Comment by gpiancastelli | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gpiancastelli | Hacker News Reader

The first time I stumbled upon Special Fish was in the first comment on another HN thread titled "Rediscovering The Small Web" [1], so if you find Special Fish interesting you may also like some other things mentioned there.

I spent a couple of hours sufring the site and various personal pages linked within some profiles. From my small sample, it seemed to be popular among some sort of lo-fi designer/technoartist crowd. It was different enough from my usual intake of the web to hook me up for a bit.

I was tempted to register an account, but gave up after reading the pitch: "Special Fish is a place for exploring logs and lists." I mean... I've done blogs (on both home-made and stock tools), tumblrs, micro-blogs (Twitter and Identi.ca), small project-based websites, you name it. What is left to explore on the logs/lists space, especially given the simple pages I've witnessed across the site (and the simple tools given to authors, I guessed), that signing up would be compelling? What are the results of this exploration on Special Fish that are worth mentioning?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23326329

Thanks for the feedback. This is something I've been thinking about a bit since launching it. I don't think SF necessarily does anything new or hooks users and I'm okay with that. I actually intended the site be more focused around the lists, but people really seem to enjoy logging their day-to-day lives. Personally, I like reading these automatic thoughts from strangers. Many people talk about quarantine routines, life goals, and ongoing projects. It's cool to see all this overlap in how people are thinking right now. So again, nothing new here, just a slightly different approach to a community website.

I totally understand your hesitance on registering an account. There are so many ways of blogging/journaling on the web already. I actually think it's a good site to browse without ever needing an account. I'm looking at added RSS soon so you won't even need to really visit and can use something like Fraidycat to check in.

Also, SF was mentioned on Kicks Condor recently [1]. I like how they talked about the site... "but it hadn’t even occurred to me to make a social network that is just a directory". I hadn't really thought of SF as just a directory either, but I like the idea that its only purpose is to be a directory of people doing DIY stuff on the web.

[1] https://www.kickscondor.com/special.fish/

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