Today's lesson: Medium is bad. They've suspended our account and blocked access to all our published stories for bogus reasons and with only 12 hours notice.
@Liberapay whaaat
@Liberapay WTF! What was the reason they gave?
@Gargron @ekaitz_zarraga @Technowix@niu.moe
> Your Medium account is in violation of our policies and is in danger of being suspended. Please review our policy for crypto accounts and posts on Medium: https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000646167
We don't even write about cryptocurrencies at all…
you should contact Medium about that issue: https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/216287508
on a second thought they may grant your account back
@Liberapay @Technowix @ekaitz_zarraga @gargron you're not a "company announcing ICOs, coins or tokens" ???? wtf
:Steemit is a blogging and social networking website that uses its Steem blockchain-based rewards platform for publishers. The Steem blockchain produces Steem and Steem Dollars which are magic bean tokens ..." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steemit
Better spray some "scam-away" because this one sounds like it either is one or will be taken over by one.
@Liberapay Medium - being mostly a no-frills blog platform - is mostly interesting for exposure, isn't it? Are there other reasons to not just use your own, self-hosted blog?
@maho @Liberapay The only reasons to use Medium are 1) pretty composer, 2) good CSS for legibility, 3) social network edfects from being tacked onto Twitter.
Assuming you find a better solution for #1 and maybe #2, you can just syndicate your articles to Medium.
Sounds like 1 is just a question of using a nice Markdown / WIYSIWIG-plugin, 2 comes down to a website theme ... that leaves point 3 which I can understand is a non-easily-replaceable feature.
@maho @Liberapay iirc, Medium uses limited HTML and not Markdown, but it has an article importer. Syndicating to multiple websites and silos is not too hard, with IFTTT or other scripts
I'm aware of that. Does not mean a homebrew solution can't be superior 😉
@maho @Liberapay Yes, I think there are many Wordpress plugins and at least one Jekyll plugin. Medium also has a posts API: https://indieweb.org/POSSE#Medium
@Liberapay blocked access?! 😤 Did you check the internet archive for a copy of your posts?
@arjenpdevries Yes, the Internet Archive has copies, e.g. https://web.archive.org/web/20180205073332/https://medium.com/@liberapay/the-second-year-of-liberapay-c017b73c9721
@Liberapay so what did you do to offend them? (Are they worried about their claps?)
@Liberapay
I've never liked Medium and I don't know why so many people seem to think it's the cat's pajamas.
Also self-hosted blogging is a solved problem and there are plenty of Medium clone minimalist skins for your platform of choice.
@maiyannah @Liberapay @bob Also, I guess, wp.com became too mainstream a while ago. Some people tend to look for the next "new cool thing" to be there when this happens.
@Liberapay They did that to one of ours a few weeks ago too. Apparently something triggered their spam filter. They apologised and re-enabled it after a while, but it had already been damaging and looked bad for us :(
I'm surprised @Liberapay doesn't run its blog on an open source platform where it owns the data and these kinds of decisions.
@Liberapay How did you add the message description?
@Liberapay Let me know if I can help with anything, if you want another platform that you don't have to maintain (and doesn't arbitrarily remove blogs). Happy to give you custom domains, etc. for free.
@Liberapay what are their reasons?
Y'all are having some very bad luck this month, I hope the self-hosted solutions that were recommended will work
@Liberapay Facebook showed us that we need liberation of services. So we need more #federation services!
Let us all know where y'all land, if you end up with a new URL so we can re-toot it.
@Liberapay ghost.org/ http://rubyonrails.org/ http://gohugo.io/ https://getgrav.org/
...heck there are even people with blogs based on bash scripts (and python, liberapay way python right? check github, fork something or so)
@azzamsa This is water under the bridge now. Our blog being unavailable for a little while was an insignificant inconvenience compared to the Mangopay fiasco of the summer.
@Liberapay I've told you this several times -_-
@Liberapay if you have access to Medium's zipball export of your articles, I have a tool which automatically converts them to jekyll:
@Michcioperz @sir @Liberapay
but they still use medium...
@Michcioperz @Liberapay sorry, someone boosted it into my timeline
@Liberapay even though @thurloat boosted this into my timeline several months after it was originally posted it is a good reminder about the hazards of being at the mercy of siloed systems.
Other examples: Fran Blanche has been locked out of her Patreon account for a week for some sort of "security reason" they still haven't resolved, and Dave Jones was banned from live streaming EEVblog for 3 months without warning because YouTube suddenly decided a video from over 6 months ago violated ToS.
@msh @Liberapay its frustrating that so many of these slights are flash-in-the-pan, and forgiven after a week of being in the spotlight.
I imagine this is how many companies feel about the commons clause on their OSS licenses, that people will forget soon and won't require a change.
@thurloat @Liberapay the Commons Clause effectively converts a license to a closed "source available" license and has the potential to be quite disruptive in a bad way. This is a reminder that OSS alone doesn't make you immune to consolidation of power.
If your livelihood can be turned upside down by the whims of a single corporation, or single project dev/leader, or single *anything*, you should think of a contingency plan (migration, forking, etc).
@Liberapay What reasons?
What reasons?
@Liberapay why not use https://write.as ?
@Liberapay what the fuck, seriously