Scripting News: The Internet is going the wrong way:
Medium, a blogging site, is gradually closing itself off to the world. People used it for years as the place-of-record. I objected when I saw them do this, because it was easy to foresee Medium pivoting, and they will pivot again. The final pivot will be when they go off the air entirely, as commercial blogging systems eventually do.
Dave’s entire post is worth reading. I too hate that Apps are the default when you click a link in an email or message but Apps are the new websites for many people. I won’t use an app if there isn’t a companion website because almost all of my computing is done on a real computer so if I can’t enter car maintenance, gas mileage, post photos or check into beers on my Macintosh, I’m not going to install an app that forces me to do it on a small screen exclusively.
Back to his note though, for years, when I link to someone’s blog hosted on Medium I add “A Medium Blog” to the text. I did this intentionally, first to allow people to know that I’m not sending them to someone’s home on the web but to leased space on someone else’s aggregator. Second, when medium goes under, I can easily find all of those posts and hopefully link to the Archive.org pages instead because eventually, all Silos close. MySpace, Friendster, LiveJournal, Tripod, Geocities, and on and on. They all go away eventually and the links on my blog shouldn’t suffer because someone chose to devote hundreds of hours of their life filling someone’s commercial silo with their thoughts, aspirations and ideas.
I’ve thought about some border-line copyright infringement and copying the entire post on my blog to avoid the inevitable broken link issue but I still can’t bring myself to do this.