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I'm not a hater, I am genuinely curious, how does something like this get to 800 votes on HN and 4.4K stars on GitHub? I mean, it's just... a pub/sub server...

by brap 4y ago

I'm not a hater, I am genuinely curious, how does something like this get to 800 votes on HN and 4.4K stars on GitHub? I mean, it's just... a pub/sub server... using HTTP? With a thin UI for web/mobile? I'm obviously missing something, so what is it? Again, not a hater, even though it may come off like I am, I'm just honestly wondering what makes this special. From first glance it seems like something most devs can hack in an hour or two.

vardump 4y ago
Useful things get votes. Even if they're simple.
wh33zle 4y ago
There is hacking the functionality together in an hour or two and then there is polishing it to the point where it doesn't have rough edges and can easily be used by anyone with terminal experience. Personally, the chosen feature set resonates a lot with me. I like services that don't need accounts f.e. because they are so easy to use.
norenh 4y ago
It is small, simple and does the job. Also seems to have good documentation. What is there not to love about that? Do you know something better that fills the same gap?
sunderous 4y ago
I think the allure comes from solving a very sharp pain point if you're a hobbyist developer or new to mobile dev: push notifications. I don't know about others, but the first time I looked into apps, I could make sense of everything until I got to push notifications. Then it became this insanely complicated rabbit hole with a bunch of companies saying they'd solve it for you for 20 bucks a month or whatever. For something that on the surface sounds like it should be dead simple. So a simple, clean, free way to send a push notification to your phone, that you can use with a web request from anywhere? I can definitely see the mass appeal of that to the millions of people with small projects who don't want to become experts on google/apple's ecosystems just to make some words pop up on their phone.

by brap 4y ago

vardump 4y ago

Useful things get votes. Even if they're simple.

wh33zle 4y ago

There is hacking the functionality together in an hour or two and then there is polishing it to the point where it doesn't have rough edges and can easily be used by anyone with terminal experience. Personally, the chosen feature set resonates a lot with me. I like services that don't need accounts f.e. because they are so easy to use.

norenh 4y ago

It is small, simple and does the job. Also seems to have good documentation. What is there not to love about that? Do you know something better that fills the same gap?

sunderous 4y ago

I think the allure comes from solving a very sharp pain point if you're a hobbyist developer or new to mobile dev: push notifications. I don't know about others, but the first time I looked into apps, I could make sense of everything until I got to push notifications. Then it became this insanely complicated rabbit hole with a bunch of companies saying they'd solve it for you for 20 bucks a month or whatever. For something that on the surface sounds like it should be dead simple. So a simple, clean, free way to send a push notification to your phone, that you can use with a web request from anywhere? I can definitely see the mass appeal of that to the millions of people with small projects who don't want to become experts on google/apple's ecosystems just to make some words pop up on their phone.