I agree, bear is great. I miss it - I no longer have an iPhone and am Windows dependent :-(. I have made the best use of OneNote as I can - but the ease of categorisation of thoughts within the bear app will always be the best imo.
I want to love Joplin (open source! markdown!) but I just can't get past how ugly it is. Its iPhone app is just a horrendous mishmash of colors and non-native UI elements.
I have even stronger feelings about Roam though. Notion is "better" than just abt anything else like it, whereas Roam is different -- there is nothing else like it.
I wish Notion had a self-hosted version. I store a lot of things in Joplin (previously Evernote) that I'm just not comfortable having on 3rd party servers :(
Joplin is cool because you can add your own css to customize the desktop app. I realize not every is interested in doing that, but I’ve been an advocate once I tweaked the styles to my liking [0]. Agree with you that the mobile app styles are very rough, but the community is very active and open to suggestions / improvements [1].
I mean, if they wanted to reserve the use of this common animal name across all industries, that’d be ridiculous, but it would seem pretty reasonable to worry about confusion between a cloud notes app and a cloud blog app. Certainly easier to think about it now than if this service takes off.
These are two different products. Blogging != note taking. And it doesn't seem like there's malicious intent. You can't use a generic name and expect others not to come up with the same idea.
Blogging !== note-taking, but you could definitely make the argument that a blog post is semantically a public note.
Apple, Fox, Shell, Target...any of these generic words ring a bell?
I’m sure there was no malicious intent, and it’s very possible that these two products will coexist without any further issue.
But as evidenced in this very thread there is the potential for confusion, which is the whole point of trademarks, and the reason why I’d have an easier time incorporating “Apple Surfboards“ than I would “Apple Keyboards”.
I saw the headline and immediately assumed it was an app by the same Bear company. I would guess that almost every single Bear Notes user would have the same reaction.
Is it known among non mac/ios users? I've never heard of it before. Not to mention that by using such a generic name you're just begging for collisions.
I appreciate the no-bs lightweight website sentiment as much as anyone, but I think there's also something to be said about drastically improving readability with some line-height and font styling.
Georgia is a decent serif that will typically be available.
Or just `font-family: serif` which will most commonly be Times New Roman or similar, but will be whatever we prefer for those few of us that set the default fonts.
oh interesting! Yeah I actually hadn't been to their landing page in a long time, totally agree with your there (and feel like it doesn't do their actual blog product justice - to my tastes at least their blogs are perfect, low-key but elegant and very readable).
write.as does support custom CSS and JS, so you can, in theory, make look however you want. It isn't quite as light as Bear is, but it's no Medium either.
It looks simple, but isn't technically minimalistic with 77KB .css and loaded fonts. The first page load was actually visibly slow with the fonts repainting in a different typeface.
Why have the same name that is linked with a well known app. 1. it confuses the user 2. No unique branding as this question is going to crop up again and again. Why the author wants to compete with this name ? Just curious
You can't self host it, otherwise you'd be better off writing your own basic HTML pages or using a static site generator. You can check out the source code on github though https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog
Love to see Django apps out in the wild! It might be worth adding a COPYRIGHT file to the repo, to clarify if we do or do not have the right to run this software on our own.
> You can't self host it, otherwise you'd be better off writing your own basic HTML pages or using a static site generator. You can check out the source code on github though https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog
Good idea but not sure if I would call it a blog hosting platform. My understanding is that it hosts a single parsed markdown file on a subdomain of my choosing.
I tried to get a better domain. I tried so hard. tiny.blog, bare.blog, bear.blog, petite.blog, smol.site, etc, etc.... Small domains are competitive if you're on a shoestring budget :P
I've not worked out when firefox reader view is visible and when it isn't, but for this blog it isn't, which is a shame because I find the chosen font unreadable.
In a nutshell, the paragraphs (<p> tags) do not contain enough text to contribute to the readability score. Reader view heuristics rewards paragraphs of at least 140 characters.
The comparisons are all to large content management systems. However this seems like a better fit for static site generators. Would it be better to compare to Jekyll, Hugo, etc?
Sure, serving static files will always be the fastest, but this is for people looking for a service like Medium, or Blogger, where there's no need to handle anything locally.
to be clear, you don't _need_ to do anything locally. It's possible to use static blogs without touching your site and there are lots of competing tools out there that will give you a web front end to your static blog.
For example. I use Hugo, with Forestry.io and don't have to touch my filesystem (or even my personal computer) to blog. I just go to a web page like all the CMS blogs.
I'm self-hosting rather than using something like netifly so the setup was a bit more geeky BUT it's totally doable and doesn't have to be tooo geeky.
Since HN seems to be on a blog-kick lately, I'll repost the idea that I'm still waiting for someone to build:
A blogverse of some kind that allows for algorithmic discoverability & aggregation (ala Medium) without the bullshit/terrible UX.
The real value proposition of Medium is that a well-made aggregator benefits readers and writers alike. Readers find more authors they like, writers find more audience. There are also network effects with shared comment logins, inter-blog citations, etc.
I really think a blogging renaissance is waiting to happen. These ingredients plus a business model not reliant on ads, massive js overhead, and other nonsense could jumpstart it.
What I want is a Yahoo-style directory for blogs. Blog owners can put their blog in exactly one category. Users can star the blogs they like, similar to GitHub, and identify the low quality click generators/marketing blogs.
I personally find Medium to be a horrible way to find content. Maybe it works for new content, if that's what you're after.
The success of search engines prompted Yahoo to ditch its original product (the curation and categorization of the web) in favor of its competitors automated (and thereby game-able) crawl-index-search approaches.
Now, decades later, there seems to be a shared yearning for the curated web, perhaps in response to the low signal:noise ratio of search. Isn't it funny, how the world works in cycles?
Curated search (domains chosen by a set of humans with no financial conflicts of interests, with some grokkable categorization and full-text search) might be the nirvana we're searching for. I think the GP has a point, that the need for a sustaining business model tends to strongly conflict with this equilibrium.
Wikipedia has sort of evolved to partially fill this niche, but it periodically struggles with funding. I agree there's not a similar filling for blogs, yet: maybe GitHub will evolve there, but it will face the same pressure of other platforms owned by public for-profit companies.
> Curated search (domains chosen by a set of humans with no financial conflicts of interests, with some grokkable categorization and full-text search) might be the nirvana we're searching for.
Moving away from ads towards human-centric curation is a primary design feature of the decentralized web.
I was probably one of the last users of their original directory. It was my browser homepage until the day they removed it.
I eventually stopped using it because it didn't keep up. These days, search is for many purposes completely useless. If I want to find someone to do work on my house, the last place I'll go is Google. It's truly amazing just how worthless the results are. You'll get results from Michigan and Florida and Oregon all for the same search, in the same town, and claiming to be a local business. I imagine it's a fraud-ridden garbage dump if you actually try to use Google to find businesses to do work for you.
On the topic of blogs - not completely useless, but overrun with shallow, uninformative trash posts by SEO experts. I think Google is more vulnerable now than at any time in the past 20 years.
> You'll get results from Michigan and Florida and Oregon all for the same search, in the same town, and claiming to be a local business.
It's worse if you are non-US. Google seems to think that anywhere in the UK is local to me for businesses, and that's AFTER I've added loads of filters to stop American results from showing.
> Curated search (domains chosen by a set of humans with no financial conflicts of interests,
The problem is that the second it becomes an authoritative source, every spammer and marketer will start trying to game it, just like the SEO does now. Corruption is a huge problem with that approach. I'm old enough to remember how much influence yahoo categories editors had, and that many have asked for money to include you in the list, or they would use the position to simply block all the competition to their own sites. Same story is happening with Wikipedia, just it's more about personal wars and agendas instead of straight down racketeering.
Yeah, this is/was a real problem, and I don’t know if there’s a perfect solution. Anecdotally, @dang and friends do a very good job “editing” hn. They’re presumably paid well for their job, and seem to be passionate about their roles (thank you!).
I feel like the key to good curation might be good moderation. In other words, allow people to submit links to be on the list, but there must be humans to control for SEO and marketing spam (like there is on HN). Making those humans incorruptible is hard but maybe not impossible, if they’re well compensated and hired thoughtfully.
That being said, I’m doubtful that such a strategy of moderation would scale to hundreds of thousands (or tens of millions, shudder) of active voters and submitters. At some point, it would need to federate, with different mods owning different lists, and it would be difficult to avoid a devolution into Reddit.
Fun anecdote -- in the late 90s I maintained several web sites (personal/hobby ones) and by far the best source of traffic for them was Yahoo directory pages. I didn't know the SEO game (if there was even one at the time) and while search engines brought a small amount of traffic, majority of visitors came from Yahoo. When I launched a new hobby site, the goto marketing plan was to apply to add it to Yahoo. Granted, we're talking about the range of dozens to maybe a hundred or two visitors a day, so it's not web scale :)
I run a Yahoo-style directory for blogs and articles I find: https://href.cool/. I'd personally like to see more personal directories rather than big monolithic directories of everything - those tend to collect spam.
Well, it’s my opinion that technology can’t solve the discovery problem. I know we want it to. But at some point the technology has to evaluate the content. It can’t - so technology gives the content to humans to evaluate. However, it can’t evaluate the humans’ capabilities. :/
You discover a directory like mine just as you would discover any other link, johntash - by coming across it as you read, perhaps on Hacker News. If there were more directories, they would be easier to discover. They happen to be richer discovery points than a normal blog or profile page.
Medium has a revenue sharing thing where a medium pro users fees are allocated to write depending on what the user reads. I don't know anyone who has medium pro though.
A question for you (and everyone): how important do you think it is that the algorithmic discoverability be married to a single platform/aggregator? What if you just had better algorithmic discoverability across all writing on the internet, regardless of where it's hosted?
I get that that would miss some of the benefits you mention (shared comment logins for example) but I'm wondering if people think it would capture 80% of the same benefits or, like, <50%. And I don't think for the discoverability to work there's any innate reason it has to be restricted to a single blogging platform.
Personally, I've started seeing algorithmic discoverability as an anti-feature that mainly serves the interests of the attention economy.
For my part, I want more long-form, thoughtful articles that offer an enriching read. Not only have we got a good decade or two's worth of experience showing that no algorithmic discovery system ever favors that kind of thing over content that's morally equivalent to Five Minute Crafts, but I've got a couple decades' worth of experience telling me that, since long-form bloggers tend to link each other quite a lot, never needed an algorithm to help me with discovery in the first place.
If I want anything, it's algorithmic filtering: Take the feeds I'm already subscribed to, and filter out the stuff that I tend to skip over without reading. Because my blog feed already delivers me a couple hours' worth of reading a day, so I can afford to be choosy.
Yeah, this is very true. I may have overstated my initial idea. When I think more about it, maybe what I'm looking for is handcrafted curation, but that let's anyone share their curation speccs and discover relevant things to curate from. To me, that suggests some kind of algorithmic component, maybe in the form of search, voting, etc., but I wouldn't necessarily want the whole thing driven by either machine or mob.
Like stitchfix, but for magazine articles, blog posts and books. I might be cynical, but I think humans do this much better than any algorithm I've ever seen. :)
For myself, I usually read in two "phases". I collect material from sources that are usually high quality for me, and do some superficial skimming to trim out the content I don't particularly care for.
Later, when I'm more "in the mood" or have a long period of time, I pop() and read(). The stack gets pretty large at times, but it only takes a couple days of vacation to blow through most of it. If I pass over something in the stack enough times, it gets free()'d.
I don't know if I'd trust an algorithm to do either of these stages for me. I'd trust an algorithm provide input to phase (1), but never to replace phase (1).
> If I want anything, it's algorithmic filtering: Take the feeds I'm already subscribed to, and filter out the stuff that I tend to skip over without reading. Because my blog feed already delivers me a couple hours' worth of reading a day, so I can afford to be choosy.
"All writing" is probably too broad, but I think there's an interesting "meet-in-the-middle" solution where the site is a kind of syndication machine that is creating traffic between separately hosted blogs.
I appreciate people wanting to own their own writing, having permanence of data assured, etc. so this is probably worth thinking about. At the same time, many outside the tech world don't want the overhead of hosting or setting up their own blog.
I wonder if a hybrid would be best? Host yourself option or host-by-us option, with a pricing structure that accords.
The point is really to maximize ones ability to traverse between writers on subjects that interest you, so the physical location of the data is secondary.
Personally, many of my good reading suggestions come from a trusted network. I trust a few people to only recommend content of a type that is high-quality and interesting to me.
I do think it's important to have an element of discoverability for new content (otherwise there's no real way for a writer to bootstrap into visibility), but I think an important element is being able to follow and trust content aggregators. Maybe algorithmic curation will be trustable in a decade, but right now it feels too gameable, and too easy to degenerate into thinkbait.
I also felt that I value personal recommendations much more than from huge aggregators or algorithms. I wanted to give these 1-to-1 recommendations a better vehicle than WhatsApp. So I created an app for it: https://onelink.to/listo
It's still early, but already usable.
I tend to be skeptical that "$x but better" is a viable business in the VC era or maybe on the internet at all. On the internet, where publishing is easy, but distribution is hard, it seems like there's already a natural tendency toward winner-takes-all. Execution matters somewhat, but at some point, I think it comes down to who can throw more capital at the problem.
I'm interested in this problem space, because current social media tools leave me somewhat dissatisfied. But I'm also skeptical about how you'd build it successfully.
Sure thing. Going to open source it after it's done. I have been thinking of using activity pub and making discovery decentralized so people can host their own curation and share with each other.
I don't even want to have a medium.com account for their crappy UI and hostile paywalls, but I doubt those who use medium regularly actually discover new blogs.
HN is one of my primary sources to read new things, and I'm already blind to medium's footer read-more links.
- Bootstrapped with low overheads. No outside investment removes pressure to grow at all costs and the lapse on integrity that we see more of each day.
- No data lock-in. Export your posts in a single JSON file (containing Markdown + HTML versions) accompanied by all images.
- We're finishing up a big set of data portability / data respect features, which we plan to announce soon.
The aim is to build a community of capable people with a genuine interest in technology and attach a job board to the site. Companies can then pay to display their vacancies on the job board and users can take a look whenever they like. No popups, banners or any of that dodgy/spammy crap getting in between users and the reading/writing. In this age we see integrity towards our users as a differentiator.
Building it is fairly straightforward and fun. Some learnings we've gained in terms of 'jumpstarting' it:
- a lot of people are vehemently sceptical after the Medium debacle.
- creating a feed that prioritises good content without "censoring" dev spam or trivial posts is tricky when coming off a smaller user base. For example, upvotes can have outsized effects.
- getting regular volume of good content so that people use Able as source of news/inspiration/learning.
We've had some great posts from people but we need just that little bit more to get the flywheel going. As soon as someone posts something, activity on the site goes up but then dies down again. It's the classic building vs. promoting trade-off. However, we've chosen to get data portability and respect right first as we believe this is fundamental. We're wrapping that up now and then have loads of learnings and ideas we want write about.
We feel that same potential 'renaissance' you're talking about and this is how we want to try and activate it. If you feel inclined, have a look and let us know what you think.
Regarding the upvoting problem: Try using only downvotes and sort by downvotes*age. This should solve a lot of problems that usually come with upvoting systems, e.g. false negatives (good articles with bad score).
I don't think you can trademark a generic work like "Bear" .. so long as the author isn't using the logos from that app or conflating its brand, it should be fine (IANAL)
You absolutely can trademark a generic word for specific circumstances. That’s why I can’t set up a computer shop called Apple. It was also the subject of many lawsuits between Apple Computers and Apple Records.
Hosting fees are pretty negligible. If it becomes a burden, then I'll cross that bridge when I get there. Thing is, if enough people are using this to make me have to upgrade my hosting, that's a great problem to have.
Heads up: it doesn’t have no JavaScript at present, because Cloudflare’s email protection system is in place. (I hate that thing. It mangles non-email addresses all the time if they look even vaguely like an email address, e.g. a package with version number “foo@1.2.3”. Penalising users that disable JavaScript.)
https://herman.bearblog.dev/ contains a “Get in touch” mailto: link that gets ruined, and the following script is added:
As a site owner, forcing non-JS users to click through a CAPTCHA is worth it since I get zero spam as a result. It might not be appropriate here, but it's appropriate for most personal websites.
My email address, me@chrismorgan.info, has been widely promulgated for many years. I get about five spam messages a day, and occasionally 10–15 a day for a week or two. I average around one false negative per month, and have had two false positives in the last three years (and neither mattered—in fact I kinda agreed with the spam filter’s judgement in both cases).
My email is with Fastmail, so I know that no emails are mysteriously disappearing (which seems to happen with providers like Gmail)—either the server rejects the email (so the sender will be notified), or it ends up in my mailboxes somewhere.
So my own experience is that sharing your email address publicly is harmless and useful.
As mentioned in other replies--some small styling tweaks for readability would be useful and would literally only cost bytes (on the order of the x-clacks-overhead on the page...)
If you're focusing on an extremely small page size, I'd prefer an external static, cached stylesheet than inlining all styling on every page load. That and a less complicated email obfuscator. :-)
I'm surprised nobody has attempted to put the content in the URL yet (to display on a static page with styling using JS [needs a tag filter...] to insert an URL parameter into some node). It would accommodate at least 2KB of text, local caching and fast hosting all in one.
This has been done, iirc. I think it was HN where I saw it a couple years back. I couldn't find it today if I wanted to, but it's definitely been done.
I was always quite fascinated by the concept, but I suspect liability and lack of control over the content is a fatal issue and why nothing much seemed to come from it.
If someone makes a 'bad' page, which is inevitable, the domain with the hashify/shortly code would be held responsible and the only way the site owner could 'remove' the content would be to stop the service.
> Storing a document in a URL is nifty, but not terribly practical. Hashify uses the [bit.ly API][4] to shorten URLs from as many as 30,000 characters to just 20 or so. In essence, bit.ly acts as a document store! [1]
bit.ly et al. seem to be able to get away with being agnostic processors. I'm surprised there haven't been more stories about their services being abused.
Thinking through this, it seems like content-in-URL would work for a website with a single page or a small number of pages, but would limited by the fact that links from one content-in-URL page to another content-in-URL page require content from both pages to be encoded in the first page’s URL. If you have pages linking to pages linking to pages, this cascades into requiring content from all pages encoded in the home page URL.
I guess I'm a bit late to the party, but after reading your comment I hacked something together - https://x.rukin.me It's ugly and I haven't spent any time styling it or improving editor(it's just textarea) but it works as PoC.
Also I've started it before I read comments that hashify exists, otherwise I would probably not do it ;)
Compared to hashify:
- it uses zlib to compress data, so it can actually contain much more content(if it's repetitive)
- it also supports password encryption of the content (don't know why, but my friend said it would be cool)
- only supports markdown(no html) as I haven't found any good js lib for html sanitization on client side
I like this idea a lot and the design is wonderful. But, I would have liked to see a link to an example blog on the page just to see what the output looks like.
For anyone who is interested in this - it is great and you can export all your Apple notes.app stuff (inc images) with the mac app Exporter, then import into Bear.app.
I can't recommend Bear enough if you're using all Apple devices. I've used many note taking app but Bear is the only thing that gives me Markdown note taking + not getting in my way of writing. I especially like the infintely nested tag of Bear, such a time saver when you can drop a #hastag/anywhere/with/inifitely/nested/hierachy .
Disclamer: I'm not affliated with Bear in anyway, just a happy customer.
I used to use bear too until I discovered notion.so, now I use nothing else (also not affiliated with Notion or Bear, but used to use bear for everything)
Bear uses iCloud storage which has on multiple occasions trashed people's data during iOS beta periods. It's not "Bear Sync", it's just another iCloud beta sync problem. If you value your data, don't use iOS betas. It's that simple.
If they had the choice, many developers would disable their apps on beta devices because of issues like yours.
Of those it seems only telegra.ph has a good UI allowing easy link/photos embedding, and the result is really pleasing. All the others need to rely on a third party. Is it open-source ?
I'm slightly amused by the domain hacks, but also concerned about a few of the ccTLDs, especially when it comes to user generated content and blogging/opinions. For example, the leader of .ph routinely calls opponents gay, is not known for human rights or free speech, and I am curious how this might reflect on it.
I have the same concerns with user generated content in/on .de and their Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz law, the mandatory Posting an Impressum on your sites, etc.
I have seen bitly suspended before by Libya for merely providing redirects to content they don't like.
"the leader of the country represented by .us [...] threatens nuclear wars"
Why would that be controversial at all? Reagan won the cold war against the Soviet Union by calling them an evil empire and repeatedly talking about nuclear war. Kennedy was able to get the Soviets out of Cuba also by raising the spectre of nuclear war.
If I may, I would like to add my own Markblog to the list :-) It is basically a static site generator based on markdown files. (https://github.com/olaven/markblog)
Sans serifs are overused because they look better on low resolution screens. If you haven't had to use a low resolution screen in a while then you are one of the privileged few.
At small sizes, like 8–13px, sans-serifs look better than serifs. And user interfaces and websites used to be that size.
But for 16px and up, which is what websites of today use, serifs are perfectly fine even on 1× displays (though sure, they’ll look better still on higher-DPI displays, but so will sans-serifs).
I should clarify that it depends on the font. Sans-serifs tend to have fairly even stroke width, but serifs tend to have more variable stroke width, and if the thin is too thin, you get a terrible font. That’s a common shortcoming of serif fonts, and Garamond demonstrates that, being quite unsuitable for screen use below 20px, maybe even 24px. Others like Georgia don’t suffer that weakness.
Are you sure that "websites of today" use 16px or larger universally? HN appears to use 9pt Verdana, which I believe is equivalent to 12px on my Windows system if my math is correct.
Georgia is a terribly underrated font. I'm sure it's heavily hinted to look good at small sizes, but even at large sizes it has an elegance that is lacking in e.g. Times Roman.
This sounds like it ought to be a job for pixel-density media queries [1] in CSS. I doubt this happens often if ever though, because designers. Anyone seen this approach in the wild?
I guess I specifically mean the default browser serif font. There are sites that consciously choose a serif typeface to convey some sense of "we are serious content," but you may notice that none of them use the default browser serif font (except as a last-step fallback).
If I see default browser serif, my immediate thought is "either this is an amateur or something is broken."
You can visit https://upmath.me/ and on the preview side, choose `md`. You can get latex equation as SVG URL hosted on s2cms.ru CDN. It's pretty fast and supports any website that supports markdown+images without the need for MathJax or Katex. Example post here https://katr.bearblog.dev/latex/
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 272 ms ] threadNo affiliation, just a happy customer. :-)
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23236786
I have even stronger feelings about Roam though. Notion is "better" than just abt anything else like it, whereas Roam is different -- there is nothing else like it.
https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam
https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam-server
[0] https://github.com/amandamcg/joplin-theme [1] https://discourse.joplinapp.org/
If you set your iPhone to Japanese keyboard it comes with hundreds of these build in
Maybe they thought the same way as you do :)
I actually tried to use Bear as a MD-based publisher to my WP blog, and it just ran aground badly.
[0] https://github.com/rizsotto/Bear
I wonder if trademark would kick in later for this.
Apple, Fox, Shell, Target...any of these generic words ring a bell?
I’m sure there was no malicious intent, and it’s very possible that these two products will coexist without any further issue.
But as evidenced in this very thread there is the potential for confusion, which is the whole point of trademarks, and the reason why I’d have an easier time incorporating “Apple Surfboards“ than I would “Apple Keyboards”.
Or just `font-family: serif` which will most commonly be Times New Roman or similar, but will be whatever we prefer for those few of us that set the default fonts.
Everything fits on one screen, the font size is much more bearable, there's no unnecessary columnization or links to other parts of the site.
It just gets out of the way.
.../140 -> test test test
.../141 -> My personal depression diary entry no.3 ...
https://write.as/about
> You can't self host it, otherwise you'd be better off writing your own basic HTML pages or using a static site generator. You can check out the source code on github though https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog
The domain name could be improved, considering that it will be part of every hosted blog. Something more concise, or rolls off the tongue easier.
https://twtxt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
In a nutshell, the paragraphs (<p> tags) do not contain enough text to contribute to the readability score. Reader view heuristics rewards paragraphs of at least 140 characters.
For example. I use Hugo, with Forestry.io and don't have to touch my filesystem (or even my personal computer) to blog. I just go to a web page like all the CMS blogs.
I'm self-hosting rather than using something like netifly so the setup was a bit more geeky BUT it's totally doable and doesn't have to be tooo geeky.
A blogverse of some kind that allows for algorithmic discoverability & aggregation (ala Medium) without the bullshit/terrible UX.
The real value proposition of Medium is that a well-made aggregator benefits readers and writers alike. Readers find more authors they like, writers find more audience. There are also network effects with shared comment logins, inter-blog citations, etc.
I really think a blogging renaissance is waiting to happen. These ingredients plus a business model not reliant on ads, massive js overhead, and other nonsense could jumpstart it.
I personally find Medium to be a horrible way to find content. Maybe it works for new content, if that's what you're after.
Now, decades later, there seems to be a shared yearning for the curated web, perhaps in response to the low signal:noise ratio of search. Isn't it funny, how the world works in cycles?
Curated search (domains chosen by a set of humans with no financial conflicts of interests, with some grokkable categorization and full-text search) might be the nirvana we're searching for. I think the GP has a point, that the need for a sustaining business model tends to strongly conflict with this equilibrium.
Wikipedia has sort of evolved to partially fill this niche, but it periodically struggles with funding. I agree there's not a similar filling for blogs, yet: maybe GitHub will evolve there, but it will face the same pressure of other platforms owned by public for-profit companies.
Moving away from ads towards human-centric curation is a primary design feature of the decentralized web.
I eventually stopped using it because it didn't keep up. These days, search is for many purposes completely useless. If I want to find someone to do work on my house, the last place I'll go is Google. It's truly amazing just how worthless the results are. You'll get results from Michigan and Florida and Oregon all for the same search, in the same town, and claiming to be a local business. I imagine it's a fraud-ridden garbage dump if you actually try to use Google to find businesses to do work for you.
On the topic of blogs - not completely useless, but overrun with shallow, uninformative trash posts by SEO experts. I think Google is more vulnerable now than at any time in the past 20 years.
It's worse if you are non-US. Google seems to think that anywhere in the UK is local to me for businesses, and that's AFTER I've added loads of filters to stop American results from showing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation
The problem is that the second it becomes an authoritative source, every spammer and marketer will start trying to game it, just like the SEO does now. Corruption is a huge problem with that approach. I'm old enough to remember how much influence yahoo categories editors had, and that many have asked for money to include you in the list, or they would use the position to simply block all the competition to their own sites. Same story is happening with Wikipedia, just it's more about personal wars and agendas instead of straight down racketeering.
I feel like the key to good curation might be good moderation. In other words, allow people to submit links to be on the list, but there must be humans to control for SEO and marketing spam (like there is on HN). Making those humans incorruptible is hard but maybe not impossible, if they’re well compensated and hired thoughtfully.
That being said, I’m doubtful that such a strategy of moderation would scale to hundreds of thousands (or tens of millions, shudder) of active voters and submitters. At some point, it would need to federate, with different mods owning different lists, and it would be difficult to avoid a devolution into Reddit.
Maybe an idea would be something like what you have, but using some sort of standard that could be pulled down similar to rss feeds?
You discover a directory like mine just as you would discover any other link, johntash - by coming across it as you read, perhaps on Hacker News. If there were more directories, they would be easier to discover. They happen to be richer discovery points than a normal blog or profile page.
Just found: https://www.kleptones.com/blog/2012/06/28/hectic-city-15-pat...
Thanks!
There is also some discussion about this kind of thing here: https://forum.indieseek.xyz Good to meet you, Alessio.
Is anyone anywhere close to this?
I get that that would miss some of the benefits you mention (shared comment logins for example) but I'm wondering if people think it would capture 80% of the same benefits or, like, <50%. And I don't think for the discoverability to work there's any innate reason it has to be restricted to a single blogging platform.
For my part, I want more long-form, thoughtful articles that offer an enriching read. Not only have we got a good decade or two's worth of experience showing that no algorithmic discovery system ever favors that kind of thing over content that's morally equivalent to Five Minute Crafts, but I've got a couple decades' worth of experience telling me that, since long-form bloggers tend to link each other quite a lot, never needed an algorithm to help me with discovery in the first place.
If I want anything, it's algorithmic filtering: Take the feeds I'm already subscribed to, and filter out the stuff that I tend to skip over without reading. Because my blog feed already delivers me a couple hours' worth of reading a day, so I can afford to be choosy.
For myself, I usually read in two "phases". I collect material from sources that are usually high quality for me, and do some superficial skimming to trim out the content I don't particularly care for.
Later, when I'm more "in the mood" or have a long period of time, I pop() and read(). The stack gets pretty large at times, but it only takes a couple days of vacation to blow through most of it. If I pass over something in the stack enough times, it gets free()'d.
I don't know if I'd trust an algorithm to do either of these stages for me. I'd trust an algorithm provide input to phase (1), but never to replace phase (1).
I think that Newsblur does this.
I appreciate people wanting to own their own writing, having permanence of data assured, etc. so this is probably worth thinking about. At the same time, many outside the tech world don't want the overhead of hosting or setting up their own blog.
I wonder if a hybrid would be best? Host yourself option or host-by-us option, with a pricing structure that accords.
The point is really to maximize ones ability to traverse between writers on subjects that interest you, so the physical location of the data is secondary.
I do think it's important to have an element of discoverability for new content (otherwise there's no real way for a writer to bootstrap into visibility), but I think an important element is being able to follow and trust content aggregators. Maybe algorithmic curation will be trustable in a decade, but right now it feels too gameable, and too easy to degenerate into thinkbait.
I'm interested in this problem space, because current social media tools leave me somewhat dissatisfied. But I'm also skeptical about how you'd build it successfully.
it's not ready yet but I would love to hear more about what features people want. Email is in the profile.
I will have to look more into it though.
Myself and a partner are building this, here are a few points:
- It's a community to read and write about building things with technology
- Clean, fast and light UX + Markdown editor (https://able.bio/new)
- Bootstrapped with low overheads. No outside investment removes pressure to grow at all costs and the lapse on integrity that we see more of each day.
- No data lock-in. Export your posts in a single JSON file (containing Markdown + HTML versions) accompanied by all images.
- We're finishing up a big set of data portability / data respect features, which we plan to announce soon.
The aim is to build a community of capable people with a genuine interest in technology and attach a job board to the site. Companies can then pay to display their vacancies on the job board and users can take a look whenever they like. No popups, banners or any of that dodgy/spammy crap getting in between users and the reading/writing. In this age we see integrity towards our users as a differentiator.
Building it is fairly straightforward and fun. Some learnings we've gained in terms of 'jumpstarting' it:
- a lot of people are vehemently sceptical after the Medium debacle.
- creating a feed that prioritises good content without "censoring" dev spam or trivial posts is tricky when coming off a smaller user base. For example, upvotes can have outsized effects.
- getting regular volume of good content so that people use Able as source of news/inspiration/learning.
We've had some great posts from people but we need just that little bit more to get the flywheel going. As soon as someone posts something, activity on the site goes up but then dies down again. It's the classic building vs. promoting trade-off. However, we've chosen to get data portability and respect right first as we believe this is fundamental. We're wrapping that up now and then have loads of learnings and ideas we want write about.
We feel that same potential 'renaissance' you're talking about and this is how we want to try and activate it. If you feel inclined, have a look and let us know what you think.
The only question I still have is what is the editor like?
Presumably you are paying web hosting fees out of pocket. If this is successful, what's the plan for when you no longer want to be that charitable?
I think you should improve the default stylesheet a bit, I like http://matejlatin.github.io/Gutenberg/.
I’ve always found Garamond text online hard on my eyes.
https://herman.bearblog.dev/ contains a “Get in touch” mailto: link that gets ruined, and the following script is added:
Not blaming bearblog, but FYI
My email is with Fastmail, so I know that no emails are mysteriously disappearing (which seems to happen with providers like Gmail)—either the server rejects the email (so the sender will be notified), or it ends up in my mailboxes somewhere.
So my own experience is that sharing your email address publicly is harmless and useful.
As mentioned in other replies--some small styling tweaks for readability would be useful and would literally only cost bytes (on the order of the x-clacks-overhead on the page...)
If you're focusing on an extremely small page size, I'd prefer an external static, cached stylesheet than inlining all styling on every page load. That and a less complicated email obfuscator. :-)
I've turned off the email obfuscator (courtesy of cloudflare), and will be doing a bunch of styling improvements over the next week.
* https://write.as/
* http://txti.es/
* http://telegra.ph/
* https://txt.fyi/
* https://verbatim.link/
* https://www.pastery.net/
* http://ix.io/
* https://commentpara.de/
* https://rwtxt.com/
* https://distbin.com/
https://itty.bitty.site/edit
You can get a QR with your text too :-)
(hashify) 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2464213 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3407197
(shortly) 2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3834643 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5696127
https://github.com/lucaspiller/shortly
I was always quite fascinated by the concept, but I suspect liability and lack of control over the content is a fatal issue and why nothing much seemed to come from it.
If someone makes a 'bad' page, which is inevitable, the domain with the hashify/shortly code would be held responsible and the only way the site owner could 'remove' the content would be to stop the service.
bit.ly et al. seem to be able to get away with being agnostic processors. I'm surprised there haven't been more stories about their services being abused.
[1] https://hashify.me/IyBIYXNoaWZ5CgpIYXNoaWZ5IGRvZXMgbm90IHNvb...
https://youtu.be/9JxhTnWrKYs
But yeah, you'd miss out on styling it.
Not blogging specific, but it allows you to encode web content into the URL.
Compared to hashify:
- it uses zlib to compress data, so it can actually contain much more content(if it's repetitive)
- it also supports password encryption of the content (don't know why, but my friend said it would be cool)
- only supports markdown(no html) as I haven't found any good js lib for html sanitization on client side
Examples:
- With password: https://bit.ly/3c7xkyb pass: wasted
- Some markdown: https://j.mp/2AivRYr
P.S. I still have no idea why anyone will use it
* https://bear.app/
Disclamer: I'm not affliated with Bear in anyway, just a happy customer.
It was during an iOS beta on one of the devices, so perhaps not their fault—but I’ve been unwilling to pay since.
Bear uses iCloud storage which has on multiple occasions trashed people's data during iOS beta periods. It's not "Bear Sync", it's just another iCloud beta sync problem. If you value your data, don't use iOS betas. It's that simple.
If they had the choice, many developers would disable their apps on beta devices because of issues like yours.
I have the same concerns with user generated content in/on .de and their Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz law, the mandatory Posting an Impressum on your sites, etc.
I have seen bitly suspended before by Libya for merely providing redirects to content they don't like.
Care to provide ANY proof? I mean exact words, not hearsay or convoluted explanations of his saying.
Why would that be controversial at all? Reagan won the cold war against the Soviet Union by calling them an evil empire and repeatedly talking about nuclear war. Kennedy was able to get the Soviets out of Cuba also by raising the spectre of nuclear war.
by what definition of "rape"?
I made a similar minimal project but targeting github.io, apparently most here want self-hosting.
E.g. https://taaalk.co/t/bitcoin-maxima-other-crypto-things
and https://taaalk.co/t/the-why-how-and-power-of-commercial-open...
But for 16px and up, which is what websites of today use, serifs are perfectly fine even on 1× displays (though sure, they’ll look better still on higher-DPI displays, but so will sans-serifs).
I should clarify that it depends on the font. Sans-serifs tend to have fairly even stroke width, but serifs tend to have more variable stroke width, and if the thin is too thin, you get a terrible font. That’s a common shortcoming of serif fonts, and Garamond demonstrates that, being quite unsuitable for screen use below 20px, maybe even 24px. Others like Georgia don’t suffer that weakness.
Georgia is a terribly underrated font. I'm sure it's heavily hinted to look good at small sizes, but even at large sizes it has an elegance that is lacking in e.g. Times Roman.
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/reso...
If I see default browser serif, my immediate thought is "either this is an amateur or something is broken."