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Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

blog.hiri.com

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Re: Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

#101

Post by ryandrake »

amelius wrote: post #73
makmanalp wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also loved that era of blogs, but unless the distribution problem is solved, we're probably never going back. Self-hosted personal blogs end up mostly being ghost towns these days unless you get somewhat famous. Medium on the other hand gets your foot in the door and draws your niche crowd and conversations for you with much less effort.

> but unless the distribution problem is solved Not sure what you mean. The distribution problem is solved by the internet. Discoverability (probably what you meant) is solved redundantly by Medium, since it is already solved by Google, and by social news websites such as HN and Reddit, etc. Medium = YouTube for textual content. The only way we "need" it is if we want a feed of algorithmically chosen content based on…

Unfortunate that the Internet community (writers and readers) are sacrificing so much to the false god of “discoverability.” For a few glorious years, self-hosted decentralized blogs, services and games were a thing. Now everyone is off re-implementing everything that sucked about centralized broadcast media.

Re: Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

#102

Post by zaarn »

FooBarWidget wrote: post #90
zaarn wrote: post #2

Quite a neat insight and somewhat confirming what I think personally; Linux users largely don't use Linux for FLOSS reasons. People who do use Linux for FLOSS reasons are however rather loud. I would probably not be wrong when saying that most Linux users will happily pay a developer for the binary of an application if the dev is "doing it right". Doing it right largely involves "don't treat the customer as a walking…

> I would probably not be wrong when saying that most Linux users will happily pay a developer for the binary of an application if the dev is "doing it right". Hm, this reminds me of the Caddy, the HTTP server with Let's Encrypt integration. It's still open source, but a while ago they made the binaries paid (if you want it for free you need to compile it yourself). They got a lot hate for that; people were even accu…

I stopped used Caddy on that event. It wasn't purely for the binary, the server also has a number of issues when mainly used as a proxy and a number of other problems for more advanced use cases.

I think the problem really is, atleast what I thought, was that the binary wasn't something I'd pay for. I could trivially compile it myself. Additionally the price was IIRC quite high for some hobbyists like myself. Plus putting advertisements in the header (or was that a separate event?)

If it had been a 10$/a license for the binary I would likely have done that but at the time it seemed cheaper to just switch to nginx.

Also keep in mind the different audience. There is server admins and developers. When I wear my server admin hat and license software, that is usually because there is no or not comparable free alternatives that I couldn't setup myself in a few hours of work. When I wear my developer hat I'm lazy and I will pay for software to save a few minutes of work if it's good enough.

Of course, I don't agree with the people who said it had become closed source, that is silly.

Re: Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

#103

Post by jarboot »

pmlnr wrote: post #5

Completely unrelated to the contents: Please, publishers, I beg you: walk away from medium. It's terrible for us, your readers. Set up a static blog, with a domain, go WordPress, Grav, Typo3, anything, but without stupidly large sticky header/footer and without heavy javascript . EDIT: apparently 121KB javascript is not heavy. I still believe it's an overkill for 30KB content.

I simply don't like it because it's blocked by the Chinese firewall. There's never any problems with self-hosted personal blogs in this regard.

But beyond that I don't think it's an unreasonable publishing medium. It's convenient for authors and scales to most platforms.

Re: Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

#104

Post by wruza »

pmlnr wrote: post #42
looperhacks wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I barely see the problem. Sure, the header and footer aren't perfect, but stupidly large? I also don't feel any "cpu melting javascripts" and my PC is barely usable when I compile anything. For me, Medium provides a very readable experience that is much better than the average static blog. And I don't have to fear a malware ridden page like an old Wordpress installation.

This is how the article looks like on 1280x800: https://i.imgur.com/L07L4ce.png Sticky header/footer, cookie consent covering the menu, not a single line of the content visible. You consider this design good? I might be wrong with this specific site on the JS - it only loaded 121KB Javascript. The actual HTML of the entry is 30. WordPress nowadays upgrades itself to minor version - security patches - without touching…

1280x800 means you can have ad blocker at least (or tampermonkey). Block bottom bar and make header scrollable for this site once. Phones lack this, sadly.

Re: Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

#105

Post by bovermyer »

brightball wrote: post #88
magduf wrote: post #72

The big thing I see missing from all this analysis is the home vs. work distinction. You have people saying "Linux users choose FLOSS because of philosophy, and proprietary software goes against this", you have users saying "I'd have tried it if it were FLOSS and I could just download it and try it", etc., but the problem is: this is a product for working with an Exchange server. How many individual users have a need…

Yep, totally agree with you there. After reading the article that was my first thought when he mentioned adding support for Google IMAP. Full stop. Don't do it. You have a product that is doing well as the solution for something with a clear business case that's not well addressed elsewhere. Own that market and focus your development attention on that Exchange ecosystem. As soon as you branch to IMAP/Gmail/General pu…

This would sound like wisdom, except that all of the other email clients for Linux are garbage.

I bought Mailbird because it looked amazing and had the feature set I wanted. It has done its job extremely well, and I'm very happy with it. But it doesn't have a Linux client; it's only for Windows.

I have six active email addresses spread across multiple providers - Office365, Exchange, Gmail, GSuite, and Zoho. I need a central place to read it all.

I've seen Hiri mentioned before, but dismissed it because it doesn't support Google/IMAP. Once it adds that support, it has my attention, and potentially my dollars.

Re: Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

#106

Post by ghaff »

captainbland wrote: post #8
pmlnr wrote: post #5

Completely unrelated to the contents: Please, publishers, I beg you: walk away from medium. It's terrible for us, your readers. Set up a static blog, with a domain, go WordPress, Grav, Typo3, anything, but without stupidly large sticky header/footer and without heavy javascript . EDIT: apparently 121KB javascript is not heavy. I still believe it's an overkill for 30KB content.

I think people are going to Medium because they say it pays from subscribed users. Not an easy thing to do with a static blog.

I don't post often to Medium. (Though I don't post heavily to my own site these days either.) What Medium's good for is that I sometime need to provide links to articles for various newsletters and so forth. In the general population, Medium seems to be seen (however erroneously) as a more "serious" platform than a personal blog. In any case, the people I'm providing the links to seem to prefer I use it for those purposes.

For deeper, general purpose pieces, I also just cross-post to Medium from my own blog as that seems to drive some incremental traffic.

Re: Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

#107

Post by vimslayer »

pmlnr wrote: post #42
looperhacks wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I barely see the problem. Sure, the header and footer aren't perfect, but stupidly large? I also don't feel any "cpu melting javascripts" and my PC is barely usable when I compile anything. For me, Medium provides a very readable experience that is much better than the average static blog. And I don't have to fear a malware ridden page like an old Wordpress installation.

This is how the article looks like on 1280x800: https://i.imgur.com/L07L4ce.png Sticky header/footer, cookie consent covering the menu, not a single line of the content visible. You consider this design good? I might be wrong with this specific site on the JS - it only loaded 121KB Javascript. The actual HTML of the entry is 30. WordPress nowadays upgrades itself to minor version - security patches - without touching…

It looks even worse on mobile https://i.imgur.com/EOm3D4Y.png

I also don't think the JS is that bad here, the site loaded pretty fast for me even when I tested with a slow 3G network. But yeah that UI doesn't give a good reading experience.

Re: Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

#108

Post by hiccuphippo »

bunderbunder wrote: post #66
pavlov wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it’s the same reason why you hear professional designers complain when they see Comic Sans used for body text, but laypersons rarely will mention it. A pro will notice things about implementation that interfere with the content, while the layperson often can’t articulate it even if they sense it’s not quite right.

A lot of people don't even realize that better is possible. I've had plenty of friends and acquaintances observe that browsing the web on my computer is very zippy compared to doing it on theirs, and ask what I do. I hate to then have to explain to them that it's because of a fairly hard-won set of JavaScript-blocking rules and suchlike. I especially hate it because the best alternative I can suggest to someone who d…

You can suggest uBlock Origin and they'll be halfway there just with that.

Re: Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

#109

Post by kevkav »

bovermyer wrote: post #105
brightball wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, totally agree with you there. After reading the article that was my first thought when he mentioned adding support for Google IMAP. Full stop. Don't do it. You have a product that is doing well as the solution for something with a clear business case that's not well addressed elsewhere. Own that market and focus your development attention on that Exchange ecosystem. As soon as you branch to IMAP/Gmail/General pu…

This would sound like wisdom, except that all of the other email clients for Linux are garbage. I bought Mailbird because it looked amazing and had the feature set I wanted. It has done its job extremely well, and I'm very happy with it. But it doesn't have a Linux client; it's only for Windows. I have six active email addresses spread across multiple providers - Office365, Exchange, Gmail, GSuite, and Zoho. I need a…

That is exactly the reason for Gmail support.

It's not moving focus away from Linux/Office365 but it accommodates people that want to have their Gmail accounts in the same client as their Office 365 / Exchange accounts.

Re: Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

#110

Post by DoofusOfDeath »

TuringTest wrote: post #65

"Unfortunately, the fundamentalist FOSS mentality we encountered on Reddit is still alive and well. Some Linux blogs and Podcasts simply won’t give us the time of day. This is not a problem with the mainstream tech blogs and is a problem unique to Linux." It seems weird that this guy will try to promote his product to the Linux community and chooses to do it by insulting its user base. While not all Linux users have…

My intention with this comment isn't to promote a culture of weaponized offense-taking. And I'm not even sure if the OP meant the term "fundamentalist" as an insult. But if so ...

I think this would be insulting to persons who self-identify as Fundamentalist Christians [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_fundamentalism

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