Goodbye, Medium

tl;dr: I moved away from Medium and opened up my blog at afontcu.dev.

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When I was 15 (so 14 years ago, OMFG), I started my personal blog called Buscant a Wally (Where’s Wally?). I remember discovering what a blog was thanks to my Spanish teacher, and running home on a Wednesday during lunch time to launch my first blog ever.

It was exciting. In 2005, the internet was way different. There were a lot fewer people (I say that as a good thing). Twitter didn’t exist. Facebook did, but nobody knew about it. Internet content lived in blogs, so everybody owned their content. The goal wasn’t about harvesting likes or retweets. We just wanted to discover cool things, and share them.

I wrote about everything - curiosities, riddles, music, interesting stuff, and shitposting. Just like any random Twitter account.

It also introduced me to the world of web development. Blogger had this weird own XML-like syntax that allowed you to tweak the template. So… well, 14 years after, here we are. I’d say it was worth it.

Enter Web 2.0

Then, in 2010, during the rise of the “Web 2.0” I founded Geeks.cat. Do you remember those days with Wordpress.org and fancy logos with gradients, bright colors, reflections, and glossy all over the place? Damn, those were the days…

Geeks.cat was a technology blog focused on gadgets, social media, and the internet in general. We also covered tech events such as the Mobile World Congress. Feels like journalism.

We even published some breaking news: we discovered that Apple had translated iOS to catalan! That was a big moment, I even gave an interview.

Eventually (circa 2014), social networks took over and Blogging died for almost everyone. We stopped tweaking Blogger and Wordpress and started reducing our content to 140 characters. That was it. RIP.

Luckily, life is like a pendulum - it always swings back. And the further you pull something, the further it swings on the other side.

Back to blogging

Medium appeared, and we all embraced it. Gosh, it was beautiful and usable. We kinda knew that content quality had descended when blogs faded away, but things changed when Medium offered us a convenient solution to write, read, and share content - wasn’t it the primary goal of the whole Internet thing?

So, in 2016 I created my personal Medium blog at medium.com/@afontcu and started writing again. Back at it! Topics had changed (so did I). The platform had changed. I felt comfortable anyway. Writing is fun.

And the pendulum kept swinging

But the pendulum didn’t stop there. We wanted our blogs back, but concerns regarding privacy and content ownership were stronger than before. And on top of that, Medium kinda fucked up its platform with paywalls, popups, banners, and other annoying stuff that focused exclusively to monetize the platform while killing the usability and cleanness of the website. No good.

After 15 years, the pendulum has come forth, and people are starting to move away from Medium and started to own their content again.

So here I am, writing in Markdown, using Visual Studio Code, and about to publish this post to my Gatsby/React-powered blog.

It feels great to own your content again. It feels great to have a place you own where you can tweak and break things at your will. Now I have a place to play around with React, I can break stuff and nobody will complain (hopefully).

I have migrated some of my content from Medium, the one I like the most. I also kept the blog simple, mostly because I’m way too busy and didn’t want to (couldn’t) spend much time creating a groundbreaking website - for now.

Anyway.

Welcome home.