Reading the post, it just seemed like an interesting and feasible challenge, as well as a learning opportunity — not an ideological purity test.

Probably for simplicity of use, as always. Although it isn't that simpler than building your own blog, at least for a tech aficionado. Wordpress if you don't know web development, one of the hundreds of blog engines otherwise.

I've used Jekyll on Github pages for quite a bit and it suited me perfectly. Being able to write a post in markdown and `git push` to deploy is all the simplicity I need.

Simplicity of use, and distribution. In certain ways, Medium's social component makes it much easier for other people to find and read it vs. a personal blog (unless you already have a following.)

Github is a closed platform too

you don't need github pages to deploy jekyll. While source code of github pages itself is not available, since it supports a open standard, which can deployed to a webserver/CDN directly without major changes, I would consider it to be open.

Just to follow this to its logical conclusion, the webserver may be running Apache or Nginx on Linux, but there are likely to be proprietary blobs in the drivers and the firmware is probably closed. Plus, much of the hosting company's networking hardware is probably running proprietary software.

IANANE (I Am Not A Network Engineer) but I imagine with open firmware like Coreboot and networking distros like Cumulus and pfSense (BSD) and the whole Open Compute Project it might be possible to run a completely open-source hosting company. Well, no. Your UPS's and other auxiliary hardware are probably running closed OSes. Darn.

Cumulus contains a large portion of closed-source code, including all the driver code provided by Broadcom, which is where much of the interesting stuff happens. (I assume their Mellanox products are the same, though I'm not familiar with them)

I'm not aware of any efforts to write open source drivers for any high speed ethernet chips, though I haven't looked much. Intel's (formerly Fulcrum) switch chips have open data sheets (but not the reference code, simulators, etc) so it would at least be plausible to start there.

someone is (or was?) trying: https://www.vikings.net/

Perfect is the enemy of the good.

Exactly. But that is not to say, that it is hassle free. I am using jekyll on my private page (till I eventually get the rewrite done). It is nice, to be able to write in .md and to then have two aliases in my bash_profile to produce a preview version on a subdomain and finally to deploy to live environment. But really it was a pain in the butt to get there. Also having images in my content makes things even harder.

There were so many roadblocks, that I took on having a ton of fun - but nowadays I would love to just have an easy way to write text, without thinking on design, formatting, code embedding and so on...

Sometimes I am scarred by myself when I find myself wishing I still had WP installed. shiver

[Edit:]

Also this way he might have some additional exposure of his novel by people stumbling upon him while on medium.

It's using open standards. It's an open platform. Unless you consider every webhost to be a closed platform?

I can recommend Ghost it's a light blogging cms

I've recently switched to Ghost after using Medium and Wordpress for other things. Ghost is by far my favorite, it's really nice.

I have a github pages blog, but I seem to find it psychologically easier to write directly into a browser window.

I feel a similar question would be "I wonder why anyone chooses to write on Twitter over their own microblog." Medium's inherent social component makes it much easier to find an audience if you don't have one already.

Medium is really easy to use and your articles look nice. Also, there's an audience already on Medium that you can tap. I guess if blogging isn't your thing and you just want to write and publish, Medium is "ok".

I used Medium for a short while, for these reasons, before realizing that it's actually pretty bad. There are a few heavy hitters on the site and everyone else is busy pandering to one another with fake internet outrage and "listicle" style articles.

I enjoy Medium, but I think of it nothing more (or less) than Twitter with more than 140 characters.

That said, there has been some interesting journalism being done there. And it's interesting seeing the White House and Obama using it as a public platform to issue addresses and policy commentary.

Wrote on this topic a bit at the beginning of the year.[1]

I think for most people it really just comes down to a mix of Medium's beautiful design, a strong existing community there, and laziness. You'd be surprised how many times I've been told by friend's to cross-post my stuff to Medium for exposure, but so far I've done my best to hold off.

[1]: https://robertnealan.com/is-self-hosted-blogging-dead/

>I wonder why he chose medium (I wonder why anyone chooses medium over their own site)

http://blog.onyxbits.de/the-importance-of-running-your-own-w...

Medium's business model is: you just started your own website and don't have enough content there to rank well with search engines/attract visitors? No problem! We got a shitton of content and are well indexed. Just write an article for us (add to the pile!) and we allow you to link back to your own project.

Medium pretty much is on my ignore list. The only thing you find there are fluff pieces without substance that are meant to drive traffic elsewhere.

And there really is not a lot of substance to telling the world that you can use Markdown to format a book (though I really wonder he didn't use LaTeX).

Markdown is both faster to type and easier to read on source form. I actually wrote big parts of my dissertation in markdown and then transpiled to LaTex for integration and formatting.

As far as I'm aware, none of iBooks, Google Play Books, Kindle Direct Publishing, nor CreateSpace are open source either for that matter.