Changing Medium Login Methods

LoopedNetwork
4 min readApr 25, 2022

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This post can be categorized under “Things so simple they shouldn’t require a blog post”, but given the amount of time I just spent scratching my head over this, I figured someone else could easily find themselves in the same boat. If nothing else, it gives me an excuse to create yet another blog post.

I have a blog over at Medium that I used for a period of time prior to creating this one on Write.as. Medium is actually where I moved my content to when I decided to ditch WordPress, which is what I used when I decided to ditch Squarespace, which is what I had moved to when I didn’t have enough web design chops to keep using Hugo for what I needed. Suffice to say, that content has shuffled around quite a bit. Learning Hugo properly is also still on my radar (I have a copy of Hugo In Action which I pre-ordered, and the final version of the book was just released), though I don’t see that supplanting this blog any time soon.

I had briefly thought about trying to move all of my old content over here, but ultimately I was looking for something of a fresh start with this blog. However, I don’t want to lose several years’ worth of posts or cut off my own access to them — there’s honestly some useful material there that I still find myself referencing periodically — hence why I kept the Medium account around rather than deleting it. I don’t plan to go back to using Medium, but I’d prefer to keep the account accessible just in case. However, I created that particular account by authenticating to Medium via Twitter. That rapidly became something of a conundrum — or so I thought — when I finally decided today to nuke all of my Twitter accounts in light of who just acquired the company. I needed to swap my Medium login from Twitter to something different, preferably just a username/email address and password. However, looking at the Medium settings didn’t show me any means by which to do this:

After digging through the other settings convinced I had to be missing something, I found no options for setting up another authentication method. I took to the Internet, but searches for things like…

medium switch from twitter authentication

… and…

medium blog change authentication

… gave me nothing relevant. Still in the settings of my Medium account, I clicked the button under Connections to unlink my Twitter account, thinking this would prompt me to pick a different authentication method. Instead, it happily permitted me to unlink my account with no further input.

The plot thickens. While poring through the Settings, I also noticed that under the Email settings, I did have an email address populated. This is the address which Medium sends notification to. I was curious as to what would happen if I attempted to log in via email and then initiate a forgotten password request. Not wanting to risk logging out while Twitter was unlinked lest I accidentally lock myself out of the account (I could always restore Twitter within 30 days, but I really didn’t want to go through that), I opened a private browser instance and went over to Medium.

Medium offers up quite the list of login options; they clearly want to direct people to use authentication other than directly through them, and I would soon realize just how true that was.

I clicked email and was briefly surprised there wasn’t an option for a forgotten password before I realized it was because there is no password with this method; Medium simply emails you a magic link you click on.

As you might guess, it was right around this point that I started to feel like a bit of an idiot. If you have an email address associated with your Medium account, you can always just log in by clicking the email option and receiving a magic link to your inbox… there isn’t any email address and password authentication mechanism in the site.

Originally published at https://borked.sh on April 25, 2022.

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LoopedNetwork
LoopedNetwork

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