A few years ago, I decided that it was not worth to keep on maintaining my own website to publish content. Using Medium seemed like a much better alternative - just log in and publish and let all the technical details be handled by Medium staff.
Today, I am making the move from Medium to my own site.
Medium got worse
When I started using Medium, I was quite fond of it. Publishing stuff was easy enough, but the real value of the platform was the constant stream of interesting articles Medium made me aware of. It was so good that in fact I did sign up for a paid membership.
Unfortunately, this has changed. In my perception, Medium has transformed into a pure monetization platform for content creators. And with this, the quality of the articles as well as the quality of the feed Medium shows me has declined. So much that I only use Medium sporadically nowadays.
I want my content to be available
Talking about monetization: By design, unregistered and free tier users can only read a handful of articles in a defined timespan. Everything else is hidden behind a paywall. While this is great for creators that regularly push content on the platform and want to make a living of it, I am not fond of it - I want my content to be readily available for everyone who is interested. Which is no problem at all, but this will keep you out of the monetization circle as freely available content does not get a share of Mediums income.
Being honest and consequent
In the end, I have been paying for a platform that I only use sporadically and that does not deliver a reasonable value for me. The only logical consequence: Abandon Medium and look for another solution.
The solution is what you are looking at right now: My own website, fully managed by yours truly. This time, it is a static website, built with Hugo. Which reduces my maintance to writing articles and re-publishing the site. There may be some rough edges here and there, but in general, everything should be working. And thanks to Hugo and my chosen theme being open source, if anything is not working, it can easily be fixed.
Let’s see how this journey goes!