If not Medium, then what?

TikTok is probably the king of medias right now. The main problem is that you have to likely put your face out to the public. I have worked on creative ways in not doing so (despite not being full-on ugly mind you), but in the age of scammers and fake news, facial credibility for content is often an essential key to longevity, and may become pretty much a basic requirement moving forward for the more credibility-minded social platforms.

I think the main issue now that is really flooding out creative writing as well as other types of creator communities (I make music for film @ruffandtuffrecordings - a new account mind you) is that everyone is grinding individually than creating partnerships. While everyone is quitting their jobs to become a creator, they are finding they have to do every aspect a corporations would normally hire for and then quickly burning out after a deep investment in time and gear.

It's probably better to partner with people who share your subject matter interest and to form a team of people and then start a dedicated web site that you use social media as a pointer thereto... That way your content also is not under risk of immediate loss in most cases if you pay your bills on time.

That being said, where to go also probably depends most on your intended subject matter.

A static website (let's say a Hugo blog on GitHub pages) can make the magic and host the content in a future-proof way.

For the discoverability: every social network can help to drive visitors to your posts.

It's crazy how today a lot of effort are put on decentralizing finance meanwhile the simplest activities (like blogging) are being strongly centralized.

Self host, use services for syndication only. Make that Medium and Facebook post, but just make it a link to your website, maybe with a preview. You get self hosting without needing to bring your own audience, you get Medium etc’s promotion without needing to surrender your content.

I should disclaim that I haven’t personally proven this out, but it’s advice I’ve often seen and what I plan on doing myself.

I’m with you. I just want an easy place to write and share an article, and I would prefer not to self host and install a million things.

No one has seemed to have suggested any alternatives, except for [HackerNoon](https://hackernoon.com). Surely there’s something else? Medium can’t have that large of a stranglehold to the point of a monopoly. (If I’m wrong, then this is a biz opportunity.)

Anecdotal: I've seen a lot of people migrate to substack (not how much better it is, but I dont dislike visiting it like I dislike visiting a medium blog)

https://mirror.xyz is neat. I have seen posts on mirror get on the front page here recently.

Mirror will create an nft of your writing and proxy it to the web2 world.

This means your writing will be owned by your wallet. Mirror cannot take it down and people can support you by buying your writing nft as a collective item.

All this without needing a paywall. The content always remain public.

Seems like there are two problems you're trying to solve: 1. getting traffic/discoverability 2. a nice platform upon which to blog

I think if you solve the two with separate tools you might get better options. For example for a nice blogging platform, you can try gonevis.com or blogger.com then promote posts on places like reddit/HN/Twitter, etc.

I bought a year of Medium subscription but I don't think I'll renew it because their suggestion algorithms are bad. If you click on one programming-related article you will be forcefed exclusively the most boring programming crap ever until the end of time. There's like a million articles on there about "programming habits" and "genius daily routines" and "productivity hacks" and "programming career advice" ... all very boring content.

A major issue I see with online blogging is the glut of tech and computing content drowning out everything else. The barrier to entry for self-hosted content also means most self-hosted content is tech oriented.

You don't necessarily have to choose - you can post on your own blog, then copy-paste it to Medium and set the canonical url back to your own address so you keep some of the SEO-juice.

UPDATE

So far the closest free alternatives I've seen are:

- write.as

- mirror.xyz

- typeshare.co

------------

The closest paid alternatives:

- Ghost

- Substack

------------

There are a number of niche-specific ones:

- Hackernoon

- Dev.to

------------

Self-hosted alternatives (non-discoverable):

- Wordpress.org

- Hugo/Digital Ocean (I chose this)

- Next.js

Hackernoon is a good place to get organic reach, if you're writing stuff that works for their audience.

Dev.to hackernoon hashnode are some other platforms where you can get tech related articles discovered.

But as everyone epse is saying, it is definitely worth the effort to own your own content. Even if you do not self host, set up WordPress or Ghost on their paid hosting and link your own domain.

Write.as, it’s as easy to use as medium but federated and open source, so you can self host.

If you feel nostalgic, https://neocities.org/ . It has a discoverability feature, via a social network of common interests.

Ghost - If you are really serious about writing and monetizing it. Not useful if you are not earning from your writing Medium - If you are gonna write once in a year. or. you are happy putting your articles behind their paywall

dev.to - If you don't have a niche, just writing for the community whenever you feel

hashnode - If you prefer having custom domain, writing for beginners, love SEO, want to build personal brand, and a bit serious about technical writing.

SSG + Github Page - If you love getting your hands dirty in coding & willing to spend sometime to learn a new tech. (plus point, you have full freedom to design it in your own way)

- My self-hosted blog built with NextJs. https://pankajtanwar.in/blogs

Self-host

Share links to your content (can even automate it) to all of the social networks you want it to go to - LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook ...

If you are writing something, maybe use something like typeshare and twitter.

It happens the same way over and over. Some site will offer discoverability, so writers flock to it, and then the site gradually becomes terrible.

The answer is to own your own stuff. Your own domain, your own blog software, etc. Just develop that. Otherwise you're putting effort into something that isn't you, that's inevitably going to go bad.