Does anyone have experience with an alternative platform? Preferably free and hosted.
Medium is not a great platform for distribution compared to that (poor reach and it never really emerged as a destination) but not worse than other external/self hosted blogs. A good strategy if you are hungry for clicks is to target all of them with content appropriate to the platform and a link to your blog for reading more. By appropriate I mean optimized for the attention span of the reader. So short tweet on twitter, executive summary on Linkedin for those poor people with essentially no attention spans and an aunty friendly version for Facebook. Reddit post and HN link if you feel brave ;-). I've also been targeting dev.to.
[0] www.write.as
As of now, normal people will have difficulty understanding how Read.as, Write.as, Snap.as all work together.
Looking forward to when I can get a full Facebook replacement for like $3/month subscription.
Myself, I'm using a VPS (5€ a month, but 10€ a year goes to the OpenBSD foundation) to host some static html (generated from markdown), and have done away with comments entirely. (The VPS isn't just for that blog. I'm serving multiple domains from it and hosting my own fossil repos there as well)
It's obviously not for everyone, but maybe it'd suit you.
I'm not really sure what the answer is as if it's going to work on a static site, the comments need some sort of backend. Most people aren't going to host it themselves, so that leads to these issues, as nobody will pay for a commenting system.
What if it costs $0 per year, if one gets < 10 comments and < 10 000 page views? And otherwise $10 per year? Or something like that. What do you think about that?
(I'm developing a no-tracking and no-ads commenting system, + open source, SaaS hosting, link in my profile.)
I would have used Gitlab pages but there is not support for automated SSL certs for custom domains. You have to upload your own manually which doesn't play nice with letsencrypt's 90-day expiry.