In our newsletter yesterday there was a line announcing that we plan to move away from using Medium as a blogging platform and in fact our new engineering blog is already hosted on http://blockstack.org/blog. We’re in the process of moving http://blog.blockstack.org away from Medium.
Some community members asked the reason behind this move. I’m copying my response that I sent in an email here:
Medium is a centralized platform and in the long run, we’d love to start using a decentralized blogging app built on Blockstack. That’d be cool. The concept of hosting a blog for a decentralized internet project on a centralized company seemed awkward.
Also, Medium doesn’t let you control the look & feel and doesn’t allow you to easily embed content/HTML etc. They also control distribution and you can’t easily ask people to sign up for a mailing list for example.
@jude really excited about that! Albert Wenger still uses Tumblr for his blog continuations and wants to move to a decentralized blogging platform. So we already have demand for this app
I think this shouldn’t be that hard when using static site generators like Jekyll, Hugo, …
The only needed thing is a viewer that can view HTML files retrieved by Blockstack.
Although I think having JSON blog data on a storage driver and a complete blog software at the client is the better solution.
Really appreciate this move by Blockstack! It feels incredibly aligned with the core values of decentralization and user ownership. I’ve always found it a bit ironic when blockchain or Web3 projects host their blogs on platforms like Medium, which—even with all their design polish—still operate on a pretty centralized model.
One thing I’ve noticed is that with Medium, even the blog discovery and audience engagement is kind of gated. Like you don’t really own your audience or mailing list, and sometimes even embedding simple custom code or scripts is unnecessarily hard. So moving the blog to something like a Jekyll/Hugo-based static site or eventually a fully decentralized Blockstack-powered blog is a logical and future-forward step.
What @vsund said about storing JSON blog data and rendering the blog entirely on the client makes so much sense—cleaner separation, more control, and a much closer fit with the ethos of projects like Blockstack.
This reminds me of something I saw recently on Invivo Biosciences site. They’re in the wellness/biotech space and just transitioned their own blog from a commercial blogging service to a simpler, privacy-focused self-hosted layout. They even talked a bit in their blog about how important it is for health and science-based platforms to maintain transparency and full control over what they share with their users—especially when it comes to discussing sensitive topics like cognitive health and biofeedback. It’s refreshing to see companies across industries realizing that ownership of content and context really does matter.
Would love to see more projects follow this route and maybe even collaborate—imagine health platforms, decentralized storage, and blockchain-powered publishing all working together. That’s a future worth building.
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