Great post Kin. Personally, I have really enjoyed digging into the #IndieWeb and taking my blogging and experience with –domains even further. One of my frustrations with Medium is the lack of webmentions. I can understand why – all about the eyeballs – and I do not agree. Like yourself, there are some random posts I POSSE there, but most of the time stay away.
The other half of the conversation is the functionality provided on Medium. If people want ‘annotations’, they can use things like Hypothes.is, if they want to provide the options to link, they can add fragmentions, while there are many themes that provide similar look and feel. To be honest, I think that Hackeducation.com is one of the cleanest reading experiences.
Although third-party applications make it ‘easy’ to sharecrop, the question is at what cost?