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Show HN: Midnight.pub – Virtual Speakeasy

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Re: Show HN: Midnight.pub – Virtual Speakeasy

#11
post #10
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Write.as is a minimal blog platform that federates over ActivityPub.

Heard about ActivityPub the first time, just checked it out briefly. Ok it' some social networking protocol, how does it relate to write.as?

You can see and comment on write.as posts from other ActivityPub (AP) platforms that support it like Mastodon. It's up to the platform to implement it since the AP specification leaves implementation details mostly up to the implementor.

A recent discussion here on HN covers it pretty well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23852036

Re: Show HN: Midnight.pub – Virtual Speakeasy

#13
MUSHes and MOOs are virtual pubs that aren't as fashionable any more as they once were. (Most MUSH-oriented apps are glorified telnet clients, and tend to reproduce the same aesthetics and design flaws/idiosyncrasies.) Real life pubs are real-time, and MUSHes offer a good balance of real-time, networked interaction and persistent objects. This project doesn't handle the real-time aspect and is less like a pub than a blog with a wiki-like editing experience.

I'm convinced that with all the chat apps that are popping up, the Slack killer will be the first one to reinvent the MUSH by bolting its most notable features onto the "chat" space.

(When Keybase was still a thing, I thought they might do it by introducing "bot workers"—chat bots implemented in a script bundle that's managed and executed in the client itself—like a browser add-on, but based on Service Workers a la Cloudflare Workers.)

Re: Show HN: Midnight.pub – Virtual Speakeasy

#15
post #9

Congrats, this is a an awesome idea and well implemented. Especially the name and domain is kind of welcoming and setting the right tone. I just checked out write.as' and ResearchRoam's traffic and they have both over 1-2M visits per month which isn't too bad and surprised me a bit. Do you have insights into this market? Why does a simple editor (write.as) gets so much traffic and is still growing? Is linking (Roam)…

> Why does a simple editor (write.as) gets so much traffic and is still growing?

Write.as isn't an editor; it's a Medium (blogging) alternative.

> Is linking (Roam) not an overrated feature and easy to accomplish with any other note taking tool?

Roam is a supercharged wiki specifically for journaling and mind-mapping (i.e. a personal wiki). People who don't understand why GitHub "wikis" aren't really wikis will also have difficulty understanding what makes wikis appealing/effective.

You can look through recent discussions here on HN about similar Roam-like tools (like Obsidian[1]) if you want to see how people are approaching these things.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23324598

Re: Show HN: Midnight.pub – Virtual Speakeasy

#16

As someone who doesn't frequent pubs - is going to pubs and talking about your day to strangers actually a feature of pubs? How does that actually work? What's the etiquette?

Usually it's something like you have a sports event you want to see, head to the pub, and you're sort of half watching it on the TV, and there's others around watching the same thing or chatting. If people are talking about something a little ways away from you it's socially acceptable to butt in, more or less. As you spend time in a local, you also get to know the regulars and they'll wind up introducing you to other regulars, etc. Double all this if there's more affiliation going on, like you're all immigrants or ex-pats or whatever, or if you're all lawyers or something.

Source: Irish immigrant family.

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