9 ms·

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

173 points by colinarms 5y ago

ComodoHacker 5y ago
I doubt that flat 5% from subscriptions would be enough to sustain free users. You will either have to draw in some established bloggers with loyal, paying audience from another platform, or find another source of revenue. Maybe I'm wrong and you did the math.
- bryans 5y ago
  A billion blog views per month would cost about $750. A million would cost $40.
chilldsgn 5y ago
Looks awesome, I am trying it out :) it's a pity I can't get paid, because Stripe is not available in my country. Maybe add some other options, such as Paddle, to those of us who are located in Africa where Stripe is not available yet.
eitland 5y ago
Wow, this is seriously fast! Maybe you should provide more links to existing blogs somewhere? (e.g. something like https://read.write.as https://read.write.as which aggregates public posts from blogs on write.as)
- colinarms 5y ago
  Thanks! Yes, I've been meaning to do this - I haven't prioritized it yet because we have not had enough quality blogs on the platform to showcase, but after all the HN traffic I think this will change :)
melvinmt 5y ago
> lacked transparency (Substack) What do you mean exactly by this?
- colinarms 5y ago
  Here are some blogposts that can describe it better than I: https://thehypothesis.substack.com/p/heres-why-substacks-scam-worked-so https://thehypothesis.substack.com/p/heres-why-substacks-sca... https://doyles.substack.com/p/in-queers-we-trust-all-others-pay https://doyles.substack.com/p/in-queers-we-trust-all-others-... https://www.vox.com/recode/22338802/substack-pro-newsletter-controversy-jude-doyle https://www.vox.com/recode/22338802/substack-pro-newsletter-... The TL;DR is that Substack has allegedly paid large sums of money to bring writers onto their platform. The writers they've paid have historically been on one end of the ideological spectrum, and Substack has not been transparent about who is being paid, nor how much.
BLKNSLVR 5y ago
I've been procrastinating self-hosting, partially due to being unable to choose a platform and knowingly committing to it for the long term (maintenance, upgrades, etc.). This will happily fill the gap and let me get something 'out there' and find my niche while continuing to be indecisive about self-hosting. Pretty darn frictionless setup, nice clean look and feel. I like it so far.
- colinarms 5y ago
  Awesome - glad to hear that! Appreciate the feedback!
f_allwein 5y ago
> Connect your bank account Does this work in any country, or just one?
- input_sh 5y ago
  It mentions Stripe, so here's a list of countries: https://stripe.com/global https://stripe.com/global
forlorn 5y ago
Looking great, godspeed!
- colinarms 5y ago
  Thanks!
colinarms 5y ago
Hi HN, At the start of this year I set a personal goal to blog more. I wanted to 1) improve my writing skills, 2) build an audience, and 3) if the stars aligned, start earning a bit of supplemental income via paid posts or subscriptions. I looked at the existing blogging/newsletter solutions out there, and none of them quite fit what I was looking for. They had paywalls (Medium), features I didn't need (Wordpress), too minimal a design (Buttondown), lacked transparency (Substack), or cost money even when I wasn't earning yet (Ghost). So, I built my own. No trackers or tracking cookies are used (beyond Plausible, for privacy-preserving analytics). Speed and minimalism is a big focus: all blogs are rendered as static HTML, using as little JS as possible. You can write blogposts in markdown, publish them, let your readers subscribe, and (when you're ready) connect your Stripe account to start charging readers for access to paid posts. You also always maintain ownership of your posts, and you can export all data at any time. Still in the early stages, so any feedback would be great. Thanks!
encryptluks2 5y ago
I personally don't believe anything is privacy-first unless it is open source do that it can be self-hosted.
- hardwaresofton 5y ago
  Well you'll love Ghost! https://ghost.org https://ghost.org For my own curiosity -- would you blog more often if someone offered you cheap(er than ghost.org) hosted ghost instance from which you're free to take your data any time? [EDIT] - To make it more concrete, let's say someone gave you a ghost blog that was free with a soft-capped at 100 visits/day (and $5/month after)
  - RNCTX 5y ago
    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 proposition. The former is pretty easy and the latter is not. Forcing people to try and do it all in one fell swoop for fear of reaching an arbitrary "user limit" is not reasonable. The hardest part anyone trying to do this from scratch is going to go through is getting off the ground from a handful of users to a few thousand users. Once they've gotten to that point, and can convert a few hundred of their few thousand users into paying subs, they're getting closer to seeing light at the end of the tunnel. The most feasible way for them to do so is market to their free subscribers / free followers with premium content, engagement with paying subs that they're missing out on, etc. Ghost chops the legs out from under them when they get to the first hurdle with the 10,000 user limit. I understand that database costs and email / SMS sending are the expensive part of hosting and have built content distribution backends before, so I get it. I understand the reasoning of putting the limit on pricing tiers there, but it would seem that a more flexible way is in order in Ghost's case. If we presume that you can convert 1% of free accounts to paying accounts, Ghost's pricing page tells its prospective users that they are going to be stuck in a $500.00 / month hobbyist income tier forever.
jcoletti 5y ago
Timely post. Been evaluating newsletter services for a new project so may give this a try. FYI – All of your site pages have the same title, or are missing page titles.
- colinarms 5y ago
  Thanks! Happy to hear any feedback or requirements you have for your new project. Shoot me an email at hello@papyrus.dev if you want to chat further. And thanks for that -- should be fixed now on a majority of pages.
xrd 5y ago
Really well done.
- colinarms 5y ago
  Thanks for the feedback - appreciate it!
toastal 5y ago
Will AsciiDoc be supported too? Markdown is far too limiting for many applications.
- colinarms 5y ago
  What applications do you envision? The editor is currently markdown combined with a rich text UI-based editor. I haven't explored supporting other types of editors (beyond extending the UI), but I'd be open to it.
  - mp3k 5y ago
    Let's add PRO mode for MDX https://v2.mdxjs.com/ https://v2.mdxjs.com/
  - toastal 5y ago
    Features I’ve used:: * Tables: more features and is standard instead of specific to some Markdown “flavors” * Admonitions: better than ad hoc emoji + bold *NOTE* usage as it then becomes styleable * Titles for blocks: better than putting "######" for an <h6> when you want a caption * Display block images * Ability to add [.css-class-name] to arbitrary blocks * Ability to add arbitrary attributes to images and links (title, rel, ARIA, etc.) What I’ll often see however in Markdown is a lot of handwritten HTML to accomplish this stuff which kinda defeats the point of a lightweight markup language. There’s also a big list of typographic substitutions which is nice for authors that prefer to type in ASCII but want proper quotes, dashes, arrows, etc. These are all things I would want if writing technical content where I am in control of styles and demand good typography.
steventey 5y ago
Absolutely a huge fan of this Colin! Keep up the great work man!!
- colinarms 5y ago
  Thanks a lot, Steven! Appreciate it!
bArray 5y ago
This looks nicely implemented. Can you give some examples of a successful blog(s) on the platform (with the permission of the author of course)? One thing I would say is that your top navigation bar (for example clicking on 'Why Papyrus?') doesn't appear to work without JS. I hope the rest of the website experience is not hindered by the need to run JS.
- colinarms 5y ago
  Thank you! We're still in the early stages so no large blogs to show just yet. Here's the Papyrus blog, if you're more curious to see how a demo blog operates: https://papyrus.so/@PapyrusBlog https://papyrus.so/@PapyrusBlog And thanks for the tip about the JS issues - I'm absolutely focused on making the entire site accessible without JS, so this is important to me. I'll take a look at shortly.
Groxx 5y ago
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 might be fine, but it'd be nice if that link-popup searched your post titles or something) and probably a small bit of extra flexibility... but finding the balancing point between "feature-full" and "simple" is quite tough, as is keeping it fast. I'm pleasantly surprised with it as-is. Any chance of custom domain support? I assume that would be a paid feature (it always is, I think that's reasonable), but it is nice to have that option. Also RSS.
- colinarms 5y ago
  Just circling back here - I launched custom domain support today (for a one-time fee of $50, you can unlock custom domains permanently for your blog).
- colinarms 5y ago
  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 domain support and RSS - both features on the roadmap! Likely RSS first, as that's quite a bit easier to implement, and custom domain support shortly after that. (Custom domain support is probably the #1 feature request at the moment).
  - prox 5y ago
    I’ve been thinking about blogging for a while, and your offering is the first that makes me want to go ahead. Custom domain would be nice!
    - 5y ago
olah_1 5y ago
$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.
- mp3k 5y ago
  This. I imagine there will be months when I don't write anything. Why would somebody still subscribe. Looks stellar btw.
  - prox 5y ago
    Maybe an option to pay for X posts instead of per month.
  - skeeter2020 5y ago
    How is this not all on you? Maybe you shouldn't be selling subscriptions for your writing if you're not actually writing?
- Reebz 5y ago
  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.
  - ayewo 5y ago
    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,bD8ptwUwiZX9o0eZCIuqwA https://excalidraw.com/#json=5965784438276096,bD8ptwUwiZX9o0...
drodil 5y ago
Have been looking for options to move away from Medium.com and this looks promising. Would appreciate functionality to automatically import existing posts from other platforms (like medium has).
- colinarms 5y ago
  Thank you! This is something I'm actively working on. I've already begun to implement functionality to import subscribers from Substack (you can test it out in the /settings/blog page). After I finish Substack, I'll begin adding support for importing posts/subscribers from other platforms.
tleb_ 5y ago
React & a framework on top can be called minimal for a blogging platform? A blog entry[0] requires the transfer of 3.29MB (2.09MB of images with most which don't look web-optimised). [0]: https://papyrus.so/@PapyrusBlog/how-we-reduced-next.js-page-size-by-3.5x-and-achieved-a-98-lighthouse-score https://papyrus.so/@PapyrusBlog/how-we-reduced-next.js-page-...
- topicseed 5y ago
  If using a framework was really needed here, probably that Svelte would have made more sense as it offers much lighter pages.
- chrismorgan 5y ago
  OP says “as little JS as possible”. I’m seeing 830KB of JavaScript (254KB over the wire) on that page (plus another 14KB of JSON inside the HTML, of __NEXT_DATA__ bloat), spread across more than 20 files, when the only effects I can see are the scroll progress bar in the header (<1KB of value), the subscribe button (perhaps just barely 1KB of value), and SPA loading of other links; and loading /@PapyrusBlog and / via such SPA links fetches another 156KB (48KB wire) of JavaScript. These figures are in no way light (even if they’re lighter than far too many sites). Given the positioning and the statement “as little JS as possible”, I was definitely expecting less than 5KB of JavaScript, perhaps even nothing beyond Plausible; having seen SPA functionality I’d be willing to increase that expectation to 25KB. I’m with topicseed: Svelte would be a much more sensible starting point when seeking to use such a framework; SvelteKit can give you the same style of SPA stuff. One last batch of remarks: most of the stuff in the “optimise images” step of that article is counterproductive. General content should not attempt to use lazy loading, it tends to make the experience worse, especially for distant visitors with higher latency but normally it doesn’t even help things for low-latency viewers. (next/image is wrong and foolish to enable lazy loading by default.) In the case of the logo specifically, if that’s the quill, that looks like it should be SVG—smaller and faster. And <code node="[object Object]">…</code> as the translation of the Markdown `…` is probably a bug.
Mandatum 5y ago
I'm stoked for you OP - I wish there was a service that you could subscribe to when a SaaS product has existed and run okay for 2 years. Right now when I hear about something I use, I just set a calendar reminder for 18-24 months away. All the best OP! We need more services like this!
- colinarms 5y ago
  Thank you! Appreciate the kind words!
stradiv 5y ago
Share to Facebook and Twitter buttons in blog posts are not working. The urls for sharing buttons are below. https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=https://papyrus.so{router.asPath} https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=https://papyrus... http://twitter.com/share?url=https://papyrus.so{router.asPath} http://twitter.com/share?url=https://papyrus.so{router.asPat...
- colinarms 5y ago
  Thanks for the catch - this should be fixed now.
freddyym 5y ago
I've always been a fan of Write.as when it comes to newsletters [0], and everything they do honestly. Great company and great products. [0] https://write.as/letters https://write.as/letters
- colinarms 5y ago
  Agreed - they were a great inspiration for us.
soniman 5y ago
This is a little off topic but I don't want to read a lot of text-heavy blogs that all look the same. Give me a little variety and some nice pictures to look at. By the way this looks nice and I'm going to check it out, too bad my Tumblr has 2500 poasts and no readers.
- colinarms 5y ago
  Thanks for the feedback. Customization is definitely on the roadmap, but nailing the reading/editing experience is higher priority for now.
diasks2 5y ago
Nice work, this looks nice. I signed up and was writing a post. I was nearly finished and switched to the tutorial post (which I had archived). I clicked the hamburger and clicked "permanently delete" to remove the tutorial post. However, nothing happened. I then clicked on "All posts" to go back to the post I was working on and it had deleted that. Any way to recover that? I don't see a help email.
- colinarms 5y ago
  Yes, there's a chance I can recover this. Can you shoot me an email (hello@papyrus.dev) with the email you signed up with, and the name of the post you were working on? Happy to look into this. This definitely sounds like a bug.
joshxyz 5y ago
It's surprisingly fast lol
chrisweekly 5y ago
+1 for shipping, and for your guiding principles. Stoked to check it out!
faramarz 5y ago
Looking forward to custom domains! I signed up because of stance on privacy and no tracking and also in the same boat; want to write more.
- colinarms 5y ago
  Just circling back here - I launched custom domain support today. For a one-time fee of $50, you can unlock custom domains permanently for your blog. Thanks!
- colinarms 5y ago
  Awesome - thank you!
axelthegerman 5y ago
I love reading DHH's posts on Hey - e.g. https://world.hey.com/dhh/rails-7-will-have-three-great-answers-to-javascript-in-2021-8d68191b https://world.hey.com/dhh/rails-7-will-have-three-great-answ... That's what I call minimal. Unfortunately it's linked to Hey email service which I'm not using
ayewo 5y ago
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29083365
- colinarms 5y ago
  1. I originally registered https://papyrus.dev 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.
  - chrismorgan 5y ago
    Why .so? Unless you’re actually linked to Somalia, its registration rules don’t allow that, so your registration is liable to be terminated at any time. See https://sonic.so/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/dotso-domain-name-registration-policies_v1.1_2.pdf#page=22 https://sonic.so/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/dotso-domain-nam..., clause 5.5.2. If you ever want to use a ccTLD, I recommend starting by looking at the registration restrictions in the infobox in the ccTLD’s Wikipedia article, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.so https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.so says “Limited to institutions and organizations in Somalia, residents of Somalia, others who have a legitimate, clear and provable connection to Somalia”. Also consider whether you trust the country in question to operate its registry well, not to have hostile takeovers that mess up the entire thing, &c. Generally speaking, I recommend avoiding using ccTLDs in this way. Even new gTLDs are mostly safer. One possibility there is papyrus.pub (“pub” being nominally short for public houses, the eating places and such, but also definitely being used for publishing). I have seen about three other .so domains, notion.so being by far the best-known; and Notion has definitely had trouble at least once either with their registration or with the operation of the registry.

173 points by colinarms 5y ago

I doubt that flat 5% from subscriptions would be enough to sustain free users. You will either have to draw in some established bloggers with loyal, paying audience from another platform, or find another source of revenue. Maybe I'm wrong and you did the math.

bryans 5y ago
A billion blog views per month would cost about $750. A million would cost $40.

chilldsgn 5y ago

Looks awesome, I am trying it out :) it's a pity I can't get paid, because Stripe is not available in my country. Maybe add some other options, such as Paddle, to those of us who are located in Africa where Stripe is not available yet.

eitland 5y ago

Wow, this is seriously fast! Maybe you should provide more links to existing blogs somewhere? (e.g. something like https://read.write.as https://read.write.as which aggregates public posts from blogs on write.as)

colinarms 5y ago
Thanks! Yes, I've been meaning to do this - I haven't prioritized it yet because we have not had enough quality blogs on the platform to showcase, but after all the HN traffic I think this will change :)

melvinmt 5y ago

> lacked transparency (Substack) What do you mean exactly by this?

colinarms 5y ago
Here are some blogposts that can describe it better than I: https://thehypothesis.substack.com/p/heres-why-substacks-scam-worked-so https://thehypothesis.substack.com/p/heres-why-substacks-sca... https://doyles.substack.com/p/in-queers-we-trust-all-others-pay https://doyles.substack.com/p/in-queers-we-trust-all-others-... https://www.vox.com/recode/22338802/substack-pro-newsletter-controversy-jude-doyle https://www.vox.com/recode/22338802/substack-pro-newsletter-... The TL;DR is that Substack has allegedly paid large sums of money to bring writers onto their platform. The writers they've paid have historically been on one end of the ideological spectrum, and Substack has not been transparent about who is being paid, nor how much.

BLKNSLVR 5y ago

I've been procrastinating self-hosting, partially due to being unable to choose a platform and knowingly committing to it for the long term (maintenance, upgrades, etc.). This will happily fill the gap and let me get something 'out there' and find my niche while continuing to be indecisive about self-hosting. Pretty darn frictionless setup, nice clean look and feel. I like it so far.

colinarms 5y ago
Awesome - glad to hear that! Appreciate the feedback!

f_allwein 5y ago

> Connect your bank account Does this work in any country, or just one?

input_sh 5y ago
It mentions Stripe, so here's a list of countries: https://stripe.com/global https://stripe.com/global

forlorn 5y ago

Looking great, godspeed!

colinarms 5y ago
Thanks!

colinarms 5y ago

Hi HN, At the start of this year I set a personal goal to blog more. I wanted to 1) improve my writing skills, 2) build an audience, and 3) if the stars aligned, start earning a bit of supplemental income via paid posts or subscriptions. I looked at the existing blogging/newsletter solutions out there, and none of them quite fit what I was looking for. They had paywalls (Medium), features I didn't need (Wordpress), too minimal a design (Buttondown), lacked transparency (Substack), or cost money even when I wasn't earning yet (Ghost). So, I built my own. No trackers or tracking cookies are used (beyond Plausible, for privacy-preserving analytics). Speed and minimalism is a big focus: all blogs are rendered as static HTML, using as little JS as possible. You can write blogposts in markdown, publish them, let your readers subscribe, and (when you're ready) connect your Stripe account to start charging readers for access to paid posts. You also always maintain ownership of your posts, and you can export all data at any time. Still in the early stages, so any feedback would be great. Thanks!

encryptluks2 5y ago

I personally don't believe anything is privacy-first unless it is open source do that it can be self-hosted.

hardwaresofton 5y ago
Well you'll love Ghost! https://ghost.org https://ghost.org For my own curiosity -- would you blog more often if someone offered you cheap(er than ghost.org) hosted ghost instance from which you're free to take your data any time? [EDIT] - To make it more concrete, let's say someone gave you a ghost blog that was free with a soft-capped at 100 visits/day (and $5/month after)
- RNCTX 5y ago
  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 proposition. The former is pretty easy and the latter is not. Forcing people to try and do it all in one fell swoop for fear of reaching an arbitrary "user limit" is not reasonable. The hardest part anyone trying to do this from scratch is going to go through is getting off the ground from a handful of users to a few thousand users. Once they've gotten to that point, and can convert a few hundred of their few thousand users into paying subs, they're getting closer to seeing light at the end of the tunnel. The most feasible way for them to do so is market to their free subscribers / free followers with premium content, engagement with paying subs that they're missing out on, etc. Ghost chops the legs out from under them when they get to the first hurdle with the 10,000 user limit. I understand that database costs and email / SMS sending are the expensive part of hosting and have built content distribution backends before, so I get it. I understand the reasoning of putting the limit on pricing tiers there, but it would seem that a more flexible way is in order in Ghost's case. If we presume that you can convert 1% of free accounts to paying accounts, Ghost's pricing page tells its prospective users that they are going to be stuck in a $500.00 / month hobbyist income tier forever.

jcoletti 5y ago

Timely post. Been evaluating newsletter services for a new project so may give this a try. FYI – All of your site pages have the same title, or are missing page titles.

colinarms 5y ago
Thanks! Happy to hear any feedback or requirements you have for your new project. Shoot me an email at hello@papyrus.dev if you want to chat further. And thanks for that -- should be fixed now on a majority of pages.

xrd 5y ago

Really well done.

colinarms 5y ago
Thanks for the feedback - appreciate it!

toastal 5y ago

Will AsciiDoc be supported too? Markdown is far too limiting for many applications.

colinarms 5y ago
What applications do you envision? The editor is currently markdown combined with a rich text UI-based editor. I haven't explored supporting other types of editors (beyond extending the UI), but I'd be open to it.
- mp3k 5y ago
  Let's add PRO mode for MDX https://v2.mdxjs.com/ https://v2.mdxjs.com/
- toastal 5y ago
  Features I’ve used:: * Tables: more features and is standard instead of specific to some Markdown “flavors” * Admonitions: better than ad hoc emoji + bold *NOTE* usage as it then becomes styleable * Titles for blocks: better than putting "######" for an <h6> when you want a caption * Display block images * Ability to add [.css-class-name] to arbitrary blocks * Ability to add arbitrary attributes to images and links (title, rel, ARIA, etc.) What I’ll often see however in Markdown is a lot of handwritten HTML to accomplish this stuff which kinda defeats the point of a lightweight markup language. There’s also a big list of typographic substitutions which is nice for authors that prefer to type in ASCII but want proper quotes, dashes, arrows, etc. These are all things I would want if writing technical content where I am in control of styles and demand good typography.

steventey 5y ago

Absolutely a huge fan of this Colin! Keep up the great work man!!

colinarms 5y ago
Thanks a lot, Steven! Appreciate it!

bArray 5y ago

This looks nicely implemented. Can you give some examples of a successful blog(s) on the platform (with the permission of the author of course)? One thing I would say is that your top navigation bar (for example clicking on 'Why Papyrus?') doesn't appear to work without JS. I hope the rest of the website experience is not hindered by the need to run JS.

colinarms 5y ago
Thank you! We're still in the early stages so no large blogs to show just yet. Here's the Papyrus blog, if you're more curious to see how a demo blog operates: https://papyrus.so/@PapyrusBlog https://papyrus.so/@PapyrusBlog And thanks for the tip about the JS issues - I'm absolutely focused on making the entire site accessible without JS, so this is important to me. I'll take a look at shortly.

Groxx 5y ago

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 might be fine, but it'd be nice if that link-popup searched your post titles or something) and probably a small bit of extra flexibility... but finding the balancing point between "feature-full" and "simple" is quite tough, as is keeping it fast. I'm pleasantly surprised with it as-is. Any chance of custom domain support? I assume that would be a paid feature (it always is, I think that's reasonable), but it is nice to have that option. Also RSS.

colinarms 5y ago
Just circling back here - I launched custom domain support today (for a one-time fee of $50, you can unlock custom domains permanently for your blog).
colinarms 5y ago
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 domain support and RSS - both features on the roadmap! Likely RSS first, as that's quite a bit easier to implement, and custom domain support shortly after that. (Custom domain support is probably the #1 feature request at the moment).
- prox 5y ago
  I’ve been thinking about blogging for a while, and your offering is the first that makes me want to go ahead. Custom domain would be nice!
  - 5y ago

olah_1 5y ago

$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.

mp3k 5y ago
This. I imagine there will be months when I don't write anything. Why would somebody still subscribe. Looks stellar btw.
- prox 5y ago
  Maybe an option to pay for X posts instead of per month.
- skeeter2020 5y ago
  How is this not all on you? Maybe you shouldn't be selling subscriptions for your writing if you're not actually writing?
Reebz 5y ago
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.
- ayewo 5y ago
  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,bD8ptwUwiZX9o0eZCIuqwA https://excalidraw.com/#json=5965784438276096,bD8ptwUwiZX9o0...

drodil 5y ago

Have been looking for options to move away from Medium.com and this looks promising. Would appreciate functionality to automatically import existing posts from other platforms (like medium has).

colinarms 5y ago
Thank you! This is something I'm actively working on. I've already begun to implement functionality to import subscribers from Substack (you can test it out in the /settings/blog page). After I finish Substack, I'll begin adding support for importing posts/subscribers from other platforms.

tleb_ 5y ago

React & a framework on top can be called minimal for a blogging platform? A blog entry[0] requires the transfer of 3.29MB (2.09MB of images with most which don't look web-optimised). [0]: https://papyrus.so/@PapyrusBlog/how-we-reduced-next.js-page-size-by-3.5x-and-achieved-a-98-lighthouse-score https://papyrus.so/@PapyrusBlog/how-we-reduced-next.js-page-...

topicseed 5y ago
If using a framework was really needed here, probably that Svelte would have made more sense as it offers much lighter pages.
chrismorgan 5y ago
OP says “as little JS as possible”. I’m seeing 830KB of JavaScript (254KB over the wire) on that page (plus another 14KB of JSON inside the HTML, of __NEXT_DATA__ bloat), spread across more than 20 files, when the only effects I can see are the scroll progress bar in the header (<1KB of value), the subscribe button (perhaps just barely 1KB of value), and SPA loading of other links; and loading /@PapyrusBlog and / via such SPA links fetches another 156KB (48KB wire) of JavaScript. These figures are in no way light (even if they’re lighter than far too many sites). Given the positioning and the statement “as little JS as possible”, I was definitely expecting less than 5KB of JavaScript, perhaps even nothing beyond Plausible; having seen SPA functionality I’d be willing to increase that expectation to 25KB. I’m with topicseed: Svelte would be a much more sensible starting point when seeking to use such a framework; SvelteKit can give you the same style of SPA stuff. One last batch of remarks: most of the stuff in the “optimise images” step of that article is counterproductive. General content should not attempt to use lazy loading, it tends to make the experience worse, especially for distant visitors with higher latency but normally it doesn’t even help things for low-latency viewers. (next/image is wrong and foolish to enable lazy loading by default.) In the case of the logo specifically, if that’s the quill, that looks like it should be SVG—smaller and faster. And <code node="[object Object]">…</code> as the translation of the Markdown `…` is probably a bug.

Mandatum 5y ago

I'm stoked for you OP - I wish there was a service that you could subscribe to when a SaaS product has existed and run okay for 2 years. Right now when I hear about something I use, I just set a calendar reminder for 18-24 months away. All the best OP! We need more services like this!

colinarms 5y ago
Thank you! Appreciate the kind words!

stradiv 5y ago

Share to Facebook and Twitter buttons in blog posts are not working. The urls for sharing buttons are below. https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=https://papyrus.so{router.asPath} https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=https://papyrus... http://twitter.com/share?url=https://papyrus.so{router.asPath} http://twitter.com/share?url=https://papyrus.so{router.asPat...

colinarms 5y ago
Thanks for the catch - this should be fixed now.

freddyym 5y ago

I've always been a fan of Write.as when it comes to newsletters [0], and everything they do honestly. Great company and great products. [0] https://write.as/letters https://write.as/letters

colinarms 5y ago
Agreed - they were a great inspiration for us.

soniman 5y ago

This is a little off topic but I don't want to read a lot of text-heavy blogs that all look the same. Give me a little variety and some nice pictures to look at. By the way this looks nice and I'm going to check it out, too bad my Tumblr has 2500 poasts and no readers.

colinarms 5y ago
Thanks for the feedback. Customization is definitely on the roadmap, but nailing the reading/editing experience is higher priority for now.

diasks2 5y ago

Nice work, this looks nice. I signed up and was writing a post. I was nearly finished and switched to the tutorial post (which I had archived). I clicked the hamburger and clicked "permanently delete" to remove the tutorial post. However, nothing happened. I then clicked on "All posts" to go back to the post I was working on and it had deleted that. Any way to recover that? I don't see a help email.

colinarms 5y ago
Yes, there's a chance I can recover this. Can you shoot me an email (hello@papyrus.dev) with the email you signed up with, and the name of the post you were working on? Happy to look into this. This definitely sounds like a bug.

joshxyz 5y ago

It's surprisingly fast lol

chrisweekly 5y ago

+1 for shipping, and for your guiding principles. Stoked to check it out!

faramarz 5y ago

Looking forward to custom domains! I signed up because of stance on privacy and no tracking and also in the same boat; want to write more.

colinarms 5y ago
Just circling back here - I launched custom domain support today. For a one-time fee of $50, you can unlock custom domains permanently for your blog. Thanks!
colinarms 5y ago
Awesome - thank you!

axelthegerman 5y ago

I love reading DHH's posts on Hey - e.g. https://world.hey.com/dhh/rails-7-will-have-three-great-answers-to-javascript-in-2021-8d68191b https://world.hey.com/dhh/rails-7-will-have-three-great-answ... That's what I call minimal. Unfortunately it's linked to Hey email service which I'm not using

ayewo 5y ago

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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29083365

colinarms 5y ago
1. I originally registered https://papyrus.dev 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.
- chrismorgan 5y ago
  Why .so? Unless you’re actually linked to Somalia, its registration rules don’t allow that, so your registration is liable to be terminated at any time. See https://sonic.so/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/dotso-domain-name-registration-policies_v1.1_2.pdf#page=22 https://sonic.so/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/dotso-domain-nam..., clause 5.5.2. If you ever want to use a ccTLD, I recommend starting by looking at the registration restrictions in the infobox in the ccTLD’s Wikipedia article, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.so https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.so says “Limited to institutions and organizations in Somalia, residents of Somalia, others who have a legitimate, clear and provable connection to Somalia”. Also consider whether you trust the country in question to operate its registry well, not to have hostile takeovers that mess up the entire thing, &c. Generally speaking, I recommend avoiding using ccTLDs in this way. Even new gTLDs are mostly safer. One possibility there is papyrus.pub (“pub” being nominally short for public houses, the eating places and such, but also definitely being used for publishing). I have seen about three other .so domains, notion.so being by far the best-known; and Notion has definitely had trouble at least once either with their registration or with the operation of the registry.