Introducing Ⓜ️ Meddler!

Two of the best features of Medium are the fact you can [export your email subscribers list](https://medium.com/dancing-elephants-press/how-to-export-your-e-mail-subscribers-from-medium-f55c9f1ef6ab) and [export your entire account, including your writing](https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/115004745787-Export-your-account-data). Why are these two of the best features? Because this means that, at anytime, you can take both your work and audience to another platform.

What happens when platforms _don't_ offer this? When Vine shut down in 2017, creators lost years of work overnight. When Yahoo acquired and then killed Geocities, [an estimated 38 million user-built pages vanished](https://computerhistory.org/blog/a-tale-of-deleted-cities/). More recently, platforms like Cohost and Revue closed with limited or no export options. Even Substack's export gives you a basic CSV, which is not a simple plug-and-play for your new blog. Medium, to its credit, lets you take your data with you.

The problem is, though, the export of your work? **For anybody that's used the export feature, they know it has a few issues.** Medium provides a GDPR-compliant data export in the form of a `.zip` archive containing HTML files.

While this preserves content, the format is:

* **Not portable**: files are single-page HTML documents with inline CSS and Medium-specific class names. * **Noisy**: includes Medium's presentation layer (`graf--`, `section--`, `markup--` CSS classes), making content reuse difficult. * **Scattered**: metadata like publish date, canonical URL, subtitle, and author are embedded in the HTML footer and header, not structured as data.

And, most importantly for me, the files are not SSG-ready. No YAML, TOML, or JSON front matter, and no clean Markdown body.

I'm somebody who's been an advocate of the [IndieWeb](http://indieweb.org/) for quite awhile now. And so I decided to use my skills as a developer to solve this issue myself.

So, I created [**Ⓜ️ Meddler**](https://meddler.fyi/), a command-line tool and website that will take the .ZIP of your export that Medium gives you and turn it into clean, portable Markdown formats for [Jekyll](https://jekyllrb.com/), [Hugo](https://gohugo.io/), [Eleventy](https://11ty.dev/), or [Astro.js](https://astro.build/).

What does this mean? That you can migrate your body of work to your own independent JAMstack blog anytime. You have your blog as a repository on GitHub, [GitLab](https://gitlab.com/), or [CodeBerg](https://codeberg.org/) and host it on a platform like [Netlify](https://www.netlify.com/) or [Vercel](https://vercel.com/) and wire to a domain from [Porkbun](https://porkbun.com/) or other provider. This means you're completely platform-independent. You own and control every aspect of your digital onlin