I suppose the better question is "why aren't we all using weird home-made static blogs?"
I'd mention posts to friends and their response was always "what's your LJ name? I'll friend you." And then I'd tell them about my self-hosted blog and they'd look at me like I was an alien. There wasn't room in their world for a blog that didn't live on LiveJournal.
LJ added a feature to pull in an RSS feed and make it look like an LJ account. The only difference was the RSS logo next to the username instead of a photo. One of my wife's friends sucked in my feed this way and people started following me there. They also started commenting there, but their comments on LJ weren't connected to my blog's comments. People were hurt I wasn't responding to their comments because I never saw them. I had to open an LJ account just to respond to my blog's comments somewhere other than my blog.
Look, I'm active in the WordPress community. I've coded blogs in PHP, Java, and Node.js. But at the end of the day, I want people to read and engage with my content. And in 2016 that means posting on Medium. I need to go where the audience is, and Medium's social features & suggested posts make it a winner.
The biggest challenge for any long-form writer in 2016 is discoverability, assuming that you don't already have a huge audience and you do want people to read your writing.
That's why I, for example, tend to guest-post on friends' blogs with larger followings rather than posting on my own small blog.
With the near-death of RSS, vanilla blogs have almost no subscription mechanism, so you can't assume people will return to them. And people subscribe to / follow individual blogs far less often than they did circa 2002 / 2003
But Medium has bubble-up features enabling your writing to be discovered.
I'm not a huge fan of the platform, but that's why I use it from time to time.
Medium seems really full of clickbait articles, or stuff with very little real content (the typical "How Waking Up At 7 AM Changed My Leadership Style And My Career Forever" kind of crap).
I don't personally care about organically building a brand for myself over the course of years. I don't want to write an article a week only to have it never see the light of day. All I want to do is jot down a few thoughts from time to time and have some people stumble upon it. Make the world a slightly better place.
Medium is perfect for that. The interface is beautiful, and it's far more likely that someone will stumble across my post on Medium than find my crappy blog.
That's Dave Winer, first bloger - http://scripting.com/liveblog/users/davewiner/2016/01/20/090...
I'm thinking about launching my own blog again but haven't decided what I really want to do.
IIRC, a while ago someone analyzed all the frontpage posts from the last year, and Medium wasn't particularly represented.
Basically I'm just pointing out that one of the reasons that we seem to congregate mostly on centralized web sites is that they're extremely convenient in specific ways: you already have the client on all of your devices, etc.
Anyone who's serious about creative control is operating their own blog. I think Twitter and Facebook's biggest contribution to social media will be the eventual resurgence of private blogs and RSS.
Ask any author of thousands of 'We reimplemented something in Go, Rust and Node.js'.
Speed isn't everything. Stability and Security are arguably more important.
I think there are developer concerns as well, when considering new or alternative languages and platforms.
Wordpress is presently king, as it comes to both blogging platforms and CMS. There are many reasons for this, and I doubt it will change anytime soon because it has momentum now as well. WP is built using PHP of course, and I've heard lots of developers say PHP is terrible.
But I also don't like to write in markdown and yaml and compile into static site and post it on GitHub so I recently moved backto blogger but I still blog on medium too. https://justruky.blogspot.com
I suspect a lot of other people are the same way. They don't want to set up another website for content they consider irrelevant to their main business/hobby.
I looked at moving to jekyll recently since it was getting a lot of press. But felt it was too much work(I would rather work on other things), and wordpress was easier to use and has plugins. I expect people use medium for the same reason
It's really the new blogger.
Also, the parallax image scrolling stuff gets old quickly.
To me it doesn't look like the FLOSS people are on it but rather a bunch of marketing types. Usually the new startup of the month has its company blog on it. Fashionable javascript library of the week too. Or is that just because most links I see published here are for this kind of use?