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

papyrus.so

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

#61

Post by mholt »

colinarms wrote: post #22
Groxx wrote: post #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 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…

Please use Caddy for custom domains (a web server I wrote that excels at this): https://caddy.community/t/serving-tens-of-thousands-of-domai...

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

#62

Post by urlwolf »

Groxx wrote: post #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 mi…

Love this. Inter-post linking is a must, I use zim wiki to think and cannot live without wikifying everything :)

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

#64

Post by skeeter2020 »

mp3k wrote: post #31
olah_1 wrote: post #23

$5 per month is too much on your competing services. If you want to differentiate, you should offer an option that is less. At $5 per blog, I can’t justify subbing to more than… 2 at the most. Compare the value proposition to something like Spotify.

This. I imagine there will be months when I don't write anything. Why would somebody still subscribe. Looks stellar btw.

How is this not all on you?

Maybe you shouldn't be selling subscriptions for your writing if you're not actually writing?

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

#65

Post by RNCTX »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #11
RNCTX wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 instan…

Absent native phone apps, the only way to reliably send notifications to people is SMS and email. This is the world that was wrought when we let ourselves be duped into handing over the whole internet to two cell phone dealers (Google and Apple), and letting them tax real time communication worldwide via their app stores. And the cost of sending email is not just the AWS SES cost per 10,000 mails but the cost to render the template for each email, too. It's not hard to get into a situation where one server relaying mail for just a handful of domains can't keep up with its own queue in any given day.

I think if you're trying to cater to paid tier users, segmenting users by free/paid and only serving free tier users the cache without any sort of interactivity features is the first thing (no comment posting, no upvoting / downvoting, etc).

Finally, yes, I think the scaling cost has to be passed on to the site owner, I don't think you can shoehorn a very elastic service in terms of hardware / network demand into a fixed monthly price, without subsidizing successful users on the backs of those previously mentioned hobbyists.

Lastly, on a more philosophical level, I think media producers / publishers need to get together and stop nipping at the heels of Facebook, Twitter, Google, Amazon, and Apple like puppies following their masters around. I mean, the whole newspaper industry let itself be duped into poor staffing decisions by Facebook lies about video metrics. Which is funny considering Facebook's whole business model is taking other media businesses' ad revenue and keeping it for themselves. I guess media execs never heard the one about grandma and the big bad wolf in their MBA programs...

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

#67

Post by ayewo »

Reebz wrote: post #53
olah_1 wrote: post #23

$5 per month is too much on your competing services. If you want to differentiate, you should offer an option that is less. At $5 per blog, I can’t justify subbing to more than… 2 at the most. Compare the value proposition to something like Spotify.

I think you have misunderstood. The $5/$7/$10 are suggested prices that you charge your subscribers. The service is free and only takes a 5% of subscription fees when they are active.

I think that section of the page could be improved to look less confusing.

I made a quick mock up: https://excalidraw.com/#json=5965784438276096,bD8ptwUwiZX9o0...

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

#68

Post by ayewo »

Your project looks nice!

1. I noticed that the signup email comes from papyrus.dev instead of papyrus.so. Any reason in particular for using 2 domains for the service?

2. Do you plan to support adding third-party tracking JS for services like Google Analytics, Umami etc?

3. I also shared some feedback elsewhere in the thread, not sure if you saw it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29083365

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

#69

Post by colinarms »

ayewo wrote: post #68

Your project looks nice! 1. I noticed that the signup email comes from papyrus.dev instead of papyrus.so. Any reason in particular for using 2 domains for the service? 2. Do you plan to support adding third-party tracking JS for services like Google Analytics, Umami etc? 3. I also shared some feedback elsewhere in the thread, not sure if you saw it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29083365

1. I originally registered https://papyrus.dev, with the original idea being a newsletter aimed at developers. I pivoted to be more broader, and with that, changed the TLD to .so. I haven't gotten around to setting up mail on the new TLD yet, so still using the old one for everything.

2. I'm not sure yet. One of the selling points is no third-party trackers, so I'm not sure how readers will feel if some of their blogs started tracking them.

3. Thanks for the feedback, and I appreciate the mockup! Agreed that section can be clearer - I've added this to the backlog.

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