Ask HN: Should I blog on Medium for my open-source project, or self-host?

both.

When I first started I installed SharePoint 2016 and had that running on a local server as my blog. Was all good until I noticed someone was pinging my local machines somehow. luckily I had Kaspersky Business Solutions installed as trial. I Shut everything down and went with blogger.

Use both medium absorbs a lot of SEO that Google would otherwise send straight to you

Use both. While medium.com gets a lot more traffic than your personal blog will, it also has a reputation for low quality posts from self-professed "experts"

I think it vastly depends on your users. Generally, I would recommend self-hosting on the same domain as the project landing page or similar. It's unlikely in my opinion that users would bother to read your posts on medium.

Write the posts on a self-hosted site, then syndicate them to Medium and share those links on social media.

Another option is to use a custom domain with Medium[0]. That way, if Medium goes out of business, you could just set up a self-hosted replacement blog with redirects for the URLs for the posts you made on Medium.

0: https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/213474588

I've found Medium incredibly useful for my open source blogging. First and foremost, it saves me from a ton of hassle picking a platform and theme for something like Wordpress, since it looks great on pretty much every device out of the box. It also has some great features that let people from the community submit posts to our publication.

Also, Medium is a great way for people to follow a variety of blogs - so not only do we still get all of the reads we get from normal sources like Twitter, sharing, etc, but you get a lot of people reading your posts from their Medium feed. In fact, for a lot of posts most of the views come from our Medium subscribers.

I agree with other commenters that setting up a custom domain is a good idea if you think you might want to move to some other platform in the future, especially if Medium is not around forever.

I'd use github pages with jekyll. Easy, superfast and free.

I believe that self hosting is more inline with open source software principles. Even if it weren't, self hosting gives you control over your content—remember, nothing is really "free." Self hosting takes a bit more time and effort but if you use a static site generator like Hugo or Pelican then the process is more simple.

I see a lot of answers saying "use both". Do you guys mean "Write the posts on a self-hosted site, then syndicate them to Medium and share those links on social media", as w1ntermute said?

I'm curious how you can use both. if you have two sites and share both links, what links would people share? Doesn't this make it more confusing for sharers?

If you don't mind all "" in your code blocks getting turned into unicode open/close quotes, and the lack of a markdown editor, then sure. Tab also doesn't indent. You can't use `code tags` for variables. Pre tags (code blocks) create a new paragraph instead of a line break (<br>). So basically not a programming blog. You can create a gist and paste the link, but that's a terrible workaround.

Crosspost with custom excerpts for each platform:

1. Quora

2. Medium

3. PostHaven

4. LinkedIn

5. Tumblr

6. BlogSpot

I would self host. Maybe crosspost to Medium as others have suggested here. Alternatively I do think github pages like has been mentioned is good if you do not want to set up your own blog (even though it really is not that hard).

The reason I would not just post on Medium is simply because you are depend on them. What if Medium at some point shuts down, you lose all your content.

If you like hacking things yourself (with React), I'd recommend to host your blog on Github Pages. Take a look at my (in progress) blog [1] and its code[2]. It uses 'Single Page Apps for GitHub Pages' [3] and renders markdown (needs some tweaking).

1. https://jumasheff.github.io/ 2. https://github.com/jumasheff/jumasheff.github.io 3. https://github.com/rafrex/spa-github-pages/

how about blogging such things in dev.to? They seem a bit Mord focused in development :)

I would prefer to keep a blog, probably using github project pages. It is more customisable (it's true medium offers a clean UI without any effort), and GitHub has given more proofs to stay alive for a long time. On GitHub pages, you own the content, and it's fairly easy to adapt to new platforms if you wish to change. If you wish to change from medium, is it easy?

You might want to consider GitLab pages with your own domain/subdomain. This is the route I'd take if I was in your shoes.

Use WordPress.com's hosted WordPress with a custom domain if maintenance is a concern. If you ever decide to go selfhosted, migration is seemless.

All the other hosted platforms frankly could stop working a year or two from now. Medium doesn't have a viable business model and probably won't get one, it's only a matter of time when it closes shop, like many other platforms before it.

Medium.com is blocked in Malaysia. So you won't have any audience from Malaysia.

I recommend a static generator such as Jekyll [1]. If you want a boilerplate to get up and running quickly, i've put the source of my blog [2] on Github: https://github.com/metachris/jekyll-boilerplate

[1] https://jekyllrb.com

[2] https://www.metachris.com

One point that people seem not to be mentioning here: Medium offers some discoverability. Self-hosting doesn't.

That's only a concern if you care about how many people read your blog, but if you do, it's a concern.

Medium's also very readable. If you choose your own theme for your blog, the chances are you'll hit a theme that's "less readable". Often, programming blogs are a LOT less readable. So that's worth considering too.

(All other points made elsewhere about control of your content, compatibility with FOSS philosophy, etc, are good ones too and I won't repeat them here.)

Cross-posting to both a self-hosted blog and Medium isn't a bad solution. Or use a custom domain, as suggested.

I prefer generator like Jekyll and host it on github. When you want a little discovery, Medium can help

ReStructuredText with Sphinx is wonderful. The syntax isn't the most intuitive, however once you have overcome this small hurdle, it can boost your productivity enormously.

In terms of deployment, using Sphinx enables you to easily deploy to readthedocs.io, or github pages.

Since it is a static site generate, it also enables you to use bootstrap, any javascript front-end library you wish to use, so nothing stops you from having web-application type behaviour and interactions in your posts. It also integrates nicely with extensions, such as mermaid, to make graphs inline with your posts. It can include code snippets from code, offers syntax highlighting and a lot more.

Medium looks great, is easy to work with, and blog posts are easy to migrate when you need to. I would start there at least until you get your project off the ground. If you reach the point that it's worth putting more time into your blogging you can look at alternatives.

I certainly wouldn't use Github pages - it's just as centralized/non-FOSS/etc., but more work and tends to look less good. Wordpress gives you self-hostability but means you're running on PHP. In the long term I'd hope for a sandstorm-based self-hostable blog that's as easy to use (and looks as good) as Medium, but I'm not aware of such a thing existing yet.

I was blogging on Posterous and had some articles ranking nicely on Google, until one day Posterous just shut down. From then on I decided I want to be in control of the domain where my posts live.

I realize Medium gives you discoverability, but so do some other places (posting to LinkedIn, text posts to relevant subreddits etc.) so I would suggest cross-posting to those after posting the link to your own site and adding it to webmaster tools so it will get indexed first.