Show HN: Midnight.pub – Virtual Speakeasy | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Midnight.pub – Virtual Speakeasy

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Midnight is a side-project I've been working on for the past year, but only released in alpha a month ago. It aims to be the web equivalent of your local pub: a place you can go to and talk about your day with strangers or friends. It's heavily inspired by write.as (for simplicy) and Roam (for bi-directional linking). My hope is that it fosters creative writing as well as typical pub discussions.

You can read more about it and the concept on https://midnight.pub

Here are some example of interesting stories written: https://midnight.pub/e/269435632215917061 https://midnight.pub/e/270853987488498184 https://midnight.pub/e/271216985664127501

Thanks for reading!

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Congrats, this is a an awesome idea and well implemented. Especially the name and domain is kind of welcoming and setting the right tone.

I just checked out write.as' and ResearchRoam's traffic and they have both over 1-2M visits per month which isn't too bad and surprised me a bit. Do you have insights into this market? Why does a simple editor (write.as) gets so much traffic and is still growing? Is linking (Roam) not an overrated feature and easy to accomplish with any other note taking tool? What kind of people are using these tools? Isn't there not heavy competition on the native app side?

> Why does a simple editor (write.as) gets so much traffic and is still growing?

Write.as isn't an editor; it's a Medium (blogging) alternative.

> Is linking (Roam) not an overrated feature and easy to accomplish with any other note taking tool?

Roam is a supercharged wiki specifically for journaling and mind-mapping (i.e. a personal wiki). People who don't understand why GitHub "wikis" aren't really wikis will also have difficulty understanding what makes wikis appealing/effective.

You can look through recent discussions here on HN about similar Roam-like tools (like Obsidian[1]) if you want to see how people are approaching these things.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23324598

As someone who doesn't frequent pubs - is going to pubs and talking about your day to strangers actually a feature of pubs? How does that actually work? What's the etiquette?

A lot of people see pubs and bars as a place to go and socialize, made easier by the social lubricant that is alcohol. It definitely depends on the vibe of the bar and the like.

I will say that all most all of the time I've spent in bars has been in a professional capacity as a musician, but I know at least one person who actually became a more social person in general because he started drinking at a local brewer's pub (they were actually a brewer's shop and a bar, it was pretty great) instead of drinking at home.

Usually it's something like you have a sports event you want to see, head to the pub, and you're sort of half watching it on the TV, and there's others around watching the same thing or chatting. If people are talking about something a little ways away from you it's socially acceptable to butt in, more or less. As you spend time in a local, you also get to know the regulars and they'll wind up introducing you to other regulars, etc. Double all this if there's more affiliation going on, like you're all immigrants or ex-pats or whatever, or if you're all lawyers or something.

Source: Irish immigrant family.

The listed links (which are not automatically made clickable in text posts):

https://midnight.pub

https://midnight.pub/e/269435632215917061

https://midnight.pub/e/270853987488498184

https://midnight.pub/e/271216985664127501

The simplicity is really appealing! Your video was good too, very clear.

It's tempting to try it, but I prefer to host all my writing and works myself.

MUSHes and MOOs are virtual pubs that aren't as fashionable any more as they once were. (Most MUSH-oriented apps are glorified telnet clients, and tend to reproduce the same aesthetics and design flaws/idiosyncrasies.) Real life pubs are real-time, and MUSHes offer a good balance of real-time, networked interaction and persistent objects. This project doesn't handle the real-time aspect and is less like a pub than a blog with a wiki-like editing experience.

I'm convinced that with all the chat apps that are popping up, the Slack killer will be the first one to reinvent the MUSH by bolting its most notable features onto the "chat" space.

(When Keybase was still a thing, I thought they might do it by introducing "bot workers"—chat bots implemented in a script bundle that's managed and executed in the client itself—like a browser add-on, but based on Service Workers a la Cloudflare Workers.)

This is fascinating and I’m not sure I quite understand it. I hadn’t heard of either of the other two services so I’m looking at those now.

Write.as is a minimal blog platform that federates over ActivityPub.

I can’t help but think about ActivityPub and how it could be used to implement something like this

Heard about ActivityPub the first time, just checked it out briefly. Ok it' some social networking protocol, how does it relate to write.as?

You can see and comment on write.as posts from other ActivityPub (AP) platforms that support it like Mastodon. It's up to the platform to implement it since the AP specification leaves implementation details mostly up to the implementor.

A recent discussion here on HN covers it pretty well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23852036

Great concept. Looking forward to seeing the community it forms.

Video is a bit quiet.

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