Medium suspended our account and blocked access to all our published stories
mastodon.xyz
mastodon.xyz
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/) 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 -- Here is a slightly customized theme: 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.
DO droplets have gotten better/bigger lately, and with the one-click install it's a cinch. That said, if anyone's interested, I wrote a post on getting it running on a small VM which I'm currently rewriting for AWS free tier: https://www.danwalker.com/running-ghost-on-a-5-digital-ocean...
It's also really easy to install yourself. They've done a great job on it all around. If you have a blog, give it a shot. It's not a WordPress replacement if you use tons of plugins but it's great writing software.
It's also really easy to theme.
> Will you add additional locations in different geographic regions?
> We are actively looking into this option right now.
However,
- They have two data center locations, both in Germany, which might be good or bad depending on how view the laws.
- Their web interface looks good too, but doesn't have the features that DO provides.
- Depending on what option you pick, some have commodity hardware (No ECC RAM, i7 processors instead of server hardware).
- [Rumor]I've heard that they are very hands off, and will take down your instance much more aggressively. As someone on reddit put it, "If Disney was a cloud provider, anything Disney won't be comfortable to host, Hetzner won't."
I had a DO NTP server for a brief time, but the latency was all over the map, so much so that it was continually pulled out of rotation by the pool. I wasn't sure if my VM happened to be on an oversubscribed host or maybe the network to that datacenter was oversubscribed, but in either case my NTP server wasn't usable, so I decommissioned my DO server.
- requires exactly mysql, nodejs, nginx and at least 1GB RAM.
- the only supported setup is Ubuntu 16.04
- has some sort of ghost-cli application used for management.
At least for me: not enough fingers for "thumbs down".
It's literally the only problem with Ghost. Wonderful product but boy... how many people are going to pay $29/month or $228/year to host their personal blog? Yeah, there's some serious added value: managed upgrades, managed backups, DDoS protection, CDN setup, etc., and that's wonderful, but still... if you're basically just writing as a hobby, it's too much. I really hope they look into offering some kind of $5-10 hobbyist plan for low-traffic blogs.
I hope Ghost will at some point have a "static site generation" mode though.
Part of the value added in SaaS like Ghost(Pro) is that the infrastructure needed to deal with traffic spikes is built-in. There really ought to be a pricing model along the lines of "I really don't expect this site to get much traffic at all, so sell me a cheap plan for day-to-day expected usage, but just in case something I write happens to go viral, I pre-approve a charge of $100 (or whatever) to deal with the traffic spike, and in case there's new sustained traffic then I'll of course upgrade to a more expensive plan which covers a higher expected rate of day-to-day traffic."
Edit: let's put it another way: if you're publishing something to the Internet, it's because you want other people to read it. You therefore want other people to actually be able to read it in the rare but foreseeable circumstance that it becomes popular. If you didn't care about that, and you were really just writing for yourself, you'd just keep an offline journal.
Cloudflare in front with aggressive caching? What you're generating essentially is a static site, so it's safe to do that. If your S3 static site gets hugged to death, you won't go offline but you will pay an unexpectedly larger bill, so you should be setting up Cloudflare in front either way.
For the static site I used Middleman. It is one of the older generators, but if you're familiar with a Rails environment you can do everything you'll ever need.
Not for everyone, but super simple, extremely fast, and completely customizable. Netlify has also taken away all the pain. Simple build and deploy. Superfast DNS and CDN. LetsEncrypt out of the box. Worth a look.
That said, the missing piece from Medium isn't the editor/hosting -- it's is the syndication.
[1]: https://gohugo.io/hosting-and-deployment/hosting-on-netlify/
I use ghost for my personal site and I love it. (Not that I use multiple authors.)
They do have some support for local caching, but investigating that is on my todo list.
One big upside of this design is seo: your blog isn't on blog.domain.com, but wherever you want it on your main site.
[0]: https://www.contentful.com/ [1]: https://www.gatsbyjs.org/docs/gatsby-starters/
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). 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.
2. When I first discovered Ghost (last year) and I heard it's using NodeJS I was expecting a beautiful, responsive, SPA blog engine that is fast. After reviewing it and even trying to use it as a platform for a newspaper I found that (It's just wordpress and it's not using the power of javascript to it's full extent.)
Fast => I could and I did built a faster wordpress site.
SPA => Nope
Customizable => Nope.
For me it's not worth the extra capabilities instead of a static blog.
I found gatsby(1) great for all my use cases and with some extra work[2] is more dynamic that ghost.
1. gatsby - https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby
2. netlify + contentful - https://www.netlifycms.org/ + https://www.contentful.com/
(I would love to see a CMS that embraces SPA/PWA. On the other side I would hate to serve 1mb of JS just to show 4 paragraphs and 1 picture)
Great! I'll happily advertise for Ghost. As I said I'm not affiliated but I am a fan. I especially am a fan because I have a huge respect for open source organizations that run their business like they do.
This seems like a positive aspect for a blog? Most blogs are pretty far removed from being “applications”.
Why wouldn't you try to bring the best possible experience to your reader?
Static sites are fast and don't require untrusted code running in my browser.
And its quite possible to make a SPA that renders on the server and serves you an html but then maybe we can show just half the information so we don't send too much info to your browser.
A blog is (usually) a collection of documents. For this use-case, using standard hypertext (standard HTML documents delivered over standard HTTP to every standards-compliant browser) does bring the best possible experience to your readers.
Delivering a single HTML document stuffed with some hand-crafted Javascript code trying to re-invent hypertext will not bring a better experience to your readers (especially not any readers who disable JavaScript), unless your blog is something more specific/unusual than a collection of documents and actually fits something other than hypertext better.
I don't know why your service doesn't scale to be as good as, if not better than that, since you can put more effort into static caching and optimization at scale.
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.
And you can put a CDN in front of gh-pages too! I have done that with cloudflare a couple of times for relatives that want to run a static site and super low cost.
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.
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...
[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.
“Cool, where’d you go?”
“GitHub pages.”
“...”
While this is certainly true, the understanding of platforms like Medium had been that they will not censor people for ideological reasons, or will do so only if the content is clearly illegal or disturbing. If they will freely censor people, there's not much point of their existence.
They threw out their integrity as a publishing platform when they updated their ToS a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16431403
Indeed, there is not much of a point to their existence when they throw this away, other than being a virtue signalling magazine with unpaid authors that doesn't even follow their own vague ToS.
This week has been horrible for speech and freedom on the web. But surely a much needed reminder that suppressing speech does not work. The remedy is more speech, not less: http://prospect.org/article/remedy-more-speech
Without holding this uncompromising stance, I'm of the opinion that one cannot call themselves a liberal, in a liberal democracy. It is the cornerstone of a functioning, modern liberal democracy, and the recent trend of this self-censorship by big technology companies is worrying.
When speech can be automated, this turns into a question of who has the largest promotional bot army. True speech can be drowned out with an infinite array of conflicting lies.
Looking at reddit as an example, I don't like where this is headed. First they came for pedos and creepers, and I said nothing because ewww. Then they came for assholes and trolls, and I said nothing because good riddance. Now they've come for gun coupons, and I don't want to flee to Voat because it's dominated by assholes and trolls.
It’s exactly this sentiment that prompts services like Reddit to censor. They need users; it’s no use being a bastion of free speech if you are hemorrhaging ad dollars because assholes and trolls ruin your platform.
It might be paper cuts, or it might be a redesign, or the rumored shift to being social media, but I honestly feel like Reddit is past its eternal September moment and kind of on the cusp of going the way of MySpace and Digg in the next few years.
Your reference to the last presidential election is nonsensical, if you're attempting to claim that the Democratic candidate lost because of a few hundred thousand dollars in ad buys and thousands of Twitter bots. Clinton lost because the campaign was clumsy when it came to image management (which you really need when it comes to the skeletons surrounding both her and her husband), and the campaign ignored flyover states and the electoral college, and even outright insulted voters. You can't rely on California to get elected, sorry.
The real victim, when bots run rampant, is platforms. Not democracies.
Ads/Stories were put in front of micro-targeted social media recipients with one of two goals.
Increase fear/anger on right so people would vote.
Increase apathy/disgust on left and with independents to discourage them from voting or to vote for a third party.
If you micro-target even the smallest group of people thousands of times, the emotional impact will lead to some percentage of success.
That small percentage may absolutely have turned the election.
I see people make that argument all the time...it’s a good sounding hypothesis...but does it actually work? Is there data that shows that this was done and that it was impactful?
That said, Given the number of voters that stayed home in 2016 (over 10% in the key states of WI, MI, OH, and PA) and the number of people who voted "against Clinton" suggests it was highly effective.
Cambridge Analytica and similar firms have a data set of how emotions can impact certain kinds of people. They have openly admitted they do this for conservative causes. Their patent company is seeded financially by some of the most conservative people with wealth and now we know they are also supported by conservative British politicians.
This is a massive conspiracy to undermine governments that are supposed to be for and by the people. This is what happens when dark money is allowed unfettered access to elections.
Democracy. Real democracy....dies.
I disagree -- I think what we saw in 2016 was democracy. We saw the effect of giving stupid people the same amount of political power as everyone else.
It's indisputable that some people are more easily gathered and led than others. We can borrow the term "network effect" to describe how these people come to wield excessive power in a democracy. But these voters don't serve their own interests. They are the players in a competition among billionaires, religious leaders, and state-level actors to see who can raise the biggest army of intellectual zombies and herd them to the polls.
At some point there will have to be a conversation about how sustainable this practice is.
Hillary spent quite a lot more than Trump[1] and had her own army on social media called Correct the Record. I believe it's now Share Blue?
The sad thing is that modern politics is based on who can make the other guy the most hated, as this seems to drive the most votes.
[1] http://fortune.com/2016/12/09/hillary-clinton-donald-trump-c...
http://www.people-press.org/2015/05/19/hillary-clinton-appro...
Speaking of "true speech", I didn't say any of those things. I happened to be thinking of Michael Gove's "had enough of experts" https://www.ft.com/content/3be49734-29cb-11e6-83e4-abc22d5d1... and the much earlier GWB reference to not being in the "reality based community".
This whole idea that false information needs to be suppressed only became popular after Trump's election win. People needed an excuse to explain that because they couldn't imagine so many normal reasonable people could possibly vote for him. The only explanation must be that they were not very intelligent and got suckered by external influence. That's a pretty arrogant viewpoint and its conclusion - censorship - is pretty naive direct action that ignores their legitimate concerns as well as the obvious horrible side effects that come with censorship. Since when did "these people aren't smart enough to take care of themselves, let's tell them what to do because we know what's best" ever work on a large population who are different from the "bosses"?
These things are always actually about the alt-right getting kicked out of a service, they say the service is now dead and doesn't care about "free speech" (argument doesn't hold on a private platform), they make their own competitor and it's filled entirely with hate speech (voat, gab, hatreon). the reason only horrible people go to those competing sites is because everyone else knows the positions are nonsense.
Then guess what: everything that isn't x will be on the first platform.
Now it’s moved on to sex workers, harm reduction communities, marketplaces, and more.
If the next step is liability for “false narratives” and “disinformation”, open and free discussion is dead, under the boot of the arbiters of truth.
Next step: Ministry of Truth?!
Censored environments like Reddit don't have the least hate because they aren't encouraging it, but because they are incapable of being used for communication between parts of humanity that exist, and will continue to exist for the time being. They are as a sandbox/playpen is to a real social environment - somewhere for children to learn and play around, but not much more. The bigger questions, disagreements and problems we face as a world are going to involve hatred and conflict before they are resolved.
Also, the answer isn't to suppress speech so it goes and hides under the surface, it doesn't go away and the people exposed to it never hear the counter points. The communities you talk about, like reddit, hate speech gets downvoted, it gets counter argued. Bring dumb hateful ignorant views into the light, so they can be addressed, if not for the purpose of convincing the OP (which is often futile), convincing anyone who might be on the fence or sympathetic at least partially to some of their points can understand why its wrong. The problem is when boards or sub-reddits become insular so never face opposing views, on either side, going back into bubbles or group think does not lead to moderate opinions and compromises, just like proving someone wrong can sometimes just cause them to double down on their opinion.
All of these sites are extremely heavily moderated, which is understandable, but saying that they are "anything goes" is false by any stretch of the imagination. Honestly before last year, Discord was the place to be, no matter what your topic was. One of my favorite places to hang out was a place called "Meth and Funamines," which doesn't sound pleasant at the surface, as it's a bunch of druggies. The major rule was "No sourcing," but nobody went there for sourcing, and rarely to discuss drugs. When people did discuss drugs, it was similar to /r/drugnerds. It was just a community of mostly chill people, posting art, poetry, supporting one another be it mental illness or otherwise. No matter who you were, you could come to that server and find a friend in a time of need.
It was wrapped up in the ban of alt-right and other 'hate' discords early this year. Other than discussing drugs, I never saw a single bad thing come from that discord.
These days, I don't know where anyone can go to be free. Self-hosted options obviously, but that is not the answer. Self-hosted services don't have the accessibility or open-ness that sites like Reddit and services like Discord provide.
I wish Discord would provide self-hosted servers and just handled keeping them on a server list. It just sucks.
Which doesn't make the concept any more valid than if the opposite were true.
I agree. But few others do. The conventional wisdom seems to be, keep that idea (e.g., racism) in the shadows; as long as we don't see it, it doesn't exit.
False assumption.
Fringe ideas breed in the shadows. They thrive there. They, like vampires, can't live in the light.
Unfortunately, we live in a head-in-the-sand world. And most wouldn't notice a loss of freedom and/or speech anyway.
I know. Sad.
This silly mindset is way too common. Don’t trust for profit companies like Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, etc to be bastions of freedom of speech. They will do whatever is best for their shareholders.
Protecting freedom is why we need to keep it feasible and affordable to be able to host your own site.
That's putting it mildly! I host a (small) static webpage on AWS S3 + CloudFront, and my monthly bill is 56 cents.
[0] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/user-guide/uploa... [1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/Ro... [2] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/Develope...
If they change the ToS then move. That's the great thing about static sites, you just plonk it anywhere and you're good to go.
The AWS CDN is really cheap, and 1 TB is a truly massive amount. Remember, this is static content, not megabytes of useless JS dependencies.
In any event, it's easy to set a budget in AWS. I'll add one now, just to be safe.
It's not the javascript but the medias that are expensive. Pictures, drawings, schemas. God forbids if you have a gif or a video.
If it helps, envision Medium as a social network. You share to FB, TW, etc. Medium would be a slightly longer post.
I would appreciate publishers who follow your solution of doing both!
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.
I hear org-mode is a good alternative. In the mean time, consider storing a permanent .html version upon publication of markdown
Notably, GitHubbers and StackOverflow representatives joined to define CommonMark, but GitHub and StackOverflow do not have remotely similar fenced code block conventions.
Also, CommonMark currently says that they have not yet defined a version 1.0 of the spec.
I certainly applaud the effort, but CommonMark did not unify all the Markdowns.
If your documents are available on the open web, you can visit them on the Wayback Machine to make sure they're cached as HTML. This is in some ways more reliable, and some ways less, than trying to keep track of your own HTML transcodes over decades. It's generally a more reliable way of making sure they're available after you disappear.
Markdown isn't the be-all and end-all of markup formats, and there are valid reasons for using formats with strict specifications (e.g., AsciiDoc or ReStructuredText for certain kinds of technical writing). But the chances of Markdown documents suddenly being woefully unreadable in 20 years are roughly in line with the chances of plain text Unicode documents being unreadable in 20 years.
The major point of using markdown, or why I use it, is that it doesn't require a working implementation to be understood. I can open a markdown file in ed and still understand it. From what I've seen of RestructuredText and Org-mode, if i'm not using the implementation, it becomes a mess.
(I also always recommend to put anything that isn't widely implemented in Markdown in HTML instead since that will be reasonably parsable for the next couple decades.)
What are the threats to your content availability — hosting provider censors you, hosting provider dies, your cloud servers die, your on-premise servers die or their storage is corrupted, your workstation dies or its storage is corrupted, you miss a bill, you lose your ability to pay bills at all?
How likely are these? What happens? How much do you care? How could you recover and re-publish your data? How quickly do you need to recover, if at all? How much (time, money) is it worth investing now, to reduce the risk of future data loss or the duration of an outage?
What does "your own platform" mean? Without relying on things like Tor, I don't believe it's possible to publish anything without relying on some large corporation who can pull your content with a day's notice. If not Medium, it'll be AWS or Google Cloud or your domain registrar. Anyone who cares about an open web should be, at minimum, calling out those who take down content on short notice without reason.
I agree we should call out sites for censorship, but there's a strong case for people taking more control over their publishing.
Nearlyfreespeech and Gandi comes to mind here, I'm sure there are others who try to set as clear stance about their TOS. In general for web hosting though you should research that they have good connections, don't over-provision and have competent staff.
I'm fine for writing in a spot I can get exposure, but you better pay me. Medium does pay a subset of their writers. I know when they started The Nib, they paid political cartoonists like Matt Bors. So they paid a small group to get others to contribute. They're pretty much the new Huffington Post.
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.
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.
A blog is not one of these use cases; it is exactly a collection of pages.
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..
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.
Yes, that's the problem.
> What did you expect?
Technology to be used in an appropriate manner to achieve business goals.
> That's the new M.O.
...for apps, yes. This isn't an app, it's a blog. Of all the things on the internet that could be handled by a static page of HTML and CSS with maybe some JS to offer extra features, this is it.
It always puzzled me how did they manage to get the amount of visitors they get? Is it just overabundance of marketing type people among Medium users that would spam their blogs to all corners of the Web?
Fun Fact: A single Medium blog page downloads more code and data than a multi user ERP & Accounting system I wrote for a large company back in the 80's (in terms of MB).
If you write good content and are consistent, it isn't that difficult to drive traffic to your own blog.
Blogging is easy with a good static site generator and netlify (free).
And here's the policy page it links to: https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000646167
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.
Very little risk.
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.
You'd be surprised how much time you can sink in a high quality blog engine.
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.
https://replyable.com/2017/03/disqus-is-your-data-worth-trad...
Maybe a subreddit would work too?
Overall, kudos, this seems cool!
I didn't know about the problems with FF and Android o.O, thanks for letting me know :- )
> would be more likely to buy hosted service from you because it's so. But maybe that's not the general stance
Hmm a word is missing after "so"?
Yes I think for most people it's not wort getting one's own server. Installing stuff, creating OpenAuth accounts at Google, FB etc, finding a send-emails SaaS, and other things ... is lots of work and sometimes confusing / frustrating.
> Hmm a word is missing after "so"?
I meant "because it's OSS" there. I really like the model where you put the code out there, open source, but sell hosting and services. You're both giving back to the community (and I can't think of much software projects built without using anything from the open source community), adopting an open and more trustworthy model, and also selling a SaaS version for those who don't want to or can not set it up. It seems to me to be a very legitimate and honest way to make money off of software.
https://github.com/posativ/isso
and Discourse on a subdomain ($5/month for a Digital Ocean server).
https://www.talkyard.io/blog-comments — there's serverless hosting (with privacy. No ads, no tracking), + it's open source like Isso.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
No further comment
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.
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)
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.
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.
I never saw this feature listed when looking at Publii, which kept me from trying it.
Note, please don't say just sync down from the server before doing anything locally; I don't want that to be the point of record. I'd rather that be Git.
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.
PS: In fact, there are 10 themes at this moment but show me the same quality, free themes that come with other static generators.
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...
It feels like Huffington Post all over again, except more accessible I guess.