With a few exceptions (I can't think of any, but presumably you might) you have to pay through one of these methods.
If you don't like Medium, you can use Blogger (3), Ghost/Svbtle (2) or self host (1 + less 2).
To put it another way, are we annoyed at Medium or just the inevitable friction in the world. No matter what they promised, they can't sustain giving away a free service without 1,2 or 3.
Edit: write.as looks like an interesting one because it lets you toggle between 1 and 2. I assume everyone knows about wordpress.
> If you don't like Medium, you can use Blogger (3), Ghost/Svbtle (2) or self host (1 + less 2).
FWIW you can also use write.as now.
I finally made a paid account the other day after wanting to for a long while. (You can have free ones as well but paid offers a few benefits and as a bonus it also felt great to support open source and pay for hosting at the same time.)
As others has mentioned it is part of the fediverse and there's also a lot of other details to like about it (like not having to give away your email address if you don't want to).
I think there's good reason to be annoyed at Medium. You know that these services need paying for - and you didn't need hundreds of millions of VC money to figure it out. So why did Medium make a load of promises they couldn't keep?
It's also worth noting that the continual introduction of companies like Medium who grab market share in the blogging space and then piss everyone off acts as a constant wrecking agent against sustainable alternatives. We constantly see this wrangling of bloggers and shitty nagware UIs because we constantly see people trying to break into this space and monetize it. Medium is making the world a worse place. They ran a loss leader to bring people on board and now they're trying to rent-seek. This is bad behaviour and people seem to just give it a pass.
I definitely agree with you, and this is one of the reasons that I don't like it when people complain so much about ads. It feels entitled in a way to demand completely free access to someone else's stuff.
Self-hosting costs me money ($5/month) but not much labour after the initial set up that took 2 hours. My work flow is to write in text files on my local computer, commit to git and `git push`. I can't think of a work flow that requires less labour. It would also cost nothing if I used github pages or a similar service.
Caveats - authoring is not mobile friendly, and it's not possible for folks who aren't comfortable with git.
1. Labor
2. Cash
3. Personal Data/Ads
With a few exceptions (I can't think of any, but presumably you might) you have to pay through one of these methods.
If you don't like Medium, you can use Blogger (3), Ghost/Svbtle (2) or self host (1 + less 2).
To put it another way, are we annoyed at Medium or just the inevitable friction in the world. No matter what they promised, they can't sustain giving away a free service without 1,2 or 3.
Edit: write.as looks like an interesting one because it lets you toggle between 1 and 2. I assume everyone knows about wordpress.