Puzzled by Medium

Sippey’s post on blogging via medium misses the point a bit from my point of view. The reason medium doesn’t feel like a blog is that it is subordinated within a particular display choice. They have decided (and done it tastefully) what every post will look like.

The editor is a lovely thing, but it is solving a very constrained problem. What I would like is for the medium editor to support posting to my own websites elsewhere, so its austere house style can be modulated by other design choices (not necessarily mine; I know my limitations).

Similarly, medium’s choices around comments and responses are very parochial. I have to write this response on medium.com, not on my own site. I have to come to medium to comment on posts. Yes, there’s twitter integration but that’s a very related parish.

What I’d like is for medium to integrate with the web. Especially the indie web. If I could use the medium editor to post to my sites, using micropub, that would be lovely. If medium understood webmentions for receiving and sending comments (and fragmentions for the per-paragraph marginalia) that would be even better.

Because the essence of blogging was always people owning their own sites and data. Blogger supported this by using ftp originally, then later offering it’s own hosting. Twitter, Tumblr and Medium have all forgotten this key component of what makes a blog a blog.

Lets fix it.