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Comment by ken | Hacker News Reader

There’s some juicy irony in seeing “We need decentralized communication (medium.com)”. I see no mention the the elephant in the room.

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I can just imagine it: "But you see, I'm only using medium.com because it's convenient. Other people shouldn't, but I'm just using it for now and will switch to something better, someday. I just don't have time at the moment."

I don't think there's anything wrong with using Medium, but this is always where decentralization/security/open-protocols utopia seems to die: convenience and the UX. Where everyone seems to be trying to convince you that something like IRC is the best while using Discord because it's better.

Can someone fill me in here please, how did medium become the place for these sorts of posts when self hosted wordpress, ghost, Squarespace, wix and just basic HTML were created so that you can host a text blog running on a server you control from wherever you want? How did medium take hold and why?

Medium offered expanded reach. A lot of people used to cross-post their personal blog on Medium; some comparisons I've seen showed nearly 10x more views from the Medium post.

Medium was originally a great experience for the reader. No interstitials, no ads, no unrelated photos, no pleading to "follow" or "become a member". Just your text, nicely formatted.

Compare a simple article, across the years:

2014: https://web.archive.org/web/20141201191740/https://medium.co...

2019: https://medium.com/@fields/now-its-about-the-things-that-you...

Once they started achieving critical mass, like every other free-to-use webpage, they loaded it full of crap.

Maybe that was a bad example or my ad-blockers are working really well, but the 2019 edition only has ads at the bottom for me which is easily ignorable.

I only clicked this so I could say this same thing. I'm glad I'm not alone in seeing this as a completely ridiculous juxtaposition between wanting decentralized communication while using a horrible centralized service. This author should start with creating a static blog or something.

Just because you need something, doesn't mean you need to use it. Decentralized communication is a fallback in the event that centralized communication fails, in the same way that cash is a fallback in the case that credit cards fail/are blocked. I don't carry cash, and I don't use decentralized communication methods, but I still think both are very important to have.

If you need cash because the card network is down, then it's already too late to get cash. Thus, it's important to test the decentralized methods, just like it's important to test your backups. And if they haven't been tested (and have up to date instructions!) the only safe assumption is to assume they don't work.

Governments are thinking about abolishing cash and when there are few enough users they will. Use it or lose it.

If you can't beat them, join 'em. At least until you can.

A technically-inclined person can beat them pretty easily (at least on the privacy/ethics front) by spending $5 on a Digital Ocean droplet and spinning up Nginx.

Or do it for free using GitHub pages + Jekyll.

That's pretty dang centralized.

Then again, so is using a VPS, just at a different layer

It's pretty dang easy to move a Git repo of Jekyll pages anywhere, and serve them with 100% fidelity. In fact, the normal way of using GitHub Pages naturally makes it trivial to copy your content anywhere, and serve it from any web server.

That does not appear to be true of Medium blogs.

But then you don't have medium's discoverability.

At this point in time, does Medium offer much discoverability? I know it used to, but at the moment, it seems like anything that isn't being charged for gets buried. As does much of anything outside of a publication, or not created by a social media influencer.

(and the percentage of people who even check the latest story for a tag has fallen even further since the last redesign).

came here to say this, cf. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18145995

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