The question is: will Substack continue to be better than Medium, or are they just temporarily better than Medium because they haven't been around long enough to have to face some of the medium-run (no pun intended) challenges that made Medium what it is today?
Embedding third party services may go against the values of some Richard Stallman types, for me however it enables me to host behind cloudflare with a $5 a month digital ocean droplet and not have to worry about getting hugged to death. I can live with the tradeoff.
I stand corrected, not sure why i was under impression gifs dont work.
But as I said, it's unfortunate that comments sound and video have to be hosted externally.
In my mind , my domain is where I make the rules.
I do not want my self-hosted blog to be subject to flavour-of-the-month demonetisation, copyright and censorship of like 5 different teams. Think of youtube banning any video mentioning corvid.