Medium
The day I almost ditched Medium. It turns out it was saving my site.
Where is my site? Even a direct search for my name brought back Medium’s logo at the top of the list. Why is Medium now my main digital footprint? Why did my digital home suddenly vanish from Google’s search results?
My first thought was that either the canonical setting was not working or Medium was ignoring it on purpose.
Maybe it was time to ditch Medium for good, I thought.
It was a classic ‘guessing game’ moment, one I found myself falling into more and more recently, despite my background in the cold, hard facts of research and statistics. My father, my wife, and many people around me are researchers. In addition to that, scientific papers, numbers, statistics, etc., were frequent in my graduation and post-graduation courses.
When did I start jumping to conclusions so easily? Perhaps it’s a byproduct of our social media-saturated world, where speculation often overshadows data.
Anyway, before taking the radical step of telling my readers I’d be leaving Medium, I decided to take a deep breath and start doing some research online to try to understand what was happening.
Among other things, my quest made me aware of the Google Search Console, which was a huge rabbit hole I ended up in. But that’s a story for another time. Anyway, when I came across the explanation “Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user,” I was affected by another guessing moment and quickly blamed Medium. Again!
At this point, my brain was already at full speed trying to figure out a strategy to fix the “Medium problem” when I checked the “Links” menu and saw Medium at the first position of external links bringing traffic to my site. Not only that, but the number was much larger than the second item in the list.
To give you some context, when you start using Google Search Console, the information is not all there at once. It gets built over the coming days after adding a site to be monitored. That lack of all the data probably also contributed to my guessing state. By the way, the “canonical issue” was about other links that had nothing to do with Medium.
Anyway, that’s good news; it was not Medium. Thank you, numbers! But I was now back to square one.
Obsidian Publish
After a lot of reading and long conversations with Gemini to understand all the tech terms I was coming across, it clicked when it mentioned something about the “Disallow search engine indexing” switch on Obsidian Publish settings. “Oh, s***,” I thought, while that unmistakable feeling of “I did something very wrong” permeated my entire body.
When switching to Obsidian Publish, it took me a while to import all my content from the old website, and I didn’t want Google indexing that big mess. That’s why I turned off the search engine indexing. What I completely forgot was to turn it back on, meaning that I completely erased my site from existence for many months. Unbelievable!
The Bright Side
Since I cannot go back in time, I try to always learn something from my mistakes and also look for the bright side of things. And learn I did. A lot! Not just the ins and outs of SEO, but also how important it is for me to regularly check my own online presence, especially since [[vladcampos.com/Action/💡 Consulting|I run my own business]]. From now on, I must create a task or a calendar entry for the future in cases like this.
Knowing that I would lose Medium’s social element by not publishing there anymore, I had to bring back [[vladcampos.com/Static/Newsletter|my newsletter]], which was a detour that brought me into another deep rabbit hole. I told you I learned a lot.
Remember the better RSS feed I created for my website? Well, I can now set it as the source of my newsletter, which I rebranded as “Friday Fix by vladcampos”. As the name implies, subscribers will get a list with links pointing to everything I shared during the week: articles, short posts, podcast episodes, and videos.
In hindsight, I’d say that the terrible mistake of blocking search engines from indexing my site ended up working as a trigger to making my online presence a bit better.
As for Medium, how many times have you seen articles stating that it is terrible for your site? I’ve seen many of those. But in my case, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Maybe because I always set a canonical link to the original article on my site. Anyway, the Google Search Console is a good place to start if you really want to know if it’s helping your site. In the end, using facts—numbers—is a great way to avoid guesswork.
Overall, have fun!
The case for By Me a Coffee joining the Fediverse.
If you take a look at my Buy Me a Coffee page, you’ll notice that it is basically a timeline, just like many other social media sites. In my case, perhaps because I talk a lot about it, many of the supporters are Fediverse users. Regardless of the reason, they don’t have access to certain features available to other social media users. Although this is an issue that can be easily fixed with some tweaks to the site, why stop there?
11 Million Possible Supporters
Imagine for a second that Buy Me a Coffee has adopted the ActivityPub protocol and now provides you, as a creator, with a Fediverse feed and address. Probably something like @vladcampos@buymeacoffee.com or @vladcampos@buymeacoffee.social. Or even @vladcampos@bmac.social, to shorten it like Medium did.
In any case, anyone using an ActivityPub-compatible service, like Mastodon, Flipboard, and so many others, would be able to follow your username and see and reply to all your posts from the ActivityPub service they are already using.
It means that creators who are not part of the Fediverse because they believe it is too complicated or who are not familiar with it would be exposed to 11 million users immediately. Since everything is connected, millions of users would not need a Buy Me a Coffee account to follow and engage with the posts of the creators they love.
And there’s no need to change how non-Fediverse users have access to the current Buy Me a Coffee site. For example, my blog is compatible with ActivityPub, but anyone on the open web can read the posts just like they would on any other blog.
As for the creators who are familiar with the Fediverse, they could, for example, use tools to cross-post to their Buy Me a Coffee feed. Another option would be to start using Buy Me a Coffee as their main way to interact with the rest of the Fediverse. That by itself would indirectly promote Buy Me a Coffee to other people on the Fediverse, as everyone would be seeing the company’s URL.
For some creators, this would be their first experience on the Fediverse. Others would probably move their followers to Buy Me a Coffee. In any case, being able to bring your followers with you anywhere is what makes people on the Fediverse move around and try different services. Currently, I’m a Mastodon user, but, I have already moved a couple of times and my followers always came with me.
Restricted to Creators
But instead of letting all users create ActivityPub accounts, I think Buy Me a Coffee should limit them to creators. Running an ActivityPub server is not cheap, and it comes with all sorts of moderation problems, which have caused many companies to give up. Not to mention that there’s no need to open the account creation to supporters since they can use their current Fediverse accounts to follow the creators.
First Steps
This is not a simple project, but it would certainly help Buy Me a Coffee stand out while also helping creators.
However, there are several small changes that can be accomplished with less effort. For example, show the Mastodon icon when the user sets an account on the social links. Another good practice would be to add Mastodon as an option to the “share on social media” feature. But why not create a Buy Me a Coffee Mastodon account or server to start sharing content and interacting with users there? This was the strategy adopted by Medium and Flipboard to get a sense of how things work differently on the Fediverse.
And of course, as I have already mentioned to Jijo Sunny in a recent conversation, many of the above suggestions also apply to Voicenotes.
Anyway, as I said before, I’m biased, but Mastodon is the only social media app I keep on my phone, as there are no ads or algorithms trying to make me addicted to it. I tap the app’s icon and look at my chronologically ordered feed to see and enjoy what people I choose to follow are sharing. In other words, this is the perfect environment to follow and interact with creators I support.