Looks awesome, I am trying it out :)
it's a pity I can't get paid, because Stripe is not available in my country. Maybe add some other options, such as Paddle, to those of us who are located in Africa where Stripe is not available yet.
Show HN: Privacy-first, minimal, fast blogging/newsletter platform
41–50 of 76 posts
Re: Show HN: Privacy-first, minimal, fast blogging/newsletter platform
#42Impressively 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 mi…
Thank you - appreciate all the feedback! I invested quite a bit into speed, and thankfully Next.js has a lot of great built-in support to make things fast - incremental static regeneration, link prefetching, image optimization, etc. For the editor bugs - thanks for highlighting, I filed a bug and definitely hoping to tackle this eventually. Agreed on the documentation as well - it's on my radar to improve. For custom…
I'd caution against asserting 200ms page loads and 99 Lighthouse scores -- you don't actually appear to be coming close to either of those metrics.
Re: Show HN: Privacy-first, minimal, fast blogging/newsletter platform
#43React & a framework on top can be called minimal for a blogging platform? A blog entry[0] requires the transfer of 3.29MB (2.09MB of images with most which don't look web-optimised). [0]: https://papyrus.so/@PapyrusBlog/how-we-reduced-next.js-page-...
OP says “as little JS as possible”. I’m seeing 830KB of JavaScript (254KB over the wire) on that page (plus another 14KB of JSON inside the HTML, of __NEXT_DATA__ bloat), spread across more than 20 files, when the only effects I can see are the scroll progress bar in the header (These figures are in no way light (even if they’re lighter than far too many sites). Given the positioning and the statement “as little JS as possible”, I was definitely expecting less than 5KB of JavaScript, perhaps even nothing beyond Plausible; having seen SPA functionality I’d be willing to increase that expectation to 25KB.
I’m with topicseed: Svelte would be a much more sensible starting point when seeking to use such a framework; SvelteKit can give you the same style of SPA stuff.
One last batch of remarks: most of the stuff in the “optimise images” step of that article is counterproductive. General content should not attempt to use lazy loading, it tends to make the experience worse, especially for distant visitors with higher latency but normally it doesn’t even help things for low-latency viewers. (next/image is wrong and foolish to enable lazy loading by default.) In the case of the logo specifically, if that’s the quill, that looks like it should be SVG—smaller and faster. And … as the translation of the Markdown `…` is probably a bug.
Re: Show HN: Privacy-first, minimal, fast blogging/newsletter platform
#44I doubt that flat 5% from subscriptions would be enough to sustain free users. You will either have to draw in some established bloggers with loyal, paying audience from another platform, or find another source of revenue. Maybe I'm wrong and you did the math.
A billion blog views per month would cost about $750. A million would cost $40.
Re: Show HN: Privacy-first, minimal, fast blogging/newsletter platform
#45Nice work, this looks nice. I signed up and was writing a post. I was nearly finished and switched to the tutorial post (which I had archived). I clicked the hamburger and clicked "permanently delete" to remove the tutorial post. However, nothing happened. I then clicked on "All posts" to go back to the post I was working on and it had deleted that. Any way to recover that? I don't see a help email.
Re: Show HN: Privacy-first, minimal, fast blogging/newsletter platform
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you - appreciate all the feedback! I invested quite a bit into speed, and thankfully Next.js has a lot of great built-in support to make things fast - incremental static regeneration, link prefetching, image optimization, etc. For the editor bugs - thanks for highlighting, I filed a bug and definitely hoping to tackle this eventually. Agreed on the documentation as well - it's on my radar to improve. For custom…
I'd caution against asserting 200ms page loads and 99 Lighthouse scores -- you don't actually appear to be coming close to either of those metrics.
Seconding this. Lighthouse on the vs-substack page gives a 82 on performance. That's a big difference, and is also under the 85 reported for Substack.
Re: Show HN: Privacy-first, minimal, fast blogging/newsletter platform
#47I personally don't believe anything is privacy-first unless it is open source do that it can be self-hosted.
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)
I would just use GitLab Pages or something and wonder why they are charging for something I can get free elsewhere.
Re: Show HN: Privacy-first, minimal, fast blogging/newsletter platform
#48Nice work, this looks nice. I signed up and was writing a post. I was nearly finished and switched to the tutorial post (which I had archived). I clicked the hamburger and clicked "permanently delete" to remove the tutorial post. However, nothing happened. I then clicked on "All posts" to go back to the post I was working on and it had deleted that. Any way to recover that? I don't see a help email.
Yes, there's a chance I can recover this. Can you shoot me an email (hello@papyrus.dev) with the email you signed up with, and the name of the post you were working on? Happy to look into this.
This definitely sounds like a bug.
Re: Show HN: Privacy-first, minimal, fast blogging/newsletter platform
#49Have been looking for options to move away from Medium.com and this looks promising. Would appreciate functionality to automatically import existing posts from other platforms (like medium has).
Thank you!
This is something I'm actively working on. I've already begun to implement functionality to import subscribers from Substack (you can test it out in the /settings/blog page).
After I finish Substack, I'll begin adding support for importing posts/subscribers from other platforms.
Re: Show HN: Privacy-first, minimal, fast blogging/newsletter platform
#50Looking great, godspeed!
Thanks!