Why I'm Leaving Medium
For a few years, Medium was the path of least resistance. Write, hit publish, let their distribution do the rest. It worked, until the friction started outweighing the convenience.
A paywall that turns away the readers I actually want to reach. A partner programme that pays out by algorithmic mood. An editor that fights me every time I want a code block that does not look like stock art.
None of that is a scandal. It is just someone else’s platform, run for someone else’s incentives.
A blog you do not control is a rented apartment. Nice view, no say in the renovations.
What “owning it” actually means
It is not really about the hosting. It is about three things that only work if you hold them yourself:
- The URLs. If a post’s address can be taken away or rewritten, every link anyone ever made to it is on loan.
- The format. Markdown in a Git repository will still open in twenty years. A proprietary editor’s export button is a promise, not a guarantee.
- The reader. No interstitial, no “you have two free articles left”, no sign-in wall between what I wrote and the person who came to read it.
The migration is the boring part
Export the archive, convert the HTML to Markdown, download the images out of Medium’s CDN instead of hotlinking them, and keep the original publication dates so the archive still reads chronologically.
The one step that is easy to skip and expensive to skip: set canonicalUrl on every migrated post
to its Medium address first, so search engines do not see two copies of the same article while
both exist. Then, once the new site is indexed, reverse it — point Medium at the new URLs and drop
the field.
Leave the canonicals pointing at Medium permanently and the traffic keeps accruing to Medium, which defeats the entire point of moving. I have a calendar reminder six weeks out. I recommend one.
So this is post one on the new setup: a domain I already owned, a static site, and a few dollars of infrastructure. The next post covers exactly how cheap that ended up being.