I used to be an occasional blogger, but had some okay traffic (a few posts took off), but definitely not a name for myself where I could take people with me to my own site. What I liked about Medium was their discoverability, shifting to my blog I believe will lose that discoverability.
Are there other platforms or other ways to get organic readership?
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
So far the closest free alternatives I've seen are:
- write.as
- mirror.xyz
- typeshare.co
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The closest paid alternatives:
- Ghost
- Substack
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There are a number of niche-specific ones:
- Hackernoon
- Dev.to
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Self-hosted alternatives (non-discoverable):
- Wordpress.org
- Hugo/Digital Ocean (I chose this)
- Next.js
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.
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
Share links to your content (can even automate it) to all of the social networks you want it to go to - LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook ...
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.