14 ms·

Show HN: Able – an alternative to Medium

248 points by new_here 7y ago

Porthos9K 7y ago
What functionality does Able provide for technical bloggers who want to do POSSE? Can users import draft articles from their site's RSS feed, for example? Also, have you given any thought to integrating with the Fediverse by implementing ActivityPub?
- new_here 7y ago
  We're definitely keen to do both of these things when our time/resources permit. What would be the first step you'd like to see here?
  - Porthos9K 7y ago
    Doing RSS Import first might be easier than ActivityPub and help writers get content onto the site faster.
    - new_here 7y ago
      Cool, we're busy working on RSS importing now. Should be up in a day or two.
  - kixiQu 7y ago
    I wrote elsewhere that even if you don't do ActivityPub publishing, being able to import from the ActivityPub 'article' type would be a nice feature. I don't know if people have played with that kind of one-way AP integration much, but it'd be neat.
- blondin 7y ago
  what is POSSE?
  - new_here 7y ago
    Publish on your Own Site Syndicate Elsewhere.
- toastal 7y ago
  ActivityPub would be an awesome alternative for sharing and commenting.
mxuribe 7y ago
I'm always glad to see competition in any space - especially anything that can keep the big boys (Medium!) in check. Kudos to you for giving this a shot! Although, while i wish you plenty of luck, the only way you're going to get my money is if/when you think about functions and features supporting things like POSSE or even better yet ActivityPub. The last few years have taught me that I'm not going to spend my money on organizations that don't align with my values of wanting more decentralization. If organization X helps foster more indie web concepts, then I'll happily pay. If you don't support decentralization, then I'll pass, thank you very much. By all means, please don't receive this as a slight to your service - i do honestly wish you luck. Take this simply as a signal from a potential customer clearly informing you of what services and features that i'm (gladly!) willing to pay. Again, best of luck with you venture!!
- new_here 7y ago
  Thanks for the feedback! We're busy working on RSS imports right now and should have something up in a day or two. We're open to ActivityPub too but this might take a bit longer just because we're building Able in our spare time. Ultimately, we want to create a great place for developers and then charge businesses to advertise their job vacancies to that community. Because we're self-funded we don't have pressure to grow at all costs but we'll need the support from the developer community if we want to turn this into a sustainable business.
  - mxuribe 7y ago
    That's great to hear! And, acknowledged on the activitypub likely taking a bit of time to roll out. That area is still new enough for many people. But again good to hear you're heading in the right direction! Cheers!
- kixiQu 7y ago
  It sounds like what you want is https://writefreely.org/ https://writefreely.org/ ? they have both a hosted option and a self-hostable open source version. The missing part is the discoverability that Medium had and that Able and dev.to are working towards, so I don't think it's totally comparable. Actually, saying that now, I'd love it if it even went one way--so I could choose to post my article on my write freely blog, but also syndicate it out to Able. (even if I didn't use the Able editor to publish out to ActivityPub and Able to host all the APIs for that) Might be simpler.
thedudeabides5 7y ago
Great. When medium started throwing up paywalls we stopped using it. Anyone want to guess when these guys put up their first paywall? I'll go with January 2021.
- new_here 7y ago
  We're self-funded, so we don't need or want to push for a billion dollar exit. We just want to be a sustainable business and resource for developers online. You can read more about our intentions and business model here: https://able.bio/about https://able.bio/about
- dfhfkslhhj 7y ago
  It's becoming impossible to "pardon the interruption" with Medium when it happens multiple times a day. For me it's a reflexive response at this point, I don't even remember what they're asking for, my hand just moves to close the thing.
  - logifail 7y ago
    > For me it's a reflexive response at this point [...] Q: Why would one not install NoScript and get rid of these "interruptions" forever?
    - dfhfkslhhj 7y ago
      I don't trust browser extensions and don't use any.
    - oefrha 7y ago
      Because images on Medium wouldn’t load without JS.
      - logifail 7y ago
        I've just loaded a random Medium link in FF with NoScript enabled and the inline images look just fine. Q: Am I missing something?
Kovah 7y ago
> Firefox gets first-class support and is the primary browser we test in. Wow. I would not have believed to ever read something like this for any service, ever again.
- eitland 7y ago
  When I do frontend work I always work in Firefox [0]. I think once we caught something that didn’t work in other browsers. That happens all the time it seems with those who work in a certain other browser. Why? I can’t say for certain, I guess it is because that other browser doesn’t care as muvh about web standards but there might also be some part that has to do with most users of that other browser not caring too much about the web ecosystem. [0]: I always do that anyway hehe, it is my not-so-secret research tool ;-)
vsr_pg 7y ago
This is awesome! Especially for data science, Medium has a stranglehold on reliable articles. Excited to see an alternative, and one that actually seems to work better.
krashidov 7y ago
Any plans to support custom domains?
- new_here 7y ago
  Yes.
moreorless 7y ago
Is there an RSS feed or am I just blind?
- new_here 7y ago
  Just for individual users at the moment. You can find them on user profiles or at the bottom of articles. When we launch support for publications you'll be able to follow the publication feed too. Would you want a feed for all articles?
  - moreorless 7y ago
    Yes, that would be good.
Tinfoilhat666 7y ago
Some pages have horizontal scrollbar on my mobile firefox, such as this https://able.bio/DavidLandup/password-encoding-with-spring-security--90gkzie https://able.bio/DavidLandup/password-encoding-with-spring-s... Also, why .bio? Sounds like biotech web site.
- new_here 7y ago
  Thanks, will fix that. > Also, why .bio? Sounds like biotech web site. Because we couldn't afford the .com and .io wouldn't sell. So we had to get creative. The idea is that your able bio can be found at able.bio/username
- stekern 7y ago
  I assume it's bio as in short for biography, which can be fitting in the context of a blogging platform. This was at least my first thought upon seeing the domain, and I didn't make any association with biology, biotech, etc. until I saw your comment.
jangliss 7y ago
Great work - there needs to be a good place to write for free without the site then trying to sell the writing on. I've signed up to your newsletter but it took me a little scrabbling about to figure out how.
- new_here 7y ago
  We'll charge businesses to advertise their vacancies, so we don't have to get in the way of developers/users. It should ask you what notifications you'd like to receive during the onboarding process and you can just check the 'Digest' box. Did that not show up for you?
  - jangliss 7y ago
    It didn't, but I ended up finding it in the settings. Cheers!
sandGorgon 7y ago
three things: 1. its hard to search for you guys. your name is hard to SEO on. for example "medium kafka" gets you relevant search results. "able blog" doesnt even feature you in the first page. Could you consider changing it ? 2. your tld is nice for branding, but im not sure if you know that these kind of tld have resolution issues in Asia. it would be nice if you were on a .com (even ablebio.com). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15663988 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15663988 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20981212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20981212 3. the .bio domain is dangerous. https://icannwiki.org/.bio https://icannwiki.org/.bio >Thus, to respect the European Union's standards for 'bio' /organic food, this open TLD will have regulations in place for registrants intending to use it as a space for organic food products. The rest of the non-organic related TLD will not be regulated. The French warning notes the wide range of international standards on agricultural products and organic food, and consequently believes that the TLD can not be implemented unless it is not at all used to denote material related to organic agriculture. It warns of consumer harm or confusion if the TLD were to be implemented. Since this is a blog service, you would have to strongly regulate this - otherwise other blogs would go down if the EU screws you because of some agricultural/organic food blog someone writes. in fact you can read lots of similar posts here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20981212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20981212 , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15663988 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15663988
- new_here 7y ago
  Thanks for the feedback, we're still quite a small site so our authority still needs to grow. Google has said that TLD's shouldn't affect ranking. I didn't know there about the issues in Asia, thanks for mentioning this. We've looked into the use of bio and there was a case where they considered it to be appriopriate for biographical purposes. Ultimately though, we do want to get a better tld. I just can't afford it on my current salary :) - suggestions are welcome.
  - fakeinc 7y ago
    able.net only costs 17 dollars per year on Google Domains. This should work. :)
georgeoliver 7y ago
It's always seemed odd to me that there isn't a hosted service with a headless web/mobile CMS, compiling to a static site, that saves to a few common backends (s3, etc.), with reasonable pricing (i.e. not $10+/mo). Let the user pay for their own storage.
- new_here 7y ago
  This is actually a really cool idea.
- 1337shadow 7y ago
  Gitlab does that for free, with free storage. Just fork any of the existing example projects: https://gitlab.com/pages https://gitlab.com/pages
  - georgeoliver 7y ago
    Whenever I've looked at Gitlab/GH pages, Netlify, etcetera in the past I haven't found a good web/mobile CMS to use with them. Most pro options are too expensive for a personal blog. However ellinokon's suggestion for Siteleaf looks promising.
    - 1337shadow 7y ago
      Are you saying that you didn't find one example out of the 20 examples they provide on the link i posted (octopress, nanoc, pelican, hyde, hexo, hugo, jekyll, metalsmith, vuepress, plain-html ...) that supports mobile, nor has a mobile compatible theme available ? The gitlab pages option is free even with a custom domain and https.
      - georgeoliver 7y ago
        I don't mean a mobile compatible theme, but a CMS mobile app to edit and create content. So something like Netlify CMS and Siteleaf.
- ellinokon 7y ago
wingtales 7y ago
Fantastic to see Medium competition. I've been so frustrated with "let's make it official"-esque messages. Best of luck - I will be using you!
- new_here 7y ago
  Thanks so much for your support. We hope it becomes a useful place for the community. Always keen to hear feedback.
joelrunyon 7y ago
Just roll your own blog already. If there's one thing these services reinforce over and over again - it's that they'll change their terms over time. Own your site. Own your data. Put it all on your own terms. If you need help setting one up (unlikely for this crowd), you can have one made for you for free here. https://StartABlog.com/free-blog https://StartABlog.com/free-blog
- whsheet 7y ago
  I disagree. Use your time to setup something smarter than a blog. A turn-key ready static site generator still takes 10x the time to set up than just using a random blog site. Also, you waste time fiddling with CSS adjusting crappy themes. Only upside would be post editing in vim. But again, do something smarter, too many new shiny toys wait for you: Tensorflow, Haskell, Rust, ESP32... extend the list yourself.
  - greggman2 7y ago
    Agree. Switching from wordpress to a static site generator has made it much harder to post for me. Sure I can use vim (or my editor of choice) but on wordpress I could post from any browser on any machine, even a phone or tablet, including images with sites that have a front end. I'm not going back but I'd post more if I had a front end like I had on wordpress. Note: IMO as a middle solution just using github is not enough. Yes I can create a new file from the interface but no preview, clunky image uploading, clucky image embedding, and other issues.
    - thanatropism 7y ago
      Bonus: wordpress.com has some (limited, but nonzero) "discoverability". Blogs can be "followed" so you can have an idea of which are the 15-50 people who look at your stuff week in, week out.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- new_here 7y ago
whsheet 7y ago
Able looks promising: Higher information density than Medium, syntax highlighting in code blocks, no big-ass modal interrupting when I just want to read a silly blog post. Besides, Medium in its current state is one of the most annoying sites and I don't get why it enjoys such a strong SERP ranking. I mean blog posts are a commodity and Medium thinks they are Netflix showing the latest Disney property. If Google search devs read this: Demote all Medium results.
- all2 7y ago
  High SERP ratings come from multiple things: 1. If you use Google signed in, they know (I assume) you preference technical material (which is the bucket Medium falls in) 2. On-site links; one of the most powerful (and underutilized methods of SEO) is interlinking pages on a site. I'm not sure why this is the case, but it can be a determining factor in top-ranked sites (see Wikipedia as the canonical example of onsite linking). 3. Inbound links; lots of people link to Medium content. If Medium uses Google's tracking tools, Google has a good idea of the inbound traffic and can adjust based on the site's popularity. None of this has to do with user experience. Unfortunately. I'm sure there is more (like page load times, how information is organized in the HTML, etc.) that factors in, but these are the ones that occurred to me.
  - whsheet 7y ago
    Thanks for giving us a 101 lesson on the basics of SEO and SERP. Glad that we have some witty minds on HN. You forgot one thing though: This modal is unnecessarily hiding content and pissing off everyone. It is reason enough to give Medium a heavy SERP penalty for many months.
    - all2 7y ago
      You asked why. I answered. I don't think that merits a personal attack. As for modals, that's UI. Google's algorithm doesn't care that I've seen.
      - 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
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Vinnl 7y ago
RSS support is nice - even better would be if they were also exposed in the metadata [1] so that my feed extension can autodetect it. <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="http://example.com/feed" /> [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/RSS/Getting_Started/Syndicating#Adding_the_.3Clink.3E https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/RSS/Getting...
- new_here 7y ago
  Great tip, will definitely add that!
  - Vinnl 7y ago
    Thanks!
    - new_here 7y ago
      This has now been added to user profiles and posts.
0-_-0 7y ago
How about math formula support?
- new_here 7y ago
  Yes, we want to support this too and will be looking into it.
  - Minenash 7y ago
    Maybe blocks that can render LaTeX?
    - bhl 7y ago
      +1 I would recommend using KaTeX for this. Another thing would be to embed CodeMirror within ProseMirror (https://prosemirror.net/examples/codemirror/ https://prosemirror.net/examples/codemirror/) instead of just using monospace font. The additional benefit of that is free syntax-highlighting. I've played with ProseMirror and math support before, so this is what it about looks like. [1] https://imgur.com/a/rV2AATD https://imgur.com/a/rV2AATD
- uuuuuuuuuuuu 7y ago
  This is a big one for me. I've been looking for a minimalistic blogging tool that has good math support for a while now and have yet to find anything. If able has good latex support in the future I'd definitely start using it.
0xcaff 7y ago
I love the cause. Is there a way to donate?
- new_here 7y ago
  Thank you! There isn't, but if you just use the site and spread the word about what we're trying to do that is more than enough :)
nexuist 7y ago
100 on Lighthouse is something to be very proud of. I love this service.
- sdan 7y ago
  Did you get 100 on lighthouse? For some reason I'm getting 59 on performance on this post itself and 93 on the post he indicated (although everything is around 100 as well). Regardless, it's a great feat.
zokier 7y ago
Why this feels Medium just all over again?
- new_here 7y ago
  It’s not. We don’t have to grow at all costs for investors. You can read our manifesto here: https://able.bio/about https://able.bio/about
- fractalf 7y ago
  To me it seems that they are well aware of why meduim went from cool to suck. Chanses are therefor good they wont do the same
lnsp 7y ago
I like it, it's clean, simple and puts content first.
fractalf 7y ago
The editor looks awesome! Great work :) ..any chanse on open sourcing the editor?
- new_here 7y ago
  Check out ProseMirror.
  - Minenash 7y ago
    Two small suggestions, there's a "placeholder" text for the new post title, but not the content. You also can't hit the enter key to start writing, so at first I couldn't figure out how to write. The other one is to make the inside is your favicon white instead of transparent. It looks good on light themes, but the A is almost invisible on my dark theme.
jakecodes 7y ago
The oauth2 requirements for twitter signup are quite aggressive. * See Tweets from your timeline (including protected Tweets) as well as your Lists and collections. * See your Twitter profile information and account settings. * See accounts you follow, mute, and block. * Follow and unfollow accounts for you. * Update your profile and account settings. * Post and delete Tweets for you, and engage with Tweets posted by others (Like, un-Like, or reply to a Tweet, Retweet, etc.) for you. * Create, manage, and delete Lists and collections for you. * Mute, block, and report accounts for you. * See your email address.
- new_here 7y ago
  Apologies, we’ll tighten that up. We only want social auth to streamline onboarding.
  - jakecodes 7y ago
    Cool. I assumed it was unintentional. Once you do that I'm in.
    - new_here 7y ago
      Give us 24 hours. Will reply once it’s sorted.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
    - new_here 7y ago
      Permissions have been fixed.
sdan 7y ago
Although this seems great, use Ghost. The editing interface is unreal and the SEO/RSS/integrations are plentiful. You can customize it however you like, but there's some nice templates they have for free as well. I use it on Docker and port it around servers all the time (had some server problems here and there and it's super easy to port it using docker to different servers). The best part is you don't have to worry if Able.bio goes away one day. Self-host will only go away on your account. Actually running https://sdan.xyz/blog https://sdan.xyz/blog on it. (I personally love how the design and fonts come together... I created this design and it's available on Github)
gnicholas 7y ago
I think folks might be more comfortable switching to this if they understood the business model (or philanthropic finding source). This platform will only have value if it scales (and therefore has substantial costs). How will those costs be covered? What about paying you for your time you spend building and maintaining it? Looking forward to learning more about your plans, and having an alternative to the existing ecosystem.
- new_here 7y ago
  Hey there, all that info is here in our manifesto: https://able.bio/about https://able.bio/about Hope that helps.
- bdcravens 7y ago
  Here's the link you're looking for: https://able.bio/about#business-model https://able.bio/about#business-model
somebodythere 7y ago
The main reason I don't use Medium is due to its restrictiveness on layout. I often include JavaScript snippets that are connected throughout the webpage to showcase concepts, or like to include table of contents for navigation, which you just can't do on Medium.
throwyourboat 7y ago
Cool, just the other day I was looking for a place to quickly paste the longish top comment from the "who wants to get fired" thread [1] in order to be able to read it reasonably formatted. I've published the story here and given the original author control: https://able.bio/throwthrowthrowyourboat/my-grand-ulcer-named-ralph--52gs1cy https://able.bio/throwthrowthrowyourboat/my-grand-ulcer-name... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21141785 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21141785
- new_here 7y ago
  OMG, I feel an ulcer developing just from reading that story. Thanks for posting! Reminds me of that 2 million LOC monstrosity someone once commented on an ASK HN about the worst codebase they’ve ever seen. Btw, there are some duplicate paragraphs in the article that are probably worth trimming out. Search for “Contract arrives, I sit down with COO and CFO and explain that we have been duped.“
  - throwyourboat 7y ago
    mh sorry, that may have been my mistake… I edited it on my phone
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jariz 7y ago
Yes, and in five years they'll start showing blocking modals too, after realising this isn't monetizable. And the never ending circle continues... Just self-host.
Minenash 7y ago
Since, you can sign in with GitHub, it would be cool if it could sync/backup posts to a repo. Since in the end, the posts are mostly markdown, each post could be a .md file in the repo, with the title, subtitles, img header, and tags, in either <> or a code block. Or as plain text and a horizonal divider (*).
- new_here 7y ago
  That’s an awesome idea! Would need to request write permissions though and most users are wary of this. Thoughts?
  - Minenash 7y ago
    Can you have different permissions from different users? If so it could be a setting to "backup to github", and then request that permission then. Is there a place I can put suggestions/requests? Because I have some for the editor.
PatrolX 7y ago
The very best alternative to Medium is self-hosted Ghost. https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost And if a person can't figure self-hosting out then the paid version of Ghost is the best option. https://ghost.org/ https://ghost.org/ Ghost is an amazing platform and it's the only blogging solution that I know of that gets a perfect Google lighthouse https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/ https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/ score right out of the box. If Ghost made switching from WordPress easy they would totally take over the blogging space. I don't know what's up at their HQ but if I were them I'd be making a "switching from WordPress" tool my #1 priority.
bhl 7y ago
Is it me, or have there been an uptick in new writing platforms? Two that I can think of are substack and reading.supply. It'd be interesting to see an open source competitor to Medium; developments in and usage of markdown editors is an added bonus!
jhatemyjob 7y ago
Providing one point of data for you. I am bookmarking your site because I will be using the jobs board. As far as the blogging part is concerned, I would rather use Medium because it has a bigger network and, more importantly, I do not trust your platform. I don't think "we don't take VC money" and "no ads" will help you build trust. It's good that you don't do those things, but that's just avoiding bad stuff. As far as building trust goes, I think you have to actively do good stuff too. In my eyes the jobs board helps with that. Just my 2¢. Best of luck.
khope 7y ago
https://share.cloutbucks.com/Khope https://share.cloutbucks.com/Khope A way to make extra cash! I've made over 1,500$ so far in not even 3 weeks! Check it out!
jjjbokma 7y ago
I decided to roll my own blog [0] instead of using medium. Moreover, I wrote the static blog generator myself (2 versions, a Python and a Perl version [1]). I have been blogging daily for over 190 days now, and it feels good. [0] http://plurrrr.com/ http://plurrrr.com/ [1] https://github.com/john-bokma/tumblelog https://github.com/john-bokma/tumblelog
cezarfloroiu 7y ago
Congrats for shipping! :) How's this different from Dev.to ?
alexmingoia 7y ago
If you don’t feel comfortable with the reliability of “free” business models, check out https://etch.blog https://etch.blog which is only $11/year for an awesome, no-nonsense blog (and newsletter). We’re committed to providing the best blogging experience at the best price, forever. We’re also committed to the open web with RSS support and Webmention comments in the pipeline.

248 points by new_here 7y ago

What functionality does Able provide for technical bloggers who want to do POSSE? Can users import draft articles from their site's RSS feed, for example? Also, have you given any thought to integrating with the Fediverse by implementing ActivityPub?

new_here 7y ago
We're definitely keen to do both of these things when our time/resources permit. What would be the first step you'd like to see here?
- Porthos9K 7y ago
  Doing RSS Import first might be easier than ActivityPub and help writers get content onto the site faster.
  - new_here 7y ago
    Cool, we're busy working on RSS importing now. Should be up in a day or two.
- kixiQu 7y ago
  I wrote elsewhere that even if you don't do ActivityPub publishing, being able to import from the ActivityPub 'article' type would be a nice feature. I don't know if people have played with that kind of one-way AP integration much, but it'd be neat.
blondin 7y ago
what is POSSE?
- new_here 7y ago
  Publish on your Own Site Syndicate Elsewhere.
toastal 7y ago
ActivityPub would be an awesome alternative for sharing and commenting.

mxuribe 7y ago

I'm always glad to see competition in any space - especially anything that can keep the big boys (Medium!) in check. Kudos to you for giving this a shot! Although, while i wish you plenty of luck, the only way you're going to get my money is if/when you think about functions and features supporting things like POSSE or even better yet ActivityPub. The last few years have taught me that I'm not going to spend my money on organizations that don't align with my values of wanting more decentralization. If organization X helps foster more indie web concepts, then I'll happily pay. If you don't support decentralization, then I'll pass, thank you very much. By all means, please don't receive this as a slight to your service - i do honestly wish you luck. Take this simply as a signal from a potential customer clearly informing you of what services and features that i'm (gladly!) willing to pay. Again, best of luck with you venture!!

new_here 7y ago
Thanks for the feedback! We're busy working on RSS imports right now and should have something up in a day or two. We're open to ActivityPub too but this might take a bit longer just because we're building Able in our spare time. Ultimately, we want to create a great place for developers and then charge businesses to advertise their job vacancies to that community. Because we're self-funded we don't have pressure to grow at all costs but we'll need the support from the developer community if we want to turn this into a sustainable business.
- mxuribe 7y ago
  That's great to hear! And, acknowledged on the activitypub likely taking a bit of time to roll out. That area is still new enough for many people. But again good to hear you're heading in the right direction! Cheers!
kixiQu 7y ago
It sounds like what you want is https://writefreely.org/ https://writefreely.org/ ? they have both a hosted option and a self-hostable open source version. The missing part is the discoverability that Medium had and that Able and dev.to are working towards, so I don't think it's totally comparable. Actually, saying that now, I'd love it if it even went one way--so I could choose to post my article on my write freely blog, but also syndicate it out to Able. (even if I didn't use the Able editor to publish out to ActivityPub and Able to host all the APIs for that) Might be simpler.

thedudeabides5 7y ago

Great. When medium started throwing up paywalls we stopped using it. Anyone want to guess when these guys put up their first paywall? I'll go with January 2021.

new_here 7y ago
We're self-funded, so we don't need or want to push for a billion dollar exit. We just want to be a sustainable business and resource for developers online. You can read more about our intentions and business model here: https://able.bio/about https://able.bio/about
dfhfkslhhj 7y ago
It's becoming impossible to "pardon the interruption" with Medium when it happens multiple times a day. For me it's a reflexive response at this point, I don't even remember what they're asking for, my hand just moves to close the thing.
- logifail 7y ago
  > For me it's a reflexive response at this point [...] Q: Why would one not install NoScript and get rid of these "interruptions" forever?
  - dfhfkslhhj 7y ago
    I don't trust browser extensions and don't use any.
  - oefrha 7y ago
    Because images on Medium wouldn’t load without JS.
    - logifail 7y ago
      I've just loaded a random Medium link in FF with NoScript enabled and the inline images look just fine. Q: Am I missing something?

Kovah 7y ago

> Firefox gets first-class support and is the primary browser we test in. Wow. I would not have believed to ever read something like this for any service, ever again.

eitland 7y ago
When I do frontend work I always work in Firefox [0]. I think once we caught something that didn’t work in other browsers. That happens all the time it seems with those who work in a certain other browser. Why? I can’t say for certain, I guess it is because that other browser doesn’t care as muvh about web standards but there might also be some part that has to do with most users of that other browser not caring too much about the web ecosystem. [0]: I always do that anyway hehe, it is my not-so-secret research tool ;-)

vsr_pg 7y ago

This is awesome! Especially for data science, Medium has a stranglehold on reliable articles. Excited to see an alternative, and one that actually seems to work better.

krashidov 7y ago

Any plans to support custom domains?

new_here 7y ago
Yes.

moreorless 7y ago

Is there an RSS feed or am I just blind?

new_here 7y ago
Just for individual users at the moment. You can find them on user profiles or at the bottom of articles. When we launch support for publications you'll be able to follow the publication feed too. Would you want a feed for all articles?
- moreorless 7y ago
  Yes, that would be good.

Tinfoilhat666 7y ago

Some pages have horizontal scrollbar on my mobile firefox, such as this https://able.bio/DavidLandup/password-encoding-with-spring-security--90gkzie https://able.bio/DavidLandup/password-encoding-with-spring-s... Also, why .bio? Sounds like biotech web site.

new_here 7y ago
Thanks, will fix that. > Also, why .bio? Sounds like biotech web site. Because we couldn't afford the .com and .io wouldn't sell. So we had to get creative. The idea is that your able bio can be found at able.bio/username
stekern 7y ago
I assume it's bio as in short for biography, which can be fitting in the context of a blogging platform. This was at least my first thought upon seeing the domain, and I didn't make any association with biology, biotech, etc. until I saw your comment.

jangliss 7y ago

Great work - there needs to be a good place to write for free without the site then trying to sell the writing on. I've signed up to your newsletter but it took me a little scrabbling about to figure out how.

new_here 7y ago
We'll charge businesses to advertise their vacancies, so we don't have to get in the way of developers/users. It should ask you what notifications you'd like to receive during the onboarding process and you can just check the 'Digest' box. Did that not show up for you?
- jangliss 7y ago
  It didn't, but I ended up finding it in the settings. Cheers!

sandGorgon 7y ago

three things: 1. its hard to search for you guys. your name is hard to SEO on. for example "medium kafka" gets you relevant search results. "able blog" doesnt even feature you in the first page. Could you consider changing it ? 2. your tld is nice for branding, but im not sure if you know that these kind of tld have resolution issues in Asia. it would be nice if you were on a .com (even ablebio.com). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15663988 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15663988 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20981212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20981212 3. the .bio domain is dangerous. https://icannwiki.org/.bio https://icannwiki.org/.bio >Thus, to respect the European Union's standards for 'bio' /organic food, this open TLD will have regulations in place for registrants intending to use it as a space for organic food products. The rest of the non-organic related TLD will not be regulated. The French warning notes the wide range of international standards on agricultural products and organic food, and consequently believes that the TLD can not be implemented unless it is not at all used to denote material related to organic agriculture. It warns of consumer harm or confusion if the TLD were to be implemented. Since this is a blog service, you would have to strongly regulate this - otherwise other blogs would go down if the EU screws you because of some agricultural/organic food blog someone writes. in fact you can read lots of similar posts here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20981212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20981212 , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15663988 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15663988

new_here 7y ago
Thanks for the feedback, we're still quite a small site so our authority still needs to grow. Google has said that TLD's shouldn't affect ranking. I didn't know there about the issues in Asia, thanks for mentioning this. We've looked into the use of bio and there was a case where they considered it to be appriopriate for biographical purposes. Ultimately though, we do want to get a better tld. I just can't afford it on my current salary :) - suggestions are welcome.
- fakeinc 7y ago
  able.net only costs 17 dollars per year on Google Domains. This should work. :)

georgeoliver 7y ago

It's always seemed odd to me that there isn't a hosted service with a headless web/mobile CMS, compiling to a static site, that saves to a few common backends (s3, etc.), with reasonable pricing (i.e. not $10+/mo). Let the user pay for their own storage.

new_here 7y ago
This is actually a really cool idea.
1337shadow 7y ago
Gitlab does that for free, with free storage. Just fork any of the existing example projects: https://gitlab.com/pages https://gitlab.com/pages
- georgeoliver 7y ago
  Whenever I've looked at Gitlab/GH pages, Netlify, etcetera in the past I haven't found a good web/mobile CMS to use with them. Most pro options are too expensive for a personal blog. However ellinokon's suggestion for Siteleaf looks promising.
  - 1337shadow 7y ago
    Are you saying that you didn't find one example out of the 20 examples they provide on the link i posted (octopress, nanoc, pelican, hyde, hexo, hugo, jekyll, metalsmith, vuepress, plain-html ...) that supports mobile, nor has a mobile compatible theme available ? The gitlab pages option is free even with a custom domain and https.
    - georgeoliver 7y ago
      I don't mean a mobile compatible theme, but a CMS mobile app to edit and create content. So something like Netlify CMS and Siteleaf.
ellinokon 7y ago

wingtales 7y ago

Fantastic to see Medium competition. I've been so frustrated with "let's make it official"-esque messages. Best of luck - I will be using you!

new_here 7y ago
Thanks so much for your support. We hope it becomes a useful place for the community. Always keen to hear feedback.

joelrunyon 7y ago

Just roll your own blog already. If there's one thing these services reinforce over and over again - it's that they'll change their terms over time. Own your site. Own your data. Put it all on your own terms. If you need help setting one up (unlikely for this crowd), you can have one made for you for free here. https://StartABlog.com/free-blog https://StartABlog.com/free-blog

whsheet 7y ago
I disagree. Use your time to setup something smarter than a blog. A turn-key ready static site generator still takes 10x the time to set up than just using a random blog site. Also, you waste time fiddling with CSS adjusting crappy themes. Only upside would be post editing in vim. But again, do something smarter, too many new shiny toys wait for you: Tensorflow, Haskell, Rust, ESP32... extend the list yourself.
- greggman2 7y ago
  Agree. Switching from wordpress to a static site generator has made it much harder to post for me. Sure I can use vim (or my editor of choice) but on wordpress I could post from any browser on any machine, even a phone or tablet, including images with sites that have a front end. I'm not going back but I'd post more if I had a front end like I had on wordpress. Note: IMO as a middle solution just using github is not enough. Yes I can create a new file from the interface but no preview, clunky image uploading, clucky image embedding, and other issues.
  - thanatropism 7y ago
    Bonus: wordpress.com has some (limited, but nonzero) "discoverability". Blogs can be "followed" so you can have an idea of which are the 15-50 people who look at your stuff week in, week out.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
new_here 7y ago

whsheet 7y ago

Able looks promising: Higher information density than Medium, syntax highlighting in code blocks, no big-ass modal interrupting when I just want to read a silly blog post. Besides, Medium in its current state is one of the most annoying sites and I don't get why it enjoys such a strong SERP ranking. I mean blog posts are a commodity and Medium thinks they are Netflix showing the latest Disney property. If Google search devs read this: Demote all Medium results.

all2 7y ago
High SERP ratings come from multiple things: 1. If you use Google signed in, they know (I assume) you preference technical material (which is the bucket Medium falls in) 2. On-site links; one of the most powerful (and underutilized methods of SEO) is interlinking pages on a site. I'm not sure why this is the case, but it can be a determining factor in top-ranked sites (see Wikipedia as the canonical example of onsite linking). 3. Inbound links; lots of people link to Medium content. If Medium uses Google's tracking tools, Google has a good idea of the inbound traffic and can adjust based on the site's popularity. None of this has to do with user experience. Unfortunately. I'm sure there is more (like page load times, how information is organized in the HTML, etc.) that factors in, but these are the ones that occurred to me.
- whsheet 7y ago
  Thanks for giving us a 101 lesson on the basics of SEO and SERP. Glad that we have some witty minds on HN. You forgot one thing though: This modal is unnecessarily hiding content and pissing off everyone. It is reason enough to give Medium a heavy SERP penalty for many months.
  - all2 7y ago
    You asked why. I answered. I don't think that merits a personal attack. As for modals, that's UI. Google's algorithm doesn't care that I've seen.
    - 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Vinnl 7y ago

RSS support is nice - even better would be if they were also exposed in the metadata [1] so that my feed extension can autodetect it. <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="http://example.com/feed" /> [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/RSS/Getting_Started/Syndicating#Adding_the_.3Clink.3E https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/RSS/Getting...

new_here 7y ago
Great tip, will definitely add that!
- Vinnl 7y ago
  Thanks!
  - new_here 7y ago
    This has now been added to user profiles and posts.

0-_-0 7y ago

How about math formula support?

new_here 7y ago
Yes, we want to support this too and will be looking into it.
- Minenash 7y ago
  Maybe blocks that can render LaTeX?
  - bhl 7y ago
    +1 I would recommend using KaTeX for this. Another thing would be to embed CodeMirror within ProseMirror (https://prosemirror.net/examples/codemirror/ https://prosemirror.net/examples/codemirror/) instead of just using monospace font. The additional benefit of that is free syntax-highlighting. I've played with ProseMirror and math support before, so this is what it about looks like. [1] https://imgur.com/a/rV2AATD https://imgur.com/a/rV2AATD
uuuuuuuuuuuu 7y ago
This is a big one for me. I've been looking for a minimalistic blogging tool that has good math support for a while now and have yet to find anything. If able has good latex support in the future I'd definitely start using it.

0xcaff 7y ago

I love the cause. Is there a way to donate?

new_here 7y ago
Thank you! There isn't, but if you just use the site and spread the word about what we're trying to do that is more than enough :)

nexuist 7y ago

100 on Lighthouse is something to be very proud of. I love this service.

sdan 7y ago
Did you get 100 on lighthouse? For some reason I'm getting 59 on performance on this post itself and 93 on the post he indicated (although everything is around 100 as well). Regardless, it's a great feat.

zokier 7y ago

Why this feels Medium just all over again?

new_here 7y ago
It’s not. We don’t have to grow at all costs for investors. You can read our manifesto here: https://able.bio/about https://able.bio/about
fractalf 7y ago
To me it seems that they are well aware of why meduim went from cool to suck. Chanses are therefor good they wont do the same

lnsp 7y ago

I like it, it's clean, simple and puts content first.

fractalf 7y ago

The editor looks awesome! Great work :) ..any chanse on open sourcing the editor?

new_here 7y ago
Check out ProseMirror.
- Minenash 7y ago
  Two small suggestions, there's a "placeholder" text for the new post title, but not the content. You also can't hit the enter key to start writing, so at first I couldn't figure out how to write. The other one is to make the inside is your favicon white instead of transparent. It looks good on light themes, but the A is almost invisible on my dark theme.

jakecodes 7y ago

The oauth2 requirements for twitter signup are quite aggressive. * See Tweets from your timeline (including protected Tweets) as well as your Lists and collections. * See your Twitter profile information and account settings. * See accounts you follow, mute, and block. * Follow and unfollow accounts for you. * Update your profile and account settings. * Post and delete Tweets for you, and engage with Tweets posted by others (Like, un-Like, or reply to a Tweet, Retweet, etc.) for you. * Create, manage, and delete Lists and collections for you. * Mute, block, and report accounts for you. * See your email address.

new_here 7y ago
Apologies, we’ll tighten that up. We only want social auth to streamline onboarding.
- jakecodes 7y ago
  Cool. I assumed it was unintentional. Once you do that I'm in.
  - new_here 7y ago
    Give us 24 hours. Will reply once it’s sorted.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - new_here 7y ago
    Permissions have been fixed.

sdan 7y ago

Although this seems great, use Ghost. The editing interface is unreal and the SEO/RSS/integrations are plentiful. You can customize it however you like, but there's some nice templates they have for free as well. I use it on Docker and port it around servers all the time (had some server problems here and there and it's super easy to port it using docker to different servers). The best part is you don't have to worry if Able.bio goes away one day. Self-host will only go away on your account. Actually running https://sdan.xyz/blog https://sdan.xyz/blog on it. (I personally love how the design and fonts come together... I created this design and it's available on Github)

gnicholas 7y ago

I think folks might be more comfortable switching to this if they understood the business model (or philanthropic finding source). This platform will only have value if it scales (and therefore has substantial costs). How will those costs be covered? What about paying you for your time you spend building and maintaining it? Looking forward to learning more about your plans, and having an alternative to the existing ecosystem.

new_here 7y ago
Hey there, all that info is here in our manifesto: https://able.bio/about https://able.bio/about Hope that helps.
bdcravens 7y ago
Here's the link you're looking for: https://able.bio/about#business-model https://able.bio/about#business-model

somebodythere 7y ago

The main reason I don't use Medium is due to its restrictiveness on layout. I often include JavaScript snippets that are connected throughout the webpage to showcase concepts, or like to include table of contents for navigation, which you just can't do on Medium.

throwyourboat 7y ago

Cool, just the other day I was looking for a place to quickly paste the longish top comment from the "who wants to get fired" thread [1] in order to be able to read it reasonably formatted. I've published the story here and given the original author control: https://able.bio/throwthrowthrowyourboat/my-grand-ulcer-named-ralph--52gs1cy https://able.bio/throwthrowthrowyourboat/my-grand-ulcer-name... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21141785 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21141785

new_here 7y ago
OMG, I feel an ulcer developing just from reading that story. Thanks for posting! Reminds me of that 2 million LOC monstrosity someone once commented on an ASK HN about the worst codebase they’ve ever seen. Btw, there are some duplicate paragraphs in the article that are probably worth trimming out. Search for “Contract arrives, I sit down with COO and CFO and explain that we have been duped.“
- throwyourboat 7y ago
  mh sorry, that may have been my mistake… I edited it on my phone

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

jariz 7y ago

Yes, and in five years they'll start showing blocking modals too, after realising this isn't monetizable. And the never ending circle continues... Just self-host.

Minenash 7y ago

Since, you can sign in with GitHub, it would be cool if it could sync/backup posts to a repo. Since in the end, the posts are mostly markdown, each post could be a .md file in the repo, with the title, subtitles, img header, and tags, in either <> or a code block. Or as plain text and a horizonal divider (*).

new_here 7y ago
That’s an awesome idea! Would need to request write permissions though and most users are wary of this. Thoughts?
- Minenash 7y ago
  Can you have different permissions from different users? If so it could be a setting to "backup to github", and then request that permission then. Is there a place I can put suggestions/requests? Because I have some for the editor.

PatrolX 7y ago

The very best alternative to Medium is self-hosted Ghost. https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost And if a person can't figure self-hosting out then the paid version of Ghost is the best option. https://ghost.org/ https://ghost.org/ Ghost is an amazing platform and it's the only blogging solution that I know of that gets a perfect Google lighthouse https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/ https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/ score right out of the box. If Ghost made switching from WordPress easy they would totally take over the blogging space. I don't know what's up at their HQ but if I were them I'd be making a "switching from WordPress" tool my #1 priority.

bhl 7y ago

Is it me, or have there been an uptick in new writing platforms? Two that I can think of are substack and reading.supply. It'd be interesting to see an open source competitor to Medium; developments in and usage of markdown editors is an added bonus!

jhatemyjob 7y ago

Providing one point of data for you. I am bookmarking your site because I will be using the jobs board. As far as the blogging part is concerned, I would rather use Medium because it has a bigger network and, more importantly, I do not trust your platform. I don't think "we don't take VC money" and "no ads" will help you build trust. It's good that you don't do those things, but that's just avoiding bad stuff. As far as building trust goes, I think you have to actively do good stuff too. In my eyes the jobs board helps with that. Just my 2¢. Best of luck.

khope 7y ago

https://share.cloutbucks.com/Khope https://share.cloutbucks.com/Khope A way to make extra cash! I've made over 1,500$ so far in not even 3 weeks! Check it out!

jjjbokma 7y ago

I decided to roll my own blog [0] instead of using medium. Moreover, I wrote the static blog generator myself (2 versions, a Python and a Perl version [1]). I have been blogging daily for over 190 days now, and it feels good. [0] http://plurrrr.com/ http://plurrrr.com/ [1] https://github.com/john-bokma/tumblelog https://github.com/john-bokma/tumblelog

cezarfloroiu 7y ago

Congrats for shipping! :) How's this different from Dev.to ?

alexmingoia 7y ago

If you don’t feel comfortable with the reliability of “free” business models, check out https://etch.blog https://etch.blog which is only $11/year for an awesome, no-nonsense blog (and newsletter). We’re committed to providing the best blogging experience at the best price, forever. We’re also committed to the open web with RSS support and Webmention comments in the pipeline.