Yes, but it’s still a walled garden. I love Medium; I really do. Medium currently offers no way for me to publish on my own site using my own tools and keep the conversation there while still allowing the content and the conversation to be pushed or published to Medium where I can engage the network.

Some smart people are working on solutions that hook various publishing tools together, but nowhere in these hooks are ways to connect to Medium. If I want to use Medium as a network and publishing channel, I must either copy and paste and publish a second time here at Medium, or I must treat Medium as a publish-first channel.

Ideally, I’d like to publish on my own site and push it to Medium using WebMentions or some other API hook, and then when the conversation happens either at Medium or at my own site it gets pushed back to my site or publication. This is what I think of when someone says “Medium is a network”.