You may be interested in
https://able.bioMyself and a partner are building this, here are a few points:
- It's a community to read and write about building things with technology
- Clean, fast and light UX + Markdown editor (https://able.bio/new)
- Bootstrapped with low overheads. No outside investment removes pressure to grow at all costs and the lapse on integrity that we see more of each day.
- No data lock-in. Export your posts in a single JSON file (containing Markdown + HTML versions) accompanied by all images.
- We're finishing up a big set of data portability / data respect features, which we plan to announce soon.
The aim is to build a community of capable people with a genuine interest in technology and attach a job board to the site. Companies can then pay to display their vacancies on the job board and users can take a look whenever they like. No popups, banners or any of that dodgy/spammy crap getting in between users and the reading/writing. In this age we see integrity towards our users as a differentiator.
Building it is fairly straightforward and fun. Some learnings we've gained in terms of 'jumpstarting' it:
- a lot of people are vehemently sceptical after the Medium debacle.
- creating a feed that prioritises good content without "censoring" dev spam or trivial posts is tricky when coming off a smaller user base. For example, upvotes can have outsized effects.
- getting regular volume of good content so that people use Able as source of news/inspiration/learning.
We've had some great posts from people but we need just that little bit more to get the flywheel going. As soon as someone posts something, activity on the site goes up but then dies down again. It's the classic building vs. promoting trade-off. However, we've chosen to get data portability and respect right first as we believe this is fundamental. We're wrapping that up now and then have loads of learnings and ideas we want write about.
We feel that same potential 'renaissance' you're talking about and this is how we want to try and activate it. If you feel inclined, have a look and let us know what you think.