Medium is bringing back support for custom domains. And in general they seem to listen better. In addition to custom domains, Medium is reducing the amount of annoying pop-ups and banners and will also offer more customization options.

Speaking of portability, it’s always been possible to get an export of all your posts and other data in Medium. And by default, all Medium publications and profiles have RSS feeds (e.g., blog.medium.com/feed) — full text, except for metered/paywall stories.

We are now bringing back another option for portability — and brandability — namely, custom domains. Not that they ever went away entirely. Medium hosts tens of thousands of publications under their own domains. However, we paused setting up new ones a couple of years ago. Among other reasons, we needed to fix some cross-domain bugs and revamp our system for registering SSL certificates. We have now prioritized that work so that we can scalably offer custom domains again.

That are good things, but I won’t switch back to Medium after leaving it years ago and recently retiring my Android-Dev publication. It will probably allow me to change the domain from a subdomain of one of my personal domains to it’s own domain (search for my nickname on Google and you’ll probably find lots of articles from that publication) and eventually hand over the publication to someone else.

I like having real control over my site and my content and don’t want to put it into the hands of a venture capital financed corporation, which could disappear the other day because not enough people want to pay for a membership to read US-focused clickbait articles (just my opinion!). Sure, I could have a lot more readers of my content with the two thousand followers I have on Medium, but I prefer to share my thoughts under my own terms on my own platform.

For people without the technical knowledge required to setup their own blog, I recommend using Write.as and probably paying for Pro to use a custom domain and get some extra features. I think, that is a more sustainable business model compared to VC-financed Medium with their paid reader memberships. Not to mention that Write.as is not full of trackers and takes forever to load (like Medium).