Can we count on Medium to be around in 10 years? I’m planning to look at my blog posts then, too.
I spent some time this week looking over coding projects I have done over the last 12 years, which is pretty much about when I started experimenting with coding. I realized a few awesome things: 1) It is a lot of fun to go look at things you made over a decade ago — it is a real time warp. 2) Stuff breaks. All the time. Very easily. The internet is very fragile. We have to constantly maintain updates for software at CodeHS that we are working on every day. If you leave a small tool or app over to the side for a few years…or 10 years, it will almost certainly stop working (except if you just make it plain old HTML).
I also took a look at my blog and website, which I’ve had for almost 12 years now, and have updated in various forms every few years or so. It is on WordPress now. Every few years, the design gets out of date. And it is a bit hard to maintain. It is kind of a hassle to maintain your own site and blog, even though it is also fun. So why maintain your own site anymore?
I think there is a very good reason to.
I still have access to my stuff from over a decade ago. Nothing really stays put on the internet. Whatever you consider to be the pinnacle of stability on the web could go away soon. Google Reader, made by Google, just stopped. And Mailbox, a popular email client owned by Dropbox, just stopped.
I think Medium is the best writing experience on the web today. But I’m sure people had a different consensus 2 years ago, 4 years ago, 6 years ago — and will have a different consensus 4 years or 10 years into the future as well.
I think a decade puts some good perspective on it: A decade ago a friend and I recorded some videos on a video camera and we no longer have any idea how to access them because the technology has changed so fast. My computer doesn’t have a DVD drive or CD drive, so it is pretty inconvenient to get things off in that format. My grandmother recently handed me a floppy disk to see if I could get addresses off of it — the last time I knew a computer could read that was in elementary school. The future of bitrot will probably accelerate.
Anyways, with this in mind, back to Medium. I’m going to keep writing on Medium. And I’m going to keep copying everything over to my personal blog at thekeesh.com. When major tools “sunset” you usually have a way to move your stuff. A lot of people are transferring their main site over to Medium, which I think is great for the platform. But I’m not ready to make any bets about this blogging platform 10 years into the future. I hope they prove it wrong — then this will really be something awesome.
But for now, I’m going to copy over my posts to my WordPress blog.
Where will your blog posts be in 10 years?