Goodbye Medium, hello Ghost
cryptofireside.com
cryptofireside.com
Register your domain. Write on that domain (using CMS you control). And then use a range of social media / forums / creator platforms to get traffic to your site.
But isn’t that always the chasm of running your own business vs. being an employee or small subcontractor?
The more control you want, the more broad your skill set and investment of your time needs to be.
Or if you want to eat your cake and have it too, follow the POSSE strategy to get the discoverability benefits of services like Medium without betting the farm on it.
https://meta.discourse.org/t/embedding-discourse-comments-vi...
Not really, they shut people down too, unfairly and without recourse. They shut down Sargon of Akkad for using bad words while arguing against racism, for example.
And don’t forget - Visa and Mastercard have started to go after content they don’t like (mostly porn and hate speech - but you never know where they’ll draw the line a year or two from now.)
I'm an incredible crypto skeptic, but this has to be one of the better arguments for crypto to exist and be convenient for payment. No other argument resonates like this one.
That seems incredibly unlikely. They didn't shut it down for ape pictures and Matt Damon. You lump libertarians in with sex positive people and you can't really tell them apart anymore.
> Plus you have the inherent risks and instability of most crypto systems
True.
> (the most popular of which murder the climate).
Everything we do murders the climate. We're not going to fix the problem without a total economic shutdown. Pointing fingers at crypto folks when Google is training ginormous ML models it won't release and while everyone else continues to fly, drive, enjoy indoor temperatures, eat meat, and buy plastic is a bit like throwing rocks in a glass house.
- playing computer games where just the graphics card is using 200W-400W ("this has no use and should be forbidden!")
- using (and buying and making others buy) over-dimensioned hardware
- upgrading your hardware (desktop, laptop, cell phone) every 2 years
- three monitors
I certainly hope you're using public transport to go to work...
Say this Sargon guy or some other personality with a rep takes payments/donations in BTC. Okay, and what then? You can't pay your rent with that, unless you're renting from some crypto fan, and they also can't pay for their taxes/groceries/gas/etc with crypto. At some point, if crypto is used as money there has to be an exchange.
And since crypto is very traceable it's very possible you won't be able to exchange coins with some sort of murky history to them. If you'd have a problem, then your landlord likely also has a problem. And you probably don't want to be on the wrong side of your landlord.
Except you don't - they can be sold and bought entirely without a digital middleman. You can buy goods for them. It's not a weird thought to keep them entirely as themselves, forever.
As for the "crypto is very traceable" angle, it's honestly kind of tired and wrong. If it's something you care about, you have solutions available. Arguing about it as if it's some sort of absolute is disingenuous.
Where do you pay rent and pay for groceries with crypto?
> As for the "crypto is very traceable" angle, it's honestly kind of tired and wrong. If it's something you care about, you have solutions available. Arguing about it as if it's some sort of absolute is disingenuous.
I know mixers exist. And a lot of exchanges ban their use, which is detectable.
Alternately, there's decentralized mixing algorithms like CoinJoin that are indistinguishable from normal transactions with multiple inputs and outputs. Bitcoin's Wasabi wallet and Ethereum's Tornado cash do this.
Privacy is really a solved problem for anyone who wants to solve it.
“I just can’t be bothered with people who chose to treat me like this. It’s really annoying. Like, I — . You’re acting like a bunch of n***s, just so you know. You act like white n***s. Exactly how you describe black people acting is the impression I get dealing with the Alt Right. I’m really, I’m just not in the mood to deal with this kind of disrespect.”
“Look, you carry on, but don’t expect me to then have a debate with one of your f*gots.…Like why would I bother?…Maybe you’re just acting like a n**r, mate? Have you considered that? Do you think white people act like this? White people are meant to be polite and respectful to one another, and you guys can’t even act like white people, it’s really amazing to me.”
You're being pretty disingenuous with your recollection of events.
You may not agree with the tone, I don’t either, but he’s debating literal white nationalists in this quote - and he knew what words they use to hurt others the most (the n and f words) so he used them against the white nationalists he was debating.
I wouldn’t recommend anyone try to do this in 2022, but you can’t argue that he’s a racist from this when you understand the context (again: literally arguing with avowed racists against racism).
It’s like people’s brains turn off the second they hear an offensive word.
I don't understand the logic here. There's no logical reason to think these racial/homophobic slurs would hurt the white nationalists or cause them to rethink their viewpoints.
> you can’t argue that he’s a racist from this when you understand the context (again: literally arguing with avowed racists against racism).
Is he not literally digging deeper into these same racist stereotypes to make his point? That's how I interpret the two quotes. He's equating the white nationalists to those two groups in order to denigrate the nationalists, which implies the two groups are also bad.
By the way, from what little I know about him, I don’t agree with much that he believes. But in any case, Patreon was wrong to deplatform him (something Twitter and YouTube haven’t done).
What if you said something bad about MasterCard's services? "Oops, no more credit cards for you" ?
This kind of monopolies should be treated like utilities, however I guess they're too useful as political tools to get that treatment.
If they are allowed to decide who they will do business with on "moral" grounds what protections are there for people when those morals shift?
"Sorry, you're an unmarried mother, and we frown upon that so you're not allowed to use your debit card any more" is a stretch, but roughly 60 years ago it was the norm and we could easily backslide to that era again.
But context matters. And I’m not going to get worked up by someone using slurs against white nationalists in a debate, even if I think it was misguided.
Gay community successfully reclaimed all the slur words (gay, queer, fag etc).
While I wish everyone could do that (change themselves to not to be offended, instead of demanding me to endlessly change my words), that's not the case, slur words still exist.
it would not be acceptable for someone outside it to use it.
The whole "You can do/say X if you are Y, but if you aren't Y, you are a racist/bigot/*phobe" isn't healthy to build a society without discrimination.
But the people currently in power (institutional, corporate, and government) are all settled that this is the new standard. So we all have to pretend to agree or get kicked out of school, fired, or deplatformed.
The English culture was heavily influenced by Kant who argued for a duty ethic, which was trained into schoolboys by the observation and participation in moral emotions during classroom tasks.
Sargon is making a (very lazy) appeal to emotional reasoning, to which Brits would respond. The idea that you don't fulfill the category of behaviour you're 'supposed to be', is something Brits can hear in his text and everyone else (except some aussies and canadians) doesn't hear.
The idea that these racists are not 'behaving white' and they are being like the thing they rail against, isn't to be understood on face value, it is supposed to generate emotional self reflection in the people that were raised in that philosophy.
I've never liked Sargon, he always appears so smug. Probably an unwelcome judgement, but he's not racist from that statement. Just an idiot.
There is meaning to words further than Prima Facie. We aren't programmed robots that interpret words like a machine, they have an added effect on the rest of our human 'functionality', which people commonly try to access via emotions, persuasion and hypothetical arguments.
Real racism happens whether or not you police saying Racist Words. The fact that I have to explain this is beyond credibility.
It would appear that racism in your country is like saying some Magic Words that summon angry political groups and has almost nothing to do with intent, logic, meaning or anything else. Just saying words is bad enough to be condemned, like He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named in Harry Potter.
I had more explanation written out, showing how the traditional Scholastic dialogue works in Master and Commander, when Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany are discussing the fate of a sailor who failed to salute, and how they let go of making "official statements" in favour of personal, emotional arguments and come upon the truth through that dialogue. I have lost interest in responding to this hyper-literal, internet Enlightenment view which encourages mediocrity and tribalism.
I have zero sympathy for your view, it oversimplifies life into a world-view that can't contain it and has almost no meaning. If this is where the conversation ends, I would be very happy with that.
What's with racism purism? That you have to embody racism with your whole self in order to be really racist. I never see this purist concept applied to anything else: "Oh, he was only saying libertarian ideas, that doesn't mean he's libertarian" - sure, but why does it matter if the speaker is libertarian (or not)? What matters, and is indisputable, is their statement was libertarian.
>but why does it matter if the speaker is libertarian (or not)? What matters, and is indisputable, is their statement was libertarian.
Because you can't contain people in speech. How is this even a question? Policing speech does one third of what the unwritten rules and unspoken feelings do for maintaining social order. You can feel a father's disapproval, you can be emotionally moved towards the Good, ect, ect. The speech acts nearly always come after the thing that happened.
A car crash always has people mourning and setting up new safety rules and making 'indisputable statements' well after the event itself. Most 'statements' are just empty posturing and perfect-form chasing.
Golly gosh this feels like taking a horse to water but being unable to make it drink.
Racist language is a part of racism, just like nazi dogwhistles are a part of nazism. Perhaps this is offensive to you and that sucks, but it doesn't change the fact that this is how terrible people advertise themselves. By using their reasoning, their words and their stance on other people you signify that you sympathise. That is all anyone really needs to understand about this linguistic smokescreen.
I’m not a fan of this tactic. But as someone who has been attacked by neonazis multiple times, I don’t mind as much if people are aggressive towards them. Tolerance paradox.
I still think it’s counterproductive, because it acknowledges their ways to a certain degree? Hard to pin down.
That way you can find a content market fit using a big platform then move people over and monetize.
There are clearly a couple issues with this now. Is the main problem here not having a host your own version of all the mediums creators use to get an audience? Ghost solves this for blogging, but I don't know anything for tik tok or Instagram or twitch.
Or is there a reason you couldn't move over a lot of audience late in the game? And if not, why not/would the reasons you can't stop you from building an audience in the first place?
Remember, its worse than just a lack of software. Text is dirt cheap (not processing text mind), whereas images, videos, require several orders of magnitude larger data, and several orders of magnitude more processing power.
CDNs are one bit of the puzzle, large specialized providers which will cache and store images around the globe for you, but those require obviously dedicated servers, associated hosting fees...
The other portion, then obviously, is bandwidth. Even if you can get away without a CDN, you still need good up/down speeds, as do your users. The solution is/was partially to use bittorrent or other file-share protocols to offload your bandwidth. OFC, then come issues like defending your work from theft, etc, all of which are issues with the simple centralized system as well, not actually at odds with file sharing (you can implement DRM over bittorrent if you wanted to).
No, here you can squarely point at RIAA, MPAA, US Congress (Interpol in the EU), and blame them for the current state affairs, bad policies having caused media monopolies. Until you strike down some of their more nonsensical decisions and bring the world back to file-sharing, alternatives to popular, performant, and widely available image/video sharing applications are not going to exist.
For textual content, there's barely any real cost tbh. a caching layer solves most of your problems with edge node speed (so you pay cloudflare or akamai or some such).
> The value-add of these services is pretty substantial, though.
For videos (and music to a degree), it's unique in that the content size is huge, and people are increasingly impatient. I have no doubt that youtube infrastructure cannot be replicated by a private person. Therefore, their services are not "value-adds", but the primary value, and your video content is the "value add".
Content is pretty important for just a “value add”!
It works fairly well, especially given that the Czech language community isn't very big.
Back in the 90s and 00s, the Web/Internet was promoted as a break from traditional mainstream media e.g. flipping between a fixed set of television networks that curated the content you'd get to see that night. It was hailed as this new way of sharing information compared to "40 channels and nothing's on tonight".
"What is the Web supposed to be?" has always been a question. Push or pull? The age of curated feeds and algorithms hasn't answered that question definitively. On the contrary.
> how do they find new viewers that want to watch their content without resorting to traditional advertising, or hoping word-of-mouth (online forums, IRL, or otherwise) works?
The Web/Internet is a game changer when it comes to providing access to services and information anytime any place. But, I don't believe that the Web / Internet was ever going to definitively solve an essentially a challenge of interaction between humans: "How do I get noticed?"
Consider a traditional library. As far as authors are concerned, putting books together and providing catalogues or curated suggestions to patrons doesn't imply that every single one of them will ever see the same reach or get the same readership. Not unless their work gets actively promoted.
Putting your work online - whether self-hosted or via a platform - only moves that challenge from the analogue to a virtual space.
Your mentioning RSS readers is interesting because subscribing to RSS feeds implies that you went through a phase or process of discovery first. Maybe someone recommended someone else's blog. Maybe you stumbled upon a blog via a blogroll. Maybe it's a blog of a friend who gave you their domain at a social occasion. There's just more then one way for a feed to arrive in your RSS reader.
To my mind, some of the criticisms about the quality of content on platforms, or what platforms recommend in their feeds, today draw parallels to criticisms given regarding last century's TV networks. To an extent, I think it's because the recommendation feeds of these platforms work just the same way: as constant feed that's passively consumed, having consumers flicking through whatever is presented until something engaging passes along.
Nobody has to hope, because it does
The current reality arguably depended on significant forks in the road of history, at least some of which might have been somewhat random.
For example, in a different, less monopolistic, version of evolution, there might be twice as many content creators, each making about half as much money.
Also, these companies are getting a hell of a deal now. Now that they are so successful that you know them by heart. And only maybe are they getting that deal, YouTube for one bled money like there's no tomorrow for a very long time, maybe even know.
Creators, and people in general need to do realize that there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. And assess and manage their risk.
Since then, I had moved to my own domain as I realized most people are asked/forced to signup and sometimes have to "pay to read". I do make sure I do not tick that monetize button/checkbox or have never agreed to be a paid editor. I even changed my username and I continue to pay for Medium to support other editors (and of course, read their stories).
I like Ghost but aren't they doing lot of things and blogging is not the main/default thing anymore? On that note, if you want to quickly try out Ghost, I have been happy with pikapods.com (I have no relationship with them). I start with them, if things go north, perhaps figure out dedicated resources.
It’s perfectly fine for classic blogging, though. They aren’t neglecting or abandoning it. In fact it’s excellent, and I’ve used it almost as long as it has existed.
If you want to slap up a site for your podcast, a newsletter, a news site, etc. it isn’t a bad choice. Their theme market is a fairly good representation of what Ghost is good at; they have categories which cover, more or less, what it’s intended and expected to be used for.
Ghost do different things and yes blogging is one of them.
+1 for Ghost. Awesome software
[1]: https://www.home-assistant.io [2]: https://building.open-home.io
I don't think that website that loads 2,5Mb of js, keep making post request on every action, and shows pop ups on everything you hover/select clean and minimal. It may not be the worst, but not minimal on my book.
That is not medium's fault, but there is even a 2,5Mb gif which takes almost half the size of page. Some people don't like mobile metered connection user.
But if you want to edit on the go, connecting your setup to a CMS is epic. I now have Forestry linked to my Github+Jekyll blog and don't have to worry about having access to a terminal to blog.
It does seem to clog up the commit history though, something to figure out soon...
It was really simple to set up as a Docker container, it is pretty fast due to not having a backing database but instead being file based, allows for some customization in the form of plugins (e.g. RSS/Atom feeds), is themeable and also reasonably secure (as long as you consider using additional auth in front of /admin, though the admin module itself is entirely optional, you can just write blog posts with a text editor, should you so choose).
Of course, there's not much of a network there to speak of, in regards to discoverability, nor is there any kind of advertising that would give me passive income from my writing (apart from a link to a VPS hosting provider, where I get discounts on my own hosting if someone signs up). However, using your own self-hosted blog is perfectly viable nowadays, should you so choose!
Also, if you need a Wiki, some folks out there strongly recommend BookStack (https://www.bookstackapp.com/) and in regards to communication you can use Mattermost (https://mattermost.com/) or something like it. Not to detract from the actual article itself, it's just that we live in a pretty great time with plenty of options, be it cloud based ones, or self-hosted software! Heck, I even have a PeerTube instance up and running which acts as a backup for my gaming/programming Twitch stream VODs, should YouTube ever purge things on their end.
Edit: link to the root page of the blog, for a quick example of how it looks https://blog.kronis.dev/ (some might also use WordPress, although it's more heavy and security begs more attention)
Asking because I wasn't aware that some countries block things as bland as Medium.
I have read absolutely nothing else they have written but judging by this “organic content” I would certainly pay them to shill some crypto scam if I were into that sort of thing.
I did not find a solution that I like. I came to the conclusion that a solution should be file based and the tool that turns it into a website should be a single script:
# File based
The content, templates and assets should be stored as files on disk. No database should be involved.
# Single script
I don't think turning templates, content and assets into a website is a complex thing. Basically it just means some templating of the content according to the templates. A small script that I can easily read should be sufficient.
So I will probably write that script myself. Currently, I expect the templates to be what I call "simplified Twig style":
<!doctype html>
<head><title>{TITLE}</title></head>
<body>{CONTENT}</body>
</html>
---
layout: post
title: Hello World
---
Hello world, this is my first blog post.
And this is my dog:
<img src="dog.jpg" alt="My dog">
---
layout: post
title: Hello World
convert: markdown2html.py
---
Hello world, this is my first blog post.
And this is my dog:
 git clone https://github.com/statamic/cms.git
cd cms
git ls-files | wc
3133
find . -name '*.php' | xargs wc -l
...
225023 total
I am going for 1 file with 50 lines of code and no dependencies.
Using a project made of thousands of files and dependencies, there is way more maintenance ahead. Handling is slower and more cumbersome. If the project moves in a direction I don't like, maintaining a fork would be too much work.
I'm sure v3 is nicer though from the amount of times I've searched the docs with an issue and seen "fixed in v3".
This is the most basic rails app you can get and it does everything I need. When I needed to customize it for the "projects" tab, that was simple too.
Siliconvict com
https://docs.replit.com/tutorials/build-host-company-blog-on...
Love the idea of just using Replit or similar web-based/cloud editor/IDE to create the content. And I also like the idea of having Replit control/host the content/files whilst also pushed to a GH repo.
So far I’ve been too lazy to attempt it though. Have just had that tab open in my browser for months as a reminder/todo to friggin do it but hasn’t happened yet..
I’ve had this happen to me far too many times: my engineering sensibilities get in the way of just putting the stuff out there.
My suggestion is to off the engineering cap and pretend like your blog or website is a business. What return on investment do you get out of all the time spent writing configuration/code, figuring out your deployment scheme, and standing up infrastructure?
For me, I didn’t get any, so I decided to scrap my overcomplicated nonsense and spin up a DigitalOcean droplet with a few clicks. Another few clicks to dump it behind Clpudflare, enable some basic VM backups, and add a basic DO firewall and I was done.
You could also write your own script like a lot of people on HN seemt to be doing and configure the build step to do nothing but take whatever is in your web directory and publish it. (Obviously the same is possible with github. I actually migrated from there. Gitlab can import github repos, and the only change needed on the cloudflare side was change where the repo points to and set up the new token)
I’ve been using Ghost for my newsletter for actuaries using Python and Medium’s distribution would add no value for me at all. Plus the flexibility of Ghost’s integrations - eg with Discourse - is very useful.
Wordpress.com?
Anyway, I abandoned it. I wouldn't recommend Ghost to anyone. It's a good blogging product, but it seems they're in the business of making money and not a great product.
???
Isn't everyone in the business of making money
My blog migrated from WordPress to Ghost to Medium. Now it’s artisinally hand crafted HTML+CSS+JS hosted on Netlify.
I know almost no one else is going to host their blog this way, but they should. Hand crafting is easier and more flexible than complex and constrained static site generators. The average blogger doesn’t have enough content to make a generator necessary or even valuable.
Do you hand craft the Atom/RSS feeds too?
[0]: https://bearblog.dev
The blog is built with Elixir/Phoenix and uses Obsidian MD as an editor. I have a personal plugin on Obsidian that will push my Excalibur drawings and my markdown notes to B2 storage and Postgres DB (one way sync to keep it simple).
With this, I can have my snappy, vim-enabled editor that is also available on my phone and tablet instead of some clunky web editor!
"Avoid using complicated opensource solutions that require constant maintenance."
No, thanks.
This is still getting Medium eyeballs and the sign up CTA is buried in the 3rd paragraph…
I get that a small portion of authors is actually looking to monetize via these platforms but the vast majority don't make a penny on their content and nor are they looking to. So that's not the main driver. As for quality control on these platforms, aside from some censorship, there is none. It's exactly the same type of content you'd find on blogs, Facebook, Linkedin, or wherever else people choose to voice their opinion. So, that's not it either.
I think it's a combination of couple of things:
- Analytics, likes, and feedback & commenting. Most of these platforms have like buttons and give you some notion of success and ways to interact. Everything a wannabe influencer needs basically. Blogs used to have similar features but those got targeted by blog spam. So, people turned off a lot of this stuff because it was just too painful to deal with. I don't think blogs ever recovered from losing that functionality. It's just a bit bare-bones these days. You can fix it if you know what you are doing but out of the box, you have none of it.
- Convenience and safety. Most people don't want to maintain servers or play web admin and they don't want to worry about doing the right things technically (assuming they are capable of that even). They just want to write and hit publish and be done with it. It's an important feature and it's why things like Facebook and Linkedin became popular. Better distribution and low hassle. Medium never really became an important distribution platform. You always have to post your Medium links somewhere else to get an audience.
- Community. These platforms for better or worse function like mini social networks with readers and authors connecting. It's of course a very fragmented space and there are tiny disconnected social clusters all over the internet now. Blogs used to offer a similar experience but there's not much happening there anymore except for a few holdouts. The blogosphere (I hesitate to use the word) is kind of dead.
- Distribution. To get your content some eyeballs, you need to promote it on multiple platforms. This has changed a lot over time. It used to be that you would have followers that would pick up anything you wrote from your RSS feed and then would distribute that to their readership. These days that's less of a thing and you need to distribute via one of the big social networks. Medium as a distribution platform is not that important. You still need the big social networks to share a link on. Not much difference with a self hosted blog.
With Medium, there's definitely a problem. The platform is now so pushy towards it's readers that I can't justify parking any content there. Just not worth it. I've used dev.to on and off for some articles and I kind of liked that experience and I appreciate the community there. I tend to cross post on my own website still. But altogether it's far less often than I used to blog.
There "we and our partners track you without opt-out, like it or lump it" had earned their domains a place in my local DNS filter. I can't say I feel I've missed it on anything as a result.
Don't forget to write a whiny post about it when you're done.