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Nicheless: a micro-blogging platform

nicheless.blog

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61–70 of 129 posts

Re: Nicheless: a micro-blogging platform

#61

Post by pmoriarty »

swidi wrote: post #37

I say this every time one of these pops up: Just do it yourself. Just get a $5 Linode or a Cloudflare account, make a Hugo/Pelican/whatever site and go. These niche microblogging sites are so small and insignificant that you can never ever trust them to survive (or even persist). Just do it yourself from the very beginning and you'll have a much better time.

blogger.com has existed for forever (maybe older than Linode or Cloudflare)

The main advantage of self-hosting on a VPS provider is that you fully own your site... but it's a tradeoff in time, money and hassle of setup and administration.

Why bother when you can let someone else do all that for you... for free?

Re: Nicheless: a micro-blogging platform

#62

Post by louispereira »

asim wrote: post #59
louispereira wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey Asim. I appreciate you taking the time to thoughtfully (and elegantly) lay out your thoughts. At the moment, I don't want Nicheless to perform a similar function to Twitter. I love Twitter and use it daily, but I find it useful as a space to reach a broad audience of people I don't know. An open network with unlimited growth potential. With nicheless, I want it to be the opposite. A place to follow people you alr…

It's a noble goal. I think many an engineer have tried. Even convincing your own social group to try new things is hard so it really has to offer something new or attract a specific type of audience. I think most people's group of well know friends and contacts caps out at 100. So that would be where I'd put a soft limit on follows e.g a little hint that says maybe you want to split this out into sub groups or separa…

Yup, that's an interesting idea. Will keep a note of it when I decide to run the experiment. Thank you!

Re: Nicheless: a micro-blogging platform

#63

Post by louispereira »

alathon wrote: post #60

This really resonates with me too. I already have a private Discord with just a few others who are both friends and work in software development, which serves as our closed-network way of discussing software and also a healthy dose of memes and real-life chat. Ive thought about inviting others who I'm less close to, because I'd welcome their contributions to those discussions, but there is always the fear of adding a…

Agreed. I haven't solved that problem myself. Most of my own friends haven't switched to Nicheless, although most of them don't write elsewhere either. To me, nicheless is an ideal space for those that are afraid to publish online to start doing so. I'm yet to figure out how to make that happen.

I'll keep at it till I figure it out though.

Re: Nicheless: a micro-blogging platform

#64

Post by louispereira »

pacifika wrote: post #56

So we used to have this thing called telnet BBSes in the mid nineties. Discord is not too similar, but typically with less moderation. Bunch of people talk about stuff in subject based rooms, there’s some administrators looking after the health of the channel. Join or leave rooms, etc. Open source would shield it a bit more from commercial interests. Social media is simply too big for this, it will always be advertis…

The goal here is to help people create and communicate in a one to many & many to one manner within small communities. I'm still working on making it easier or more obvious to do that, but I'm going to keep trying!

Re: Nicheless: a micro-blogging platform

#65

Post by q-base »

I signed up. I actually have 2 personal blogs, so I am unsure about whether I will use your platform.

But there is something about the unfiltered short format that I like and even though I have thought about publishing shorter style posts on my own blogs, I for some reason never get to it.

I am a big fan of the design as well! Nice job.

Re: Nicheless: a micro-blogging platform

#66

Post by qwerty456127 »

What immediately scares me is every post on the website by the link having a title. To me inventing a good title arguably almost seems the hardest part of writing at all. A microblog should let you dump a thought quickly without requiring you to name it first.

Also, individual post URL is hidden to deep. You apparently have to open the post, scroll down, click "share", click "copy link", and even that element is not a real link. As soon as I see a post/preview/listing I want to be able to middle-click it to open it in a background tab or Ctrl+click it to copy/whatever.

Re: Nicheless: a micro-blogging platform

#70

Post by louispereira »

jmpz wrote: post #67

I really like the implementation and the idea, but why have a word limit at all? You could encourage short form writing in other ways, but to make it impossible seems really limiting.

Hey! I've found that constraints make it easier for people to take action. The word limit does that for me. It's long enough to allow for nuance around a single topic, and short enough to not be intimidating to start, as well as to force some clarity of thought.
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