Saving my stuff from Medium

As it appears, Medium is starting to use some Dark UX Patterns to paywall content. There have been several false alarms (accidental paywalling, "build my brand" hipsterism etc.) earlier, but it seems they are now all-in on their desperate monetization attempts.

Here's what I did to secure my stuff:

• Exported the zip file of all posts from Medium Settings UI

• Copied the "posts" folder from the zip (bunch of html files) to
  my github repo

• Converted them to markdown for easy reading on github with medium-2-md and npx:
  

$ npx medium-2-md convertLocal html/

This emitted a bunch of markdown files in a new directory. I deleted all the blog comments (nobody wants to read those!) and pushed the files to github, for easy reading. Here's an example blog post

All the gists (i.e. code snippets) are still missing from the markdown versions - so some scripting work remains to be done before pushing them elsewhere.

What didn't work

dev.to offers a way to import content from Medium through RSS feeds. In the spirit of dark patterns, Medium's RSS feed only has a few most recent articles (example here) so I abandoned that path.

Migrating to dev.to?

As it appears, dev.to is fast as heck. Pages practically load before you click them, so you manage to skim more posts per minute. I'll probably push all of these posts there once the preparation work is ready.

The first step though was to move everything to a public static hosting site (github). Now, Medium can go tits-up tomorrow for all I care!