Reach and engagement are problems these days. Many social platforms promote things they can inject ads on. E.g. a Facebook post will get a wider audience than simply posting a link to your FB feed. Same on linkedin. Same on twitter. They are optimized for keeping traffic inside their platform. They'll run your content but not necessarily bubble it up in other people's feeds.

Medium is not a great platform for distribution compared to that (poor reach and it never really emerged as a destination) but not worse than other external/self hosted blogs. A good strategy if you are hungry for clicks is to target all of them with content appropriate to the platform and a link to your blog for reading more. By appropriate I mean optimized for the attention span of the reader. So short tweet on twitter, executive summary on Linkedin for those poor people with essentially no attention spans and an aunty friendly version for Facebook. Reddit post and HN link if you feel brave ;-). I've also been targeting dev.to.

There is a freemium service called Write.as [0]. It might not be the exactly same kind of thing as Medium, but, personally, I appreciate its ultra-simplicity. Since I have never went as far as starting my own blog, I occasionally host text content there that I want to share.

[0] www.write.as

According to the creator's blog, he intends to complete a whole suite of products that all work together.

As of now, normal people will have difficulty understanding how Read.as, Write.as, Snap.as all work together.

Looking forward to when I can get a full Facebook replacement for like $3/month subscription.

The underlying engine just got open sourced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18432327

Github Pages + something like disqus if you need comments? Add in a simple enough theme like http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/, and that'll probably do the job. The main downside is having to use social media for discovery, but in that regard it doesn't sound too much worse than medium by your reckoning. You can even use your own domain.

Myself, I'm using a VPS (5€ a month, but 10€ a year goes to the OpenBSD foundation) to host some static html (generated from markdown), and have done away with comments entirely. (The VPS isn't just for that blog. I'm serving multiple domains from it and hosting my own fossil repos there as well)

It's obviously not for everyone, but maybe it'd suit you.

Disqus is really bad in terms of privacy of users [0] (that article was from 2014, now I guess it's on par with most other sites).

I'm not really sure what the answer is as if it's going to work on a static site, the comments need some sort of backend. Most people aren't going to host it themselves, so that leads to these issues, as nobody will pay for a commenting system.

[0] https://chrislema.com/killed-disqus-commenting/

> nobody will pay for a commenting system

What if it costs $0 per year, if one gets < 10 comments and < 10 000 page views? And otherwise $10 per year? Or something like that. What do you think about that?

(I'm developing a no-tracking and no-ads commenting system, + open source, SaaS hosting, link in my profile.)

I recently started a blog built with Hugo and published using Netlify by way of a private git repo on Gitlab.com.

I would have used Gitlab pages but there is not support for automated SSL certs for custom domains. You have to upload your own manually which doesn't play nice with letsencrypt's 90-day expiry.

Or use a Cloudflare certificate (valid 15 years iirc).

I'll be launching Qards very soon. No servers, no databases, free, fast and modern.

https://qards.io