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Show HN: Privacy-first, minimal, fast blogging/newsletter platform

papyrus.so

11–20 of 76 posts

Re: Show HN: Privacy-first, minimal, fast blogging/newsletter platform

#11
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well you'll love Ghost! https://ghost.org For my own curiosity -- would you blog more often if someone offered you cheap(er than ghost.org) hosted ghost instance from which you're free to take your data any time? [EDIT] - To make it more concrete, let's say someone gave you a ghost blog that was free with a soft-capped at 100 visits/day (and $5/month after)

The (seemingly) hard scarcity limit on users is where Ghost loses me. By capping your tiers at number of users you are losing a lot of people who might otherwise use your platform, imo. Here's my reasoning: You need to get lots of users to market to so that you can convert those users to paying subscribers. Getting people to sign up for notifications is one thing, getting them to pay money is a whole other propositio…

This is a good point — how would you change their pricing model then? The difficulty of supporting creators will grow with users, would a tiered model that starts charging earlier (but charges less) be better?

Maybe it's better to just do a single no-bullshit price and run unlimited ghost instances for people -- and once you know the scale that a particular instance can take, different tiers for the very large instances. Maybe one price (let's say $10) + custom? But at this point you'll be overwhelmed by users with very large followings which generate tons of traffic.

And if you go by a strictly bandwidth model, then people are vulnerable to overages...

Re: Show HN: Privacy-first, minimal, fast blogging/newsletter platform

#13

> lacked transparency (Substack) What do you mean exactly by this?

Here are some blogposts that can describe it better than I:

https://thehypothesis.substack.com/p/heres-why-substacks-sca...

https://doyles.substack.com/p/in-queers-we-trust-all-others-...

https://www.vox.com/recode/22338802/substack-pro-newsletter-...

The TL;DR is that Substack has allegedly paid large sums of money to bring writers onto their platform. The writers they've paid have historically been on one end of the ideological spectrum, and Substack has not been transparent about who is being paid, nor how much.

Re: Show HN: Privacy-first, minimal, fast blogging/newsletter platform

#14
This looks nicely implemented. Can you give some examples of a successful blog(s) on the platform (with the permission of the author of course)?

One thing I would say is that your top navigation bar (for example clicking on 'Why Papyrus?') doesn't appear to work without JS. I hope the rest of the website experience is not hindered by the need to run JS.

Re: Show HN: Privacy-first, minimal, fast blogging/newsletter platform

#16
Impressively fast (honestly, that's stellar work), slightly buggy in the editor (focus is sometimes hard to determine, triple-click doesn't always select a paragraph, etc) but I assume that'll get cleared up eventually, and it's pretty good looking across the board.

I might actually use this. Simple and effective and not full of crap. It could use a little bit more documentation (inter-post linking how? hardcoding might be fine, but it'd be nice if that link-popup searched your post titles or something) and probably a small bit of extra flexibility... but finding the balancing point between "feature-full" and "simple" is quite tough, as is keeping it fast. I'm pleasantly surprised with it as-is.

Any chance of custom domain support? I assume that would be a paid feature (it always is, I think that's reasonable), but it is nice to have that option. Also RSS.

Re: Show HN: Privacy-first, minimal, fast blogging/newsletter platform

#17
I've been procrastinating self-hosting, partially due to being unable to choose a platform and knowingly committing to it for the long term (maintenance, upgrades, etc.).

This will happily fill the gap and let me get something 'out there' and find my niche while continuing to be indecisive about self-hosting.

Pretty darn frictionless setup, nice clean look and feel. I like it so far.

Re: Show HN: Privacy-first, minimal, fast blogging/newsletter platform

#18
post #14

This looks nicely implemented. Can you give some examples of a successful blog(s) on the platform (with the permission of the author of course)? One thing I would say is that your top navigation bar (for example clicking on 'Why Papyrus?') doesn't appear to work without JS. I hope the rest of the website experience is not hindered by the need to run JS.

Thank you!

We're still in the early stages so no large blogs to show just yet.

Here's the Papyrus blog, if you're more curious to see how a demo blog operates: https://papyrus.so/@PapyrusBlog

And thanks for the tip about the JS issues - I'm absolutely focused on making the entire site accessible without JS, so this is important to me. I'll take a look at shortly.

Re: Show HN: Privacy-first, minimal, fast blogging/newsletter platform

#19
post #8

Will AsciiDoc be supported too? Markdown is far too limiting for many applications.

What applications do you envision?

The editor is currently markdown combined with a rich text UI-based editor. I haven't explored supporting other types of editors (beyond extending the UI), but I'd be open to it.

Re: Show HN: Privacy-first, minimal, fast blogging/newsletter platform

#20

I've been procrastinating self-hosting, partially due to being unable to choose a platform and knowingly committing to it for the long term (maintenance, upgrades, etc.). This will happily fill the gap and let me get something 'out there' and find my niche while continuing to be indecisive about self-hosting. Pretty darn frictionless setup, nice clean look and feel. I like it so far.

Awesome - glad to hear that! Appreciate the feedback!
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