I prefer owning my data and customise my pages to be blazingly fast without any javascript bloat, etc. That's why I use static blog generator - Jekyll and host it on AWS.

But it's a bit tedious at times. Having an "admin panel" accessible from everywhere is very comfortable. But I don't like the bloat monsters like Wordpress, etc.

As for the reach - I think Medium doesn't provide so much value. Posting on HN, Reddit, etc feels enough in my case.