[Advaith]

Medium peaked a couple years ago, with many startups leveraging the audience and using it as a blog. I suppose their pivot into aggressive growth + monetization has lost them some really important publications. Arguably, hackernoon and freecodecamp were some of the most popular publications.

By removing the 'free' aspect of the content, medium effectively put itself in the same bucket as other platforms.

I also don't like medium's UX, especially the highlighting feature. It is really distracting.

It'd be cool to have a central store where users can publish content without worrying about uptime, paywalls or anything as such.

[nimonian]

I think a lot of people fantasise about a better, more open Medium, and I'm surprised it doesn't exist.

Github does a fantastic job of hosting code and keeping people happy (generally). It's generous to individuals and has a good business model. It would be great to have a place to host my content which is as friendly as github.

I think cloning Medium wouldn't be horribly difficult. It might even be a good medium (hue hue) term project for a solo dev. Perhaps I'm grossly underestimating the work; perhaps it already exists; or perhaps I've just found something to keep me busy over the summer!