Gathering an audience is way harder without Medium. It might be atrocious in other ways, but it vastly increases the chances of your content getting read.

Does it really tho? This one seemingly got featured by someone at Medium and it pulled in around 10 000 hits from newsletters. While it's more than nothing its no where near the majority source of my traffic.

On principle I'll avoid viewing an article if it's being hosted on medium and skim the comments to decide whether it's worth viewing directly. Probably go on to view the original about 1% of the time. Sorry author, but using medium already counts against you.

And what's with all these sites that now force you to accept their cookie policy? Totally pointless when you configure the browser to delete cookies when the browser exits...

> and free hosting from GitLab/GitHub pages, there's little excuse not to self-publish

Seems like satire has settled in for the duration.

what's the problem with GitHub pages?

I'm amused to see GitHub thought of as self-publishing. It is nothing of the kind. It's someone else's platform granting you an instantly revocable right to use their facilities, no - or just a few thousand - strings attached. In principle no different from Facebook and Twitter and all the other shoddy complimentary crap.

This seems to be a silly distinction because I doubt you will find many sites which pass your bar for being self-published. Unless you bought your own hardware, host it on land you own, connect to the internet via your ISP, and call it something under your TLD there are still a lot of people who can revoke your access to the internet arbitrarily and have terms of service. Nobody is an island.

With GitHub you can use your own domain and have full access to the code. GitHub revokes or kicks you off? Just upload the code somewhere else and point your domain there. That's not the same situation as publishing on Medium.

It's different in that I am the customer, I literally give them money to host my stuff. They can of course stop hosting my stuff at any time, but then I will also stop giving them money.

I'm not 100% sure since I'm a developer and not an entrepreneur, but I think they prefer to receive money rather than not receive money.

For you, yes. If you look up at the ancestor posts you'll see the discussion was about free hosting at GitHub/gitlab.