Medium’s me.dm Mastodon Server Opens Up

Alex Benzer, director of product at Medium:

A few weeks ago, we announced that Medium is embracing short-form writing by launching our very own Mastodon server at me.dm. Starting today, we’re opening up me.dm access for our member community. If you’re a Medium member, you can create an account on me.dm.

It’s fascinating to see Medium enter the Mastodon game. For one thing, amongst Medium’s co-founders are Ev Williams (who also served as Medium’s CEO for most of its existence) and Biz Stone — two people who were at Twitter at the beginning. Williams also served as one of Twitter’s numerous CEOs.

Second, Medium is a commercial company, having raised, according to CrunchBase, $163 million (so far). To my knowledge no company with such resources has started a public Mastodon instance to date. I am very uncomfortable with the fact that nearly all Mastodon servers are free-to-use volunteer efforts, funded by voluntary donations. That’s not sustainable. I suspect a lot of Mastodon servers that seem to be thriving today won’t be around in 5 years, taking all of their posts with them. I don’t feel great about the fact that Medium is venture-backed, either, but they do charge $5/month or $50/year for a membership. I like paying for the services I use. Twitter is free to use and look how that’s gone.

Third, “me.dm” is a cool-ass domain name. If I weren’t already all-in with my @[email protected] account, I’d be tempted to start here. As every good introduction to Mastodon makes clear, it’s confusing and tricky to choose which server to sign up on. Medium’s strikes me as a good one.

★ Monday, 6 March 2023