Location of interviews and blog posts

[rebeccaradding]

I received this email from freeCodeCamp earlier this summer (see below). With @bobbysebolao writing a lovely new interview, we should probably have a think about where to host the article - on freeCodeCamp's blog, on Medium, ourselves, elsewhere (including pitching to bigger platforms as suggested by @yvonne-liu). Thoughts?

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Thanks again for publishing on freeCodeCamp's Medium publication.

freeCodeCamp is the biggest publication on Medium. Our open source community sends Medium about 5% of their total traffic.

But over the past year, Medium has become more aggressive toward us. They have pressured us to put our articles behind their paywalls. We refused. So they tried to buy us. (Which makes no sense. We’re a public charity.) We refused. Then they started threatening us with a lawyer.

It's not just us. They are doing this to a lot of publications. And a lot of high profile people from the developer community are leaving Medium as a result.

Medium is a corporation founded by a billionaire who also accepted $132 million in venture capital.

freeCodeCamp is just a tiny donor-supported nonprofit.

I tell you this not because I want you to be angry. I'm not angry. I just want to help people learn to code.

So together, the community made plans to leave Medium. We built freeCodeCamp News as fast as we could.

freeCodeCamp News is a place where you can share your blog articles. It's free, it doesn't have ads, and it's open source. There are no "sign in" popups or paywalled articles. According to Google's own Lighthouse Score, freeCodeCamp News is faster than Medium, has better SEO than Medium, and is more accessible than Medium.

And in just the past 48 hours, hundreds of thousands of people have read articles on freeCodeCamp News. So we have a growing audience for your articles.

This said, all of your articles are still on Medium where they were before.

The articles you submitted - which we edited then published in freeCodeCamp's Medium publication - are now on freeCodeCamp News, too.

You can read more about freeCodeCamp News - including my detailed FAQ - here: https://www.freecodecamp.org/forum/t/279929

On a personal note, I wrote more than 500 articles on Medium. I built up a following of 155,000 people on Medium over the years. It was hard to leave Medium. But I have no doubt that it was the right thing to do.

I'm optimistic that all of us in the developer community can start our own blogs on the open web, then use community tools like freeCodeCamp News to raise awareness of them.

I'm looking forward to reading more of your writing in the future.

[freelancedad]

@sofer @rebeccaradding @yvonne-liu @bobbysebolao

The outreach for our interviews is definitely important.

I have come across - hashnode.com but that is a needle in the haystack of posting channels that are available. As we have nearly finished the interview article can we please discuss where we would like to share it?

On an internal blog, we will have to use our network to spread the word, to a smaller audience but this will mean that traffic will likely stay on our site.

We are familiar with Medium and Freecodecamp, who have readership much greater than ours

Is there any experience that people could share - on channels they trust and know there are audiences that align with FAC.

Do we want to explore channels that we haven't explored before to attract new audiences; my train of thought is around websites that potential commercial partners may frequent.

For now I'm brain dumping but hopefully, there is enough sensibility in the above to get some ideas shared.

Cheers

[bobbysebolao]

Dev.to is an alternative to Medium that I see gets shared a lot on Twitter. I think it's more established than and has more traffic than Hash Node, both websites sound like they have the right audience for the article. The article could go on multiple platforms - the more platforms, the bigger the reach.

I think self-hosting the article on the FAC website and cross-posting it on platforms like Medium and dev.to would be a good approach.

[rebeccaradding]

@bobbysebolao to be clear, you're suggesting that we set up a blog on the Founders and Coders website, post your piece there, then cross-post it elsewhere?

[oliverjam]

That's probably the ideal solution—having the canonical URL always point back to the site we own, and just syndicate publication to third parties. It wouldn't be too hard to set up with Gatsby either, but it would require at least some development time.

[bobbysebolao]

@rebeccaradding yes, I think that would be a great approach. @oliverjam agreed, I've heard that dev.to specifically allows you to point a canonical URL back to your own website.

[freelancedad]

@bobbysebolao and I caught up this afternoon around his article, in the interim period could we sign up with FAC twitter to https://dev.to/new ? - Would we be happy to publish Bobby's article here whilst we set a list of priorities for the website build?

@rebeccaradding Do we have FAC profiles for FreeCodeCamp and Medium?

@yvonne-liu @oliverjam I think a blog page would be good but wouldn't think it is a priority on the list, what do you think?

[oliverjam]

@freelancedad There are definitely bigger issues to prioritise on the site I think. I'd definitely like to do it at some point though

[Oliversw]

Just created and are setting up a Dev.to account if we decide that we would like to post there in the meantime

Issue here