I don’t know if it’s a good alternative, but I blog on GitHub using GitHub Pages. It’s a minimalist experience: I use Markdown (optional), and I have my own domain (critical!)

If they ever shutter the service, it is very easy to generate all the HTML pages with Jekyll, and then throw them up on a static host.

Every single one of Medium’s discoverability and traffic benefits feel like Faustian bargains to me, so I am not going there.

The last time I experimented with publishing in a walled garden was Posterous, mostly because they were a YCombinator startup at a time when that wasn’t some kind of golden ticket, and I wanted to make a gesture of support for them and for YCombinator.

Posterous shuttered, and I republished my work using GitHub Pages, but all the old urls broke, and I’m never doing that again.