You published something on Medium three years ago. A friend shares the link. They tap it, and instead of your words, they see a full-screen interstitial: “Become a member to read this story.” Your friend closes the tab.

Your writing is behind a paywall you don’t remember choosing.

This happens to thousands of writers. Medium changed the rules after you showed up. Posts that were free became metered. The algorithm shifted to favor paying members reading paying members. Your old posts now serve one purpose: converting your readers into Medium’s subscribers.

You didn’t agree to this. But leaving feels hard because your archive is there, your stats are there, and the export sounds painful.

It’s less painful than you think.

#What Medium Actually Became

Medium started as a beautiful place to write. Clean editor, built-in audience, instant distribution. The deal was clear: you bring the writing, they bring the readers.

Then the deal changed. Medium needed revenue, so they built a paywall. Fair enough — businesses need money. But the paywall crept around your content by default — a pre-checked box at publish time that many writers never noticed. Posts you wrote for the open web were now gated. The “become a member” screen sits between your words and anyone who wants to read them.

The algorithm followed the money. Posts from Partner Program members get more distribution. Posts outside the paywall get less. Medium’s incentive is to keep readers inside Medium, not to send them to your writing.

This isn’t malice. It’s a platform doing what platforms do: optimizing for their survival, not yours.

#How to Get Your Writing Out

Go to Medium. Click your profile picture, open Settings, and look for “Download your information.” Request the export.

Medium emails you a link. You download a zip file. Inside: a folder of HTML files. One per post, plus some metadata.

Here’s where it gets real.

The HTML is not clean. It’s Medium’s rendering markup — nested divs, inline styles, Medium-specific class names. Images reference Medium’s CDN (miro.medium.com). If Medium ever changes those URLs or takes them down, your images disappear.

You don’t get markdown. You don’t get plain text. You get a snapshot of what Medium’s renderer produced, frozen in HTML that only looks right inside Medium’s CSS.

This is the practical reality of “you own your content.” The words are technically yours. The format is theirs.

#Turning HTML Into Something Usable

The first thing you’ll want to do is convert those HTML files to markdown. Pandoc does this well enough:

pandoc my-medium-post.html -f html -t markdown -o my-medium-post.md

The output won’t be perfect. You’ll get some artifacts — extra line breaks, weird formatting around embedded content, image references still pointing to Medium’s CDN. Plan to spend 10–15 minutes per post cleaning up the ones you care about. For a back catalog of 50 posts, maybe pick the 10 that still matter and let the rest exist as-is.

For images, download them. Don’t leave them on Medium’s CDN. A simple script can pull every image URL from your posts and save them locally. Or do it by hand for the posts that matter — there’s something clarifying about deciding which of your old posts are worth the effort.

#Where to Go Next

You have markdown files. Now what?

Self-host with Hugo or Jekyll. Full control. Free hosting on GitHub Pages or Netlify. The tradeoff: you need to pick a theme, configure a build pipeline, and maintain the setup. If you’re comfortable with git and a terminal, this is the most powerful option. If the phrase “build pipeline” makes you tired, keep reading.

Ghost. Has a Medium import tool that handles some of the conversion. Managed hosting starts at $18 a month. Good editor, good design, built-in newsletters. You own the content more than on Medium, but you’re still inside a CMS — your posts live in Ghost’s database, not as files on your computer.

Substack. Easy to set up, built-in audience tools, free to start. But you’re trading one platform for another. Substack has its own algorithm, its own incentives, its own decisions about what to promote. The writing is easier to export than Medium (you get a CSV), but your subscriber relationships still live on Substack’s infrastructure. Different tradeoffs, same fundamental dependency.

File-based publishing. Your markdown files live in a folder you control — Dropbox, iCloud, your hard drive. A tool like FolderPress turns that folder into a website. The files are yours before, during, and after. No database. No CMS. No export process because there’s nothing to export from. You’re already holding the files.

Each option is legitimate. The right one depends on how much control you want versus how much setup you’ll tolerate.

#What You’ll Lose

I should be honest about this.

Medium has distribution. When you publish on Medium, their algorithm puts your writing in front of people who might care. That’s real, and it’s hard to replace. Building an audience on your own domain means starting from scratch — SEO, social sharing, word of mouth, newsletters. It’s slower. Much slower.

You’ll lose your stats. Years of views, reads, claps. Those numbers felt meaningful, but they were Medium’s metrics about Medium’s audience. They don’t transfer because they were never really yours.

You’ll lose the social features. Followers, highlights, responses. The community that exists inside Medium stays inside Medium.

And you’ll lose the editor. Medium’s editor is genuinely good. Clean, focused, well-designed. Whatever you move to will feel different, possibly worse at first.

#What You’ll Gain

Your words in files you can read with any text editor. No login required. No internet required.

A URL you control. Your domain, your pages, no interstitials between your reader and your writing.

Independence from someone else’s business decisions. Medium will keep changing — the algorithm, the paywall rules, the editor, the economics. None of those changes will touch your writing if your writing isn’t on Medium.

The ability to leave again. If your next platform doesn’t work out, you pick up your markdown files and go. No export process. No format conversion. The exit is as easy as the entrance.

#The Real Calculation

Leaving Medium isn’t free. You give up distribution and convenience. You take on the work of building your own readership.

But staying isn’t free either. Every month you stay, you write more words on a platform that can change the terms whenever it wants. Your archive gets deeper. The switching cost gets higher. The paywall sits between your writing and anyone who doesn’t pay Medium $5 a month.

The question isn’t whether Medium is bad. It’s whether you want your writing to depend on decisions you don’t make.

If the answer is no, the mechanics are straightforward. Export, convert, pick a home. The hard part isn’t technical. The hard part is accepting that distribution was never yours to keep — and that owning your words means building your own path to readers.

That’s harder. It’s also yours.