Bypass Medium Paywall - Working late 2023 - Greasy Fork, Violentmonkey, Tampermonkey - Click the RAW button to install

medium.user.js

// ==UserScript==
// @name        Medium Paywall Bypass
// @namespace   Violentmonkey Scripts
// @run-at      document-start
// @match       *://*.medium.com/*
// @match       *://medium.com/*
// @match       *://*/*
// @grant       none
// @version     2.3
// @inject-into content
// @updateURL   https://gist.githubusercontent.com/mathix420/e0604ab0e916622972372711d2829555/raw/medium.user.js
// @downloadURL https://gist.githubusercontent.com/mathix420/e0604ab0e916622972372711d2829555/raw/medium.user.js
// @website     https://freedium.cfd
// @author      Mathix420, ZhymabekRoman
// @description Don't forget to remove `@match` filters you don't want.
// ==/UserScript==

// initCall is telling us if we need to inject the title observer
function mediumRedirecter(initCall = false) {
  // I miss typescript...
  const mediumPostUrlProperty = ((document.head || {}).querySelector ? document.head.querySelector('meta[property="al:android:url"]') : {}) || {}

  if (
      // Allow seeing original articles that were already redirected to freedium.
      !window.location.href.endsWith('#bypass') &&
      // Do not redirect when editing on medium.
      !window.location.href.includes("/edit?source=") &&
      // Detect if we are on a medium website (regardless of the domain)
      (mediumPostUrlProperty.content && mediumPostUrlProperty.content.includes('medium://p/'))
    ) {
    window.location.href = 'https://freedium.cfd/' + window.location.href;
  } else if (initCall && /(.*\.|^)medium\.com$/.test(window.location.host)) {
    new MutationObserver(function(mutations) {
      if (mutations[0].target.textContent) mediumRedirecter();
    }).observe(
        document.querySelector('title'),
        { subtree: true, characterData: true, childList: true }
    );
  }
}

mediumRedirecter(true);

Thanks all Freedium-cfd members!

@mathix420 Can you fix this error? Sometimes this error appears:

TypeError: can't access property "querySelector", document.head is null

@ZhymabekRoman I've fixed the type error, but if the head tag is missing it won't be able to detect the medium page before js load.
Sorry for the delay, I got lot of work these days!

@mathix420 Thank you! I really appreciate your efforts

I think you can simplify the below lines using Optional chaining (?.):

First, completely remove

- const mediumPostUrlProperty = ((document.head || {}).querySelector ? document.head.querySelector('meta[property="al:android:url"]') : {}) || {}

Then inside the first if statement, replace

- (mediumPostUrlProperty.content && mediumPostUrlProperty.content.includes('medium://p/'))
+ document.head?.querySelector('meta[property="al:android:url"]')?.content?.includes('medium://p/')

Personally, I'm not going to use // @match *://*/*. So I put this into a detectMediumWebsite() function and commented it out.

Thanks for your work.

P.S. By the way, are you sure that the MutationObserver is actually registered?

Can you remove? // @match *://*/*

do not make sense to be for all sites.

do not make sense to be for all sites.

Medium has too many sub-domains

Medium has too many sub-domains

// @match *://*.medium.com/* Should be enough for matching sub-domains.

Should be enough for matching sub-domains.

What about devopsquare.com, blog.devops.dev, blog.stackademic.com, ai.plainenglish.io, bettermarketing.pub and etc? It's impossible for us to say how many Medium sites there are.

You are right. I didn't know those type of sites exist. But they are just different domains, technically speaking.

To recap:
// @match *://*.medium.com/* Is enough for matching sub-domains.
// @match *://*/* Is needed for matching any possible domain who happens to be a Medium website.

freedium is offline so unfortunately this script doesn't work anymore for now

All works as expected. Yeah, we made some codebase refactor, to improve speed and some big bug fixes. And there were some minor downtimes.