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 What?
What's the reason?
@Liberapay what the fuck, seriously
@Liberapay
Sounds like #ghost or #jekyll is the way to go.
If you need help, feel free to reach out!
@sheogorath Thanks. We already have a volunteer to host a Ghost instance. The discussion is in https://github.com/liberapay/salon/issues/136
@Liberapay WTF! What was the reason they gave?
@Gargron @ekaitz_zarraga @Technowix
> 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…
@Liberapay @Gargron @Technowix Third party stuff...
Why not use Wordpress or something like that?
@jeff Yeah, whatever.
I have a wordpress thing and it just works. In the case of liberapay people it's ok for them to use Pelican, but I don't think it's a real solution for *everyone*.
Anyway, I agree with you in the 95%.
@jeff It's easy to have a wordpress. I know many places which sell VPS's for wordpress.
@jeff Yeah, why does it look like we are discussing if we agree?
:D
@jeff
I've been messing around with Hugo recently. Pretty nice.
@ekaitz_zarraga
@jeff @ekaitz_zarraga @Liberapay I'd recommend a static site generator. No comments or search, but no one's gonna use a WordPress vulnerability to hack the site.
(You can even do a WordPress-based static site; I know the version packaged for Sandstorm supports this, but I haven't tried it.)
ISTR that WordPress has a plugin that will generate a static site.
@suetanvil @Liberapay @ekaitz_zarraga @jeff @varx I'd go with Contentful & static parsing. You get CMS UI & you get your data as you please.
@Liberapay @Gargron @Technowix The best answer in cases like that is (imo):
- I'm not talking about crypto but, you know what? Fuck you. Delete the account. I don't give a shit. I'm moving out of here.
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 @Gargron @ekaitz_zarraga @Technowix Ghost is pretty cheap to use their service IIRC
@Liberapay @Technowix @ekaitz_zarraga @gargron you're not a "company announcing ICOs, coins or tokens" ???? wtf
@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 What an earth could be their reason? 😕
@Liberapay DreamWidth seems to have compatible values.
https://www.dreamwidth.org/legal/principles
https://www.dreamwidth.org/legal/diversity
@Liberapay Obviously self-hosted is still good for the main thing, but syndication helps.
@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 :(
@Liberapay I don't get why an organization like LiberaPay does not run an own blog software instance. There's plenty of blog software you can run on your own infrastructure. WordPress, Ghost, Hugo,... Any many more.
I'd take advantage of the situation and move to independent blog hosting.
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!
@Liberapay why ?! o_o