key with a million people? You can try to create a
| sophisticated token-sharing detection system with invasive
| fingerprinting and tracking and proxy/VPN detection and such,
| but it's endless whack-a-mole and it's barely feasible for
| the world's top companies, on top of being the antithesis of
| what cryptocurrency people stand for. This is why consensus
| algorithms like proof of work exist in the first place: you
| can never ensure one identifier (a private key, an IP,
| whatever) = one person. They have to sacrifice something
| fungible and scarce.
|
| And "Your super-fans can collect NFTs of your published
| content." Just... what? Why? This strikes me as ridiculous
| and, frankly, cringe-inducing. It makes the whole thing feel
| gross.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| > It's odd to me that people focus so much on Ethereum
| NFTs' environmental impact. It's certainly not good, but
| it's currently nowhere close to Bitcoin's consumption ...
|
| In a conversation about NFTs why is it odd to focus on
| NFT's environmental impact? Most people who hate NFTs also
| hate bitcoin, I assume they also hate racism, child labour,
| and COVID. Do you also find it odd that people don't
| mention their feelings about those issues when talking
| about NFTs?
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I totally agree with meowface that bigger problem with
| people shilling Bitcoin and ICOs and NFTs and other shams
| is that they're obvious snake oil salesmen pushing get-
| rich-quick pyramid schemes, but when trying to deprogram
| cryptocurrency cult members, it's easier to focus of the
| more tangible irrefutable problems like the environmental
| and heath impacts, and ask them to justify why they don't
| give a shit about the environment and the health problems
| of burning coal. Because simply explaining to them that
| they've been duped by scammers is a lot harder sell --
| they've bought into the cult and are shilling it them
| selves, so they don't want to admit it. The same way it's
| harder convince a Trump supporter that he's a con-man,
| and easier to get them to admit that they don't think
| injecting bleach and inserting an ultraviolet flashlight
| up their rectum is a good way of curing Covid-19.
|
| If course there will always be a round of stuck excuses
| like "some day <insert name of scam here> will be
| environmentally friendly" or "Proof of Stake", but those
| are bullshit and easier to shoot down (because they're
| circular arguments, analogous to Trump's excuse that he's
| going to publish his wonderful health care plan any day
| now, and "Proof of Stake" is just Oligarchy on Steroids
| that certainly isn't going to help any starving artists,
| and any useful financial services end up being as
| centralized as Visa anyway) than convincing somebody
| they're not a member of a cult and they're not going to
| get rich quick if only they shill the cult's products a
| little harder.
| meowface wrote:
| Sorry, maybe I worded my comment poorly. I'm not trying
| to say "why are you talking about Ethereum and not
| Bitcoin instead?", or something like that.
|
| Here, it's a tiny bit like trying to link NFTs to racism
| because there's a certain subset of cryptocurrency
| enthusiasts who are Nazis. (And some do say this.) Not
| the best analogy, I know, but in this case Ethereum is
| commonly thought of as environmentally unfriendly
| basically due to guilt by association with Bitcoin.
|
| Ethereum does have an excessive environmental impact,
| because proof of work is fundamentally environmentally
| unfriendly. But the point is it isn't a very big impact
| right now and probably won't ever be an impact because
| before it can reach that point there'll probably be a
| shift to an algorithm that reduces the energy cost to
| that of any other ordinary software. And even if it did
| pose such an impact right now, NFTs pose no direct
| marginal energy cost (though they do so indirectly by
| encouraging more use of the network, which raises the
| incentive to mine).
|
| In my opinion, there are so many other good arguments
| against (most/nearly all) NFTs that when you pull this
| one out, it instantly causes the opposition to flag you
| as someone not worth listening to. Especially when it's
| couched in dramatic language, like that NFTs are "burning
| so much coal, causing cancer, and destroying the
| environment", as the previous commenter wrote.
| hiptobecubic wrote:
| "It's bad but it's fine because I'm sure that everyone
| will do something about it before it becomes a problem,"
| isn't very satisfying.
| ahelwer wrote:
| Not an NFT guy but according to https://papyrusnft.io/
| they're enabling non-Ethereum chains which will address the
| environmental concerns.
| meowface wrote:
| >https://papyrusnft.io
|
| It's good they're trying to find less environmentally-
| costly alternatives, but the mere existence of this domain
| makes the whole enterprise feel _much_ more sketchy and
| greasy to me, honestly. Not to mention the content on it.
| bartread wrote:
| > Another Medium alternative is Papyrus: https://papyrus.so.
|
| Right. But even ignoring all that NFT stuff that others are
| commenting on, isn't your offering with Papyrus just somebody
| else's playground _not owned by the content creator_? Whereas
| the author has gone for a setup that fundamentally they own:
| they could move it anywhere, not tied to any provider, pretty
| easily. There are a ton of options for hosting a jekyll blog.
|
| No disrespect to what you've built with Papyrus, because it
| does look good, but you've completely missed the point. Isn't
| this post more about taking back personal ownership and control
| of content than ceding to yet another "platform"? Here's the
| third paragraph:
|
| _Because I want that my content is my content and not my
| content on the "Medium's hands", plus Medium is not what was in
| the beginning._
|
| Some of us don't want a "Medium alternative": we want ownership
| and control. Papyrus might be great now but, guaranteed, if it
| becomes as successful as Medium, I seriously doubt it will
| avoid devolving into a similar mess. I'd be happy to be proven
| wrong.
|
| Again, with no disrespect to the quality of what you've built,
| in this context screw yet another company that wants to line
| its founders' pockets off the back of other peoples' content. I
| wish you well, but I don't believe what you're offering is what
| the author of the post is talking about (though it will no
| doubt suit some, and that's OK).
| dheera wrote:
| > Whereas the author has gone for a setup that fundamentally
| they own: they could move it anywhere, not tied to any
| provider, pretty easily
|
| I haven't looked into Papyrus but there are many non-Medium
| platforms that let you export your data easily in standard
| formats.
|
| Personally my biggest issue with Medium is them imposing a
| paywall on _my_ writing without giving me a decent salary for
| it, OR hiding my content. Not a good choice.
| giuliomagnifico wrote:
| 100% agree, I couldn't replied better!
| p4bl0 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Growth?
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| I saw that their content editor looks to have better support
| for code editing. I'm sold
| colinarms wrote:
| 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,
| editor demo: https://rich-markdown-editor-
| demo.onrender.com/?path=/story/...
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| richmarkdown looks archived. do you know any active forks
| or an alternative?
| xmorse wrote:
| If you are searching for a Medium alternative checkout Notaku
| 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
| ohmahjong wrote:
| Absolutely _not_ to be confused with Nutaku (NSFW).
| xmorse wrote:
| Didn't know anything about it
| Syonyk wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| valryon wrote:
| This is one letter swap from something very popular but
| completely different...
| fleddr wrote:
| 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.
| yreg wrote:
| 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.
| ivanmontillam wrote:
| 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 [1] https://www.ivanmontilla.com
|
| EDIT: Typos.
| shantnutiwari wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| markdown wrote:
| Wow, that's a blast from the past. Great to see Grav still
| going, and still lead by Andy Miller.
|
| Andy Miller was the founding design lead for Joomla! CMS. He
| also started the first template/theme shop and club long before
| there was anything like it in the CMS world.
|
| Grav grew out of Rockettheme.
| ivanmontillam wrote:
| I love RocketTheme and Gantry Framework!
|
| Whenever I have to create a website, the first theme shop I
| check to see if there's anything I like is RocketTheme.
| giuliomagnifico wrote:
| I'll give a look, thanks for the info!
| efitz wrote:
| What about substack? It solves all the problems that the OP
| raises
| detaro wrote:
| How does substack solve the first point?
| collaborative wrote:
| 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)
| githubholobeat wrote:
| 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.
| aklemm wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| ghaff wrote:
| I think there was also a time when many people assumed--not
| knowing any better--that something published on Medium was
| more authoritative than something on a random personal blog.
| I used to sometimes cross-publish to Medium when something
| was going to be linked from a company newsletter if we wanted
| it on a third-party site. But I haven't done that for a few
| years now.
|
| While it's nothing great, I just use Blogger/Google. It's
| free, clean, exportable, and can handle traffic spikes. You
| can run ads but don't have to; I don'tI've thought about
| moving to Wordpress and went so far as to start a more
| focused blog there at one point. But I dropped it and just
| continued to use Blogger.
| boxed wrote:
| 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 if you want to see)
| rambambram wrote:
| I also like your design.
| ta988 wrote:
| 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.
| aklemm wrote:
| 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.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| > 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.
| donatj wrote:
| Mediums descent from shining exemplar of good to questionably
| evil was sudden.
| hiptobecubic wrote:
| 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?
| acdha wrote:
| The VCs poured a ton of money into paying popular writers to
| write on Medium, which got a lot of attention. That lasted
| until everyone learned that the VCs needing to cash out meant
| that Medium needed to sell ads and behavioural data, and that
| also meant that user-hostile things like dark SEO patterns
| were seen as necessary.
| mhitza wrote:
| It went downhill since its launch. Some things that I enjoyed
| when it came out.
|
| 1. it had any easy way to bring on board a collaborator to
| help out with a draft article (without them needing to create
| an account, for example).
|
| 2. it had a clean and minimalist UI, and better editor
| experience than tinyMCE and other popular editors at the time
|
| 3. while the curation process wasn't open (as far as I
| recall), I was expecting it to lead towards a centralized
| blogging platform (a la reddit) but where personal
| submissions are front and center.
| krastanov wrote:
| 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.
| throwhauser wrote:
| 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.
| wepple wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| ljm wrote:
| Like many VC-backed startups I think it was a bit of a
| darling for a while and then there was the inevitable
| realisation that something needed to change if it was going
| to have a viable business model.
|
| That's the charitable version. After all, they did amass a
| decently sized userbase in its darling stage, all ideological
| and disruptive as it was.
|
| Now it's yet another domain I exclude from search results.
| hiptobecubic wrote:
| This is what I'm missing. What was ideological and
| disruptive about it? It seemed like a status symbol, but
| otherwise just a blog.
| wooptoo wrote:
| 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/
| Railworks2 wrote:
| One could simplify the entire thing and use GitHub pages or
| CloudFlare pages to host Jekyll sites directly from a GitHub
| repository
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