What WordPress & Medium could have been?

https://www.flickr.com/photos/will-lion/2958508813/i

For ages I’ve wondered if WordPress was going to do something more decentralised/interesting with all those blogs loosely connected using WordPress?

The answer seems to be no, which is a crying shame but I recently noticed Standardnotes, added a new sub-service which seems closer to what I imagined from WordPress

We’ve put a lot of work into our note sharing platform called Listed. Listed allows you to publish and share notes directly from the Standard Notes web and desktop app. Best of all, it allows readers to subscribe to your new posts. Your subscribers are immediately notified by email any time you publish a new post. Unlike Medium, Listed allows you to own your content source, and have a more direct communication channel with your readers.

You can imagine this could be a neat way to keep a group of people connected, outside the prying eyes of a centralised service. For example it could be a neat email mailing system like mail chimp. Imagine something like NTK in this way?

Ok so listed is still in early days but theres some interesting decentralised blogging systems like Steemit which are doing something different with the community of writers.

Is Medium doing what WordPress dreamed about?

Always wondered if WordPress is missing out to Medium.

Medium is becoming the preferred social platform for thoughtful commentary, provocative essays, and blockbuster enterprise journalism from independent and commercial publishers seeking to instigate meaningful conversations on topics of substance, interest, and import. Here, these conversations push thinking forward where it matters and drive real impact in the world.

Distributed conversations is something I thought WordPress was up to a long while ago. Its certainly easier when you own the platform and can make sweeping changes. Have a look at the way twitter closed off API access to 3rd party apps and services because they wanted to monetize there (literately) platform.

Its what makes me suspect of sinking time and my own thoughts into platforms like Medium and Slack. Yes they can do things which others can’t do currently…

…But I remember platforms like Medium and Slack are not open (even with the XMPP and IRC gateways) and there is a very bad side to this. Chris Messina tweeted recently about a new wordpress move in the middle of the slack fall out

Unfortunately I can’t install Calypso as its OSX only at the moment but its open and theres a hope someone will create a Linux client or even a Chrome/Firefox app?

Maybe WordPress will ultimately show Medium how to do distributed conversations, but in a open way, after all.

As for Slack… I’m still not sure, but I am using it via XMPP instead.