The core argument against Medium is: "Until you host your content on your platform, they will always live at the mercy of the company hosting the platform."
Owning your content and self-publication is one of the principles of the indieweb[0]. This is as relevant of a discussion I think to plug it. When it comes to alternatives to the social media/algorithm-ified/data-hungry web-that in my opinion we should have gotten-it’s the IndieWeb.
Which is fine, a lot of people putting their ideas out there are more concerned with the level of reach/impact than whether they own a webpage nor that it lives forever.
That's me in a nutshell. I've built a regular audience for my writing over the years. As the author suggests though, it might be a good idea to have a mirror.
The question is what does it really mean to have 'your own platform'? Does it mean that you need to have your own server at your bedroom? Or is it enough to rent one at a server room, or a shared host or maybe just rent some web space? What with your internet connectivity? Or just electicity - do you need to generate your own? You always depend on someone and in theory that someone can take your blog down.
I think the reasonable answer is that you need to pay for all your needs and not rely on any free services. Then you can rely on your providers.
Paying helps, but even then, they are usually terms against abusive behavior. It seems that what constitutes abuse reduces as you go up the chain (for example: perhaps a social network forbids false information and worse, perhaps a hosted CMS forbids hate speech and worse, perhaps a VPS/colo/residential forbids only very illegal activity) but it's always there to some extent. Maybe it's about human abuse and maybe it's about technical/network abuse, but there is something forbidden.
Is it possible (not feasible, but possible) to put something on the internet that relies on nobody else at all?
Is this actually a valid (albeit not feasible, but theoretically valid) answer to the question though? I didn't capitalize the I in my question, but I should have, because I do mean for it to be interoperable / peered.
I think so? If you run your radio transmitter.
Just tell peers what frequency. Though if some company decides to build a large relay node infrastructure, you'd need some crypto verification to keep them off Yournet.
But most of them are easily replaced if they go bad. Even domains are of course technically rented, but your own domain is among the most stable identifiers we have on the internet - people owning domains over decades is commonplace.
If my domain registrar, my DNS provider, my hosting company, ... go "bad" I can just move and my readers won't notice. Even if you are on hosted wordpress etc, you can archive your site as is and move, preserving the URLs. That's not the case with Medium etc where your content lives under their domain.
Reclaiming a domain from a registrar that has "gone bad" actually sounds pretty difficult. If they were so inclined, they could refuse to give you the transfer code, and they could renew it so it doesn't expire.
It always comes back to capital, sure. Technically your ISP could disappear tomorrow, or your region's power could go out. _Then what?_ There's always some bit of internet infrastructure you don't own or that necessitates money. But infrastructure is different. As long as you pay (and aren't doing anything particularly illegal), your server will probably continue to exist. And if not, you just buy or rent a computer in a different data center, or even set up a server on a spare computer at home. But you're much less likely to have your hosting provider pull sketchy Medium-style nonsense than, well, Medium.
