Hello, there, dear comrades! I am not fond of the aforementioned source myself, but... What are your thoughts on Medium.com from a perspective of a poster? Would you find it worthwhile to post your writing there? What are some of the platforms you'd use instead? Thanks!

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ziq wrote on February 25, 2021 at 10:29 AM

Honestly whenever I see a medium link, I don't read the essay. It basically means the person is just writing as many words as they can to get ad money without saying anything important. It's like an entire clickbait ecosystem.

PeaceLaborMay OP wrote on February 25, 2021 at 10:32 AM

Thanks for sharing your perspective! I'm not a fan of the vibe Medium gives off, either.

ziq wrote on February 25, 2021 at 10:38 AM (edited on February 25, 2021 at 10:41 AM)

If your purpose is to make money then maybe it's useful as long as the articles have broad appeal, but if it's to write theory, stick with theanarchistlibrary + patreon. What I do is post my essays to raddle, get engagement, heavily rewrite them based on the engagement I got, post them on patreon, then my essay page on raddle's wiki, then anarchistnews, then reddit, then theanarchistlibrary. That way you get engagement from several different groups in several phases. Some of them also get picked up by various anarchist distros like warzone and printed into zines that are distributed around the world at infoshops and bookfairs.

Then when you have enough essays, compile them together, write some exclusive stuff, and submit it to an anarchist book publisher. I used little black cart but you would want to look at red publishers like akpress.

Hibiscus_Syrup wrote on February 25, 2021 at 12:38 PM

The anarchist library generally won't publish you unless you've published that piece elsewhere though.

I suppose it can start with a wiki here in hopes that it's reproduced on anews, from there it might be accepted to the library.

PeaceLaborMay OP wrote on February 25, 2021 at 10:44 AM

Thank you for the detailed response!

celebratedrecluse wrote on February 25, 2021 at 10:50 AM

I look forward to reading your essays in the future. You are a great contributor to the forum.

PeaceLaborMay OP wrote on February 25, 2021 at 10:52 AM

Thank you so much!

yam wrote on February 25, 2021 at 10:45 AM

I'd suggest publishing on a site that uses a free / libre blogging engine, such as write.as.

Medium imposes a monthly limit on how many articles readers may read. Unless you're specifically planning to use Medium to monetize* your posts, I'd stay away.

*) what is that word even

zoom_zip wrote on February 25, 2021 at 10:57 AM

write.as looks nice. thanks for that suggestion.

PeaceLaborMay OP wrote on February 25, 2021 at 10:54 AM

Thank you! A few comrades have recommended Write.as as well, sounds like it is a worthwhile option!

zoom_zip wrote on February 25, 2021 at 9:40 AM

their privacy policy is standard data harvesting bullshit. I’m guessing you need an account to post, so, if you care about privacy:

use a disposable email
don’t give your real name or any personal info
keep the website in its own container

when i wanted to publish something the other week i used a github static page. don’t know if that is much better now that they are owned by microsoft.

i’ve not used it, but maybe mastodon? seems more of a twitter replacement than a publishing platform but you could use pastebin for longer text and just link to it through mastodon to keep it all in one place.

PeaceLaborMay OP wrote on February 25, 2021 at 10:03 AM

Thank you for your input!

celebratedrecluse wrote on February 25, 2021 at 10:49 AM

Also, if you are following the above advice, do not connect the profile to your other online presences, for example here where you have posted links to video with your face etc

southerntofu wrote on February 25, 2021 at 9:47 PM

Hello comrade! It depends on your use case.

personal blog federated with other blogs (replies/reposts..) : writefreely or Plume they both use the ActivityPub protocol so you can subscribe/reply from Mastodon (and others) ; the alternative is Hubzilla which federated with many protocols (including ActivityPub) but is less refined
self-organized automedia platform: SPIP is a really good collaborative platform, widely used as part of the Mutu Network (no english/russian sites yet!) but i would keep an eye on the Activitypub-based Indymedia reboot (example instance)

If you want to learn new things about web development, programming (& others), i highly encourage you to start making your own website from scratch (with HTML and CSS), i'm sure there's a bunch of people around here who would be glad to help if you have questions about that. But i understand if you don't have time for it ;)

Have fun!

PeaceLaborMay OP wrote on February 26, 2021 at 1:50 AM

Thank you for your input!

mima wrote on February 26, 2021 at 11:43 AM

I haven't used it yet, but if you only care about writing content and don't want to bother about styling (which is an important thing to consider in the web), you can try either creating a server on geminispace or get an account on one of the hosting Gemini servers.

The disadvantage of course is, you have a limited audience. Your readers either have to use a gemini-to-web proxy or a dedicated gemini client. But the biggest advantage IMO is that you don't have to deal with the web's nonsense. Gemini clients also control how your content looks to them (unlike the web where the author controls the styling). So, as one Gemini developer puts it, it's very liberating for both writers and readers.