Mataroa blog – Naked blogging platform for minimalists | Hacker News Reader

Mataroa blog – Naked blogging platform for minimalists

mataroa.blog

532 pointsnotmuffin153 comments

One nice thing I recognized is that the generated RSS feed contains full html text. I wish more blogging platforms are like this; save a lot of effort for feed readers.

I'd also recommend to add open graph meta for the blog posts. Presumably people will want to share the posts somewhere; a nice set of open graph metas goes a long way.

I haven't checked it out yet, but... Wouldn't one not want html text in the feed, if one chose to use a blogging platform whose focus was text and simplicity? I prefer to read feeds with plain text myself.

Images are a feature many articles benefit from.

De gustibus I suppose, but to me, “Images are a feature many or most articles use and which a very small number benefit from.”

You're right. I shouldn't have said many. I forgot some like to put memes in their articles. I still think the ability to use images can be important, depending on topic. Quite simply a blog about anything graphics-related would benefit.

I've been told Medium requires a huge photo at the top of each post, regardless if it makes sense or not for the article. Most of the time those articles are simply junk.

Agreed, but on a technical level it makes it harder for the client software to have to decide what to do with those resources. A plain-text post can sit on my drive for months until I get around to reading it with barely any impact on disk space usage.

With images I either have to eat the storage utilization for them or suffer a privacy leak by loading them when the post is opened. For the latter, there's always a small risk that a post could be deleted or an entire website vanish in between the time my feed updates and the time I open a post, in which case it would be left with text but broken images. I guess they could be inlined (like `<img src="data:image/png;base64,etc"/>`) to avoid that risk. It's even more obnoxiously complex if we're using the modern `picture`/`srcset`/etc to serve multiple resolutions and image formats for various screen sizes, connection speeds, and platforms.

Most sane feed readers sanitize the html down to a dumb level; just headings, paragraphs, links and some inline images. If you only have the text to begin with, hyper-links won't work.

> One nice thing I recognized is that the generated RSS feed contains full html text. I wish more blogging platforms are like this; save a lot of effort for feed readers.

The reason some blogs don't include the whole thing in the RSS is because they want you to visit the site for the ad revenue. It's not an oversight.

Blogging is (was?) a job for some people. It wasn't completely supported by ads, but ads are part of it. It's like YouTubers before YouTube.

Maybe today, but I personally stopped providing full text in the feeds of my now defunct and free from advertising blog, because my content was directly vacuumed and inserted into a spammy full of advertising website.

This was around 2005 for what I can remember. Time is flying...

> my content was directly vacuumed

This happens with the HTML contents just as easily. Perhaps just include a unique identifier in the text per client, and a link back to the source.

> This happens with the HTML contents just as easily.

On an individual scale, yes. But if you're a spammer and want to vaccuum up text from 1000 sites, you'll skip writing a scraper for individual sites (which may change their formatting later anyway) and just use reliably-formatted RSS feeds.

Correct. To the point where most black hat tools that spammers use will have rss feed ingestion as the primary or only data ingestion method.

That was probably true back in 2004, but today there are numerous reader view, full text converter, and advanced web spider projects that anybody can plug in and get the full text from at least 90% of web sites, with no extra effort.

Unethical people is going to do whatever they can. Life is much more enjoyable if you just ignore them and whatever shit they are going to do with the content you willingly shared with the world for free.

> Life is much more enjoyable if …

That sentence has widely different endings for different people.

> my content was directly vacuumed and inserted into a spammy full of advertising website

For all its faults, this is something I have no shame invoking DMCA for. You still own the copyright on your writing even if you publish it for free online.

How do you "invoke DMCA" on a random spam site? I've only heard it mentioned WRT central authority sites like YouTube, etc.

Contact the host. I can't recall if I've done this before but I do recall that it often works.

There are some downsides: interactive pages won’t work and automated content stealers. It very easy to copy articles from such RSS feeds because you don’t need to search for the text in HTML.

That's great, but unfortunately the HTML view only shows the TITLE, ala HackerNews, and not even a single summary sentence or paragraph there. So we've got a good RSS feed, but a bad HTML view.

> Presumably people will want to share the posts somewhere; a nice set of open graph metas goes a long way.

Genuine question - what does this enable? I assume the big guys love the additional tagging for engaging similar content, but what else is there?

a nice looking link preview.

It lets you decide how a link you share is presented on a variety of supporting platforms, with a few bits of metadata. You can control whether/how it presents your page's title, a preview image, summary/description, and who it's attributed to. All of which are desirable for content authors, not just those platforms.

>Content in mataroa blogs is unfiltered and unmonitored. Users are free to publish any combination of words and pixels. However, content of animosity or disparagement of an individual or a group on account of a group characteristic such as race, colour, national origin, sex, disability, religion, or sexual orientation will be taken down immediately.

>If one notices something along those lines in a mataroa blog please let us know at admin@mataroa.blog.

There should probably be something explicit in there about what kinds of pornography is allowed on the site. Also, the first part of the paragraph seems contradicted by the second: I would say users aren't really free to publish any combination of words given the sentence that follows.

P.S. it looks like a great service

Made a small adjustment to improve clarity in that paragraph. Thanks :)

This seems far too broad, mainly because of the religious restriction. A blog on comparative religion could be removed for using the word "heterodox". Faith is a choice, unlike all the other protected characteristics in this list.

>Faith is a choice Faith isn't a choice for the faithful

Having been faithful at one point in time, and no longer being faithful, I can invalidate that.

I was using and loved mataroa. It was the fairest, most painless option I had found for blogging (as of 2020.) I eventually switched away from it because the default font was small and I couldn’t change it. I wonder if this has been updated since. (At the moment, I’m hosting my blog as a static site with NFS. I go back and forth about wanting comments/email sign-up.)

The developers were nice though, and I used their source code to learn Django. Really grateful.

That sounds easy to fix, just some custom css?

I was wondering about the typography too. Specifically for multi-language support, the chances are high that you’d want something better than the one default font they provide. Not to mention that you may want to edit the language meta code if you are writing in a different language.

I built mataroa. Not sure if your comment is referring to mataroa, but in case it is:

I care a lot about typography and making a platform in which non-latin scripts can be read well. Mataroa does not provide any font. Rather, it uses the end user's system fonts. System fonts are most probably better than webfonts. They can define a large set of characters, including as many languages as they can, without caring about how big they get. This is in contrast to webfonts, of which all character glyphs need to be sent to the client—so size matters.

I've also written this text on the topic: https://nutcroft.com/blog/in-defense-of-user-defined-web-fon...

Thanks for your comments. However, for certain languages it is important to specify the language in the HTML with the `lang` attribute. Otherwise incorrect glyphs may be displayed. More info:

https://heistak.github.io/your-code-displays-japanese-wrong/

That's very interesting. Thank you for bringing it to my attention! Maybe a new setting to set the `lang` attribute is worth it.

That attribute could also let you easily group your users into different languages. If you wanted to add more discovery features or something and let people search by language. Not sure what your goal is around that. Maybe opt out of discovery by default or something.

Unicode was supposed to save us from language-specific codepages, but alas...

On my phone it's pretty small font and linegeight, and found uncomfortable to read. As a web & app dev I have no idea how to quickly change this, let alone someone less tech savvy. For old people often small text is a big thing. Maybe add few font enlarge buttons?

One can change their blog's theme (which is essentially a larger serif font at 20px) on the mataroa blog setting page.

Ok but using px instead of rem is already getting it wrong. See https://every-layout.dev/rudiments/units/

Thanks for the article! I think I'm convinced—will probably change up some stuff on font sizes and container widths.

> Mataroa does not provide any font. Rather, it uses the end user's system fonts.

Thank you very much for this.

Well, you do make one bad decision with your typography (and that’s the one alecst was remarking on with “the default font was small”): you set the font size to 14px, rather than leaving it at the default value (which will normally be 16px) or possibly increasing it a little (I reckon the decent range relative to the default is about 1–1.25em).

Nice. Almost what I want: simplicity, images (for plots), and no adds or tracking. However, I want to author pages on optics, and I want to use MathJax (https://www.mathjax.org/) for equations. Please let me know how I might use MathJax with Mataroa if I've misunderstood. Or, please suggest something similar that supports MathJax. Rolling my own static site (as many NH postings describe) is enticing but beyond my ability. I am not a Web programmer, and Mataroa's simplicity is perfect for me.

Edit: leaving up as an embarrassing reminder to myself fully rtfm before opening my mouth. I thought this did NOT have comments and sub by email but it does. Glad y’all provided me with some feedback to realize I was wrong.

—-

Original comment:

I don’t get it. If you want to write and don’t care how much you’re read, write privately (Google Docs, a journal, text file, etc.)

If you’re writing publicly presumably it’s for public consumption. The way you know if your writing is read is through feedback - comments, shares, email subs, etc.

Feedback on your writing both helps you understand where you need to think more deeply about what you wrote AND provides valuable positive reinforcement: somebody is reading what you put into the world.

Not providing hooks for these seems to defeat the purpose of writing in public.

Maybe consider that you're not their target audience.

I’m trying to understand who the target audience is.

Phrasing my comment a slightly different way: what’s the point of writing *in public* if you don’t get feedback?

Too much feedback (especially when it comes to sharing your own thoughts) poisons the purity.

It’s a cliche that every musicians best work is their early stuff. Once you become popular, famous, entangled in expectations and opinions, you lose the thing that made you great.

You are misrepresenting it: Not caring about numbers/analytics isn't "no feedback". People can still leave comments, email, ...

And the usefulness of writing isn't connected to if people can reach the author or not.

For me

- Writing publicly is minimum viable pressure to make me better formulate my ideas. It doesn’t require feedback; 80% of the value is in my words being public. When my ideas are better formulated, it leads to me new ideas I wouldn’t have had otherwise

- Over time (I’ve been blogging since 2000) I’ve found that the most valuable feedback is in email. You don’t get good signal to noise in comments or Web Mentions. RSS + a public email address is all I need

- I can afford for my network to grow slowly. I don’t need to build big community with flurries of debate in a comments section. Writing publicly is an excellent way to keep in touch with the broad network I already have

Not sure what kind of feedback you want?

They have comments and they have (local) analytics. What more do you expect from a blog?

I see where you’re coming from, but I personally love blogging with zero concern for who reads it, how many likes it gets, or whether or not people want to give feedback.

It prevents me from falling into a trap of crafting posts that have a bias toward what I think people might want to read, it keeps it pure.

Just writing knowing that someone might read it inspires better writing. It's like when you think about a problem really hard, come up with nothing, then spend an hour formulating a perfect StackExchange question. More often than not, the process of writing for other people leads me to the answer, even without sending the question.

Same with blogging, except I can publish any old crap on my blog without moderation.

Private feedback via email is always possible and you can chose to publish specific feedback you deem important. It's the same for printed literature. There is no comment section in books. As for sharing: you can always share the URL

I have a public notes repo [0] in which I only write for myself, with no real expectation that anyone will ever read it. I have however gotten feedback in the form of cold emails that people have found the notes useful or interesting. Writing in public without hooks can also be valuable.

[0]: https://notes.param.codes

> I thought this did NOT have comments and sub by email but it does.

Can you please elaborate? Because I was (and still am) under the exact same impression. The only appearance of the word "comments" on the home page is this:

• Comments (alpha)

and there is no link.

I moved my personal blog to mataroa, and then wrote a love letter to the service on how much it gets right — https://pratul.net/blog/mataroa-just-works-for-me/

Great service, and an inspiration for https://smol.pub

smol.pub is awesomeeeeeee

Been a happy user of it :D

Thanks a lot for building it !

thank you teitoklien <3

Would you say there are significant differences between these two services? Or were you just inspired to build your own?

Is the “key” for an account a one-time purchase of $5?

Does mataroa, or a similar platform, offer syntax highlighting?

I'm on month 80 avoiding setting up a blog to capture my occasional thoughts and frequent side project adventures – mostly because I'd rather fiddle with the side projects than set aside time spinning up some blog platform (which often begins with promising I'll use asciidoc, and ends in frustration trying to render asciidoc _juuuuust_ right). I would love to have a dead-simple interface (for writing and reading) to collect words. But since most of those words will be about code, a lack of syntax highlighting will take residence in my mind.

(Tangentially related: I _love_ reader mode, because I like to read an article or two while rocking my baby to sleep, and reader mode offers dark mode, even on websites in stunning retina-burn white. The only downside of reader mode is how it kills syntax highlighting.)

Mataroa offers syntax highlighting. Example: https://nutcroft.com/blog/building-mataroa-blog/

Excellent! Thank you!

I would like to try writing a post before signing up, or at least see what the import/export looks like

I want to see if source code snippets, SVG, LaTeX, etc. works

Same issue with bearblog.dev. They show you example rendered posts but not the example source

Good points.

For the post source, it's just simple text markdown. SVG and LaTeX do not work. Most custom HTML and CSS does not work.

The allowed HTML elements/attributes and CSS rules that work are these: https://github.com/sirodoht/mataroa/blob/2d1524e1f3ba968efcb...

Could you sign up using a mailinator.com account just to kick the tires?

You can sign up for an account without an email address, so I don't think there is a need for Mailinator here.

Yeah, sadly the only demo sites you see anymore are mostly for b2b services.

> I would like to try writing a post before signing up

"signing up" is completely painless

  - no cost, no email required
  - choose a subdomain name aka login
  - choose a password
  - done

they've alredy given you exactly what you're asking for

I like modern web minimalism and modest design wave. Laconic and elegant.

Is there a reason reader mode doesn’t work on mobile Safari? (Pinch zooming and horizontal scrolling is painful.)

Hmm. No idea why. I'll take a look, this should work.

Mobile Safari's reader mode works for me on posts. It doesn't work on home pages but I don't expect it to; home pages aren't wrapped in <article> elements, it's not semantically appropriate, but posts are.

If anyone is looking for a free and privacy respecting feedback gathering option for blogs, I have one here: https://roastidio.us

It is designed to complement SSG style blogs, but should work with blogging platforms as well.

Seems very similar to https://bearblog.dev — another cool project

Yeah the “example post” names Bear Blog as a direct source of inspiration.

> Created out of authentic admiration of Herman's genius idea of Bear Blog, Mataroa.blog is like Bear Blog but also a bit different. Namely, it has built-in first-class support to export your blog, and it also supports image hosting.

I missed this. Cool!

No one mentions it so there you go: mataroa means "hope" in Maohi

I consider write.as another good minimalist blogging option. It provides some features above its free tier

This is the first service, which unfortunately just found shut down free registrations, that came to my mind when opened the link.

See also https://posthaven.com by those who made Posterous:

“Garry Tan and Brett Gibson were two of the co-founders of Posterous in 2008. Posterous was acquired by Twitter in 2012, and while we were happy that it was a meaningful acquisition for the team and investors, we were bummed to see something gets shuttered that we believed should last forever.”

https://firstsiteguide.com/posterous-is-gone/

Posthaven is pretty minimalist and still there.

PS. As many comments here are about fonts, the most recent (rare changes, as in, back in 2016, which is a "good thing") feature update to Posthaven was customizable html/css: https://blog.posthaven.com. Also does post by email, custom domains, and rss feeds.

I had more or less this exact idea a few months ago, but wasn't able to block out time to develop it.

Happy to see it exists in the world!

How does this compare to https://blot.im/ ?

This looks great. Everthing (at least) I want for a very reasonable price.

I've recently published an overview of the best platforms and architectures for blogging, given different technical expertise levels and budgets. Mataroa is the top choice for the category "Free and easy, without much control/ownership of the platform". Here's the link if you are interested: https://lanfranco.me/posts/resilient-lean-low-cost-blogging/

This is fantastic, was thinking about doing something similar as a side project but given that this exists, I’ll probably simply go with this. Thanks for implementing and posting on HN

I think this is great and easy for most people, but if you are a developer, you ought to host it on your own. There is no excuse.

There is an easy excuse: time. Most people have better things to do than fiddle around with setting up a blog. The setting up process provides minimal value to most people.

If you’re spending the time to write articles, it takes no more than an hour to setup a simple blog. As a developer, it is the right thing to do. It provides tremendous value to people - a sense of pride, enterprise of building something, owning it and then showing it to others.

You might as well give up on writing then.

Drew Devault gives out $20 to start your own blog. We need to perpetuate this culture, not oppose.

Checkout https://www.polyblog.io

It's a choose your own adventure blog platform where you can go headless and customize everything or choose battery included and get a yourblog.polyblog.io out of the box

[disclaimer, I'm the founder of Polyblog.io]

This is everything I need except analytics. I need basic analytics like page views and visitor locations. Does anyone know of a naked blog that also includes some analytics? I this there is space between simple analytics and privacy invading tracking analytics.

Looks great! I will try it out. Thank you for sharing.

The pricing seems to be very fair and something that i would pay to support the project.

addition: i wonder how non mainstream opinions are moderated there, e.g. conspiracy theories, pro Russian content, pro Chinese content, etc.

Re: your addition--As an oldie on the internet, this has been through a few pendulum swings. I personally think it's fine to have non-coercive weird content exist (freedom of speech sans CP and similar exploitation) without it being shoved into people's faces (newsfeed). This let's people vote with their feet.

Looks really polished and I love the minimalist design.

One thing I've been wondering that a lot of web platforms offer: how do you allow users to bring their custom domain with TLS? What's the tech behind that and how does the process work?

Just letsencrypt, I guess.

That was one of the hard things to figure out how to do in a simple way on mataroa. Just using Let's Encrypt directly was the first iteration. Now mataroa is using a combination of:

- Let's Encrypt with a wildcard certificate for mataroa.blog and all *.mataroa.blog domains

- Caddy's automated certificates for all user custom domains

You can see a few more details about this setup in the server playbook doc [1] and the Caddyfile [2]

[1]: https://github.com/sirodoht/mataroa/blob/master/docs/server-...

[2]: https://github.com/sirodoht/mataroa/blob/master/Caddyfile

You can do this a variety of ways, most of which boil down to automating a reverse proxy server and generating acme certs. My favorite is Caddy server if you want to build and manage it yourself.

Things get trickier if you want to handle this well for globally distributed servers, since you'll need to have a cluster of reverse proxies near or colocated to your app servers. That needs an anycast IP address to handle A records for apex domains, and usually you want them coordinating to share certs, cache, etc. efficiently. In that situation I'd recommend reaching for a paid service, since there can be a lot to build and maintain.

Source: I built approximated.app, which is a service that does all of that for you.

Whatever terminates the connection (e.g. nginx, haproxy, apache) needs to be configured for each supported domain. As a platform this would mean having code to modify and reload the config and put certs in place on behalf of users.

How do you plan on making the business sustainable?

Pretty much anyone can make this using Hugo, no?

This is easier than setting up a Hugo blog and for many I am sure that's worth $9/year.

If I wasn't already self-hosting ghost I would probably use this service.

Is there an API? Can I prepare a blog offline and run a script to publish it?

Thanks, exactly what I was looking for! Just created my first blog in a long time: https://reliwa.mataroa.blog/

Is self hosting an option?

It's open-source: https://git.sr.ht/~sirodoht/mataroa

Nice! $9 for annual services on top of a well constructed platform you can also self host is a really aim-for-the-moon commitment. I hope mataroa finds phenomenal success with their business.

There’s always Hugo, Jekyll, Zola, right?

True. Much like Dropbox, the tooling exists beforehand. It's nice when a company brings it altogether, maintains the expert knowledgebase, and creates the process to be simple (including setup).

that is first thing popped to mind as well.

I like it. Looks great in reader mode, too. Not that you really need it. I think posts should have a link to the previous/next post in the blog. And I wonder if there is custom CSS.

I do a minimal thing too. A css, a bit of php, a markdown-to-html converter. Content in markdown files. Directories for structure.

Pig-ignorant and unbreakable.

Same, except mine is JS-free.

My markdown converter is php. Parsedown

I want something like this that lets me password protect certain pages/posts. Does anyone know of something besides for Wordpress?

like it! Very simple yet very good at doing its job. Is there a feature for anonymous upload?

I love this mostly but often need some customization, can I attach image or bikes to post ?

Curious if willing to share the market size:revenue for the premium service?

bump, also curious

One can find some stats here: https://mataroa.blog/modus/transparency/

Like it. The main page has a rss <link> but blog posts can have too.

False advertising, no nudes anywhere to be found!! /s

I honestly thought this was about nudism, initially.

Looks great. Please increase the font size to 16px or at least 15px. It is very difficult to read smaller texts which has become the norm these days.

If this is a common complaint that you have, why not just increase the font size and pick fonts you like in the browser settings? The settings are there for a reason.

This home page doesn't honor the browser's font-size setting, it sets it to 14px. It should be changed to 1rem so it uses what's set in the browser.

The font-family is sans-serif, so it does honor that browser setting, but if you'd prefer to read it in a serif font, too bad.

How do I do that in iOS Safari?

It looks nice. I will give it a shot.

Love text and white space =)

Not gonna lie, the appeal of these things is entirely lost on me. Who is sitting around thinking, "I wish I could find somewhere that would let me write plain html with basic CSS to make it legible?" Literally anywhere that will host a page can be a minimal blogging platform if you just don't use django or whatever to host your blog.

OneDrive.

The truly naked blogging setup would be:

- a git repo containing a Hugo (or similar) SSG site.

– push this git repo to a couple of free private repo hosting services (GitHub, GitLab, GCP CloudCode, AWS CodeCommit etc)

– and optionally use their free CI integration to generate the static site (or do it locally on your laptop).

- and push to a free cloud storage (AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle etc all give storage in their free tier).

- Use Cloudflare CDN or AWS CloudFront (or both) to serve this static website from the storage origin.

– Use Cloudflare DNS for hosting your custom personal domain name and point it to the CDNs.

All this is free, with a bit of effort of initial setup in an afternoon. And it is super resilient with multiple independent CDN, Storage and Git hosting.

Ive used Github and Netlify (there are other alternatives too) for a simple and free static hosting.

I don’t enjoy the process of having to build the site and push the built site to a service like github. It adds a certain kind of friction to the process of “saving” my work that just isn’t life-giving for me.

This is a huge factor for me. The best blogging/knowledge share/writing tools are the ones that have minimal overhead.

You could keep the source files in GitHub and use their web editor to add or update content, then build and push to the publishing server via a GitHub action.

You can find descriptions of such a setup by googling.

> then build and push to the publishing server via a GitHub action

I have looked into this before, but it honestly just seemed very esoteric and complex. I'm surprised that Github doesn't provide pre-made "recipes" for this stuff.

With Jekyll, you just have your site in a `<username>.github.io` repository, and it automatically publishes your site for you. So, the process is: write in markdown, commit, push, and then GitHub does the rest.

Yep, I know. But honestly I find all the jekyll themes pretty ugly

I use mostly this same setup for my personal site and blog [1] [2].

Git (versioning) -> Github (Git hosting) -> Github Pages (static site generation, and hosting) -> Cloudflare Free Plan (DNS and CDN). I have a Gitlab account that has mirrors of my Git repos, just in case.

One question, though. How do you use more than one CDN to front your website?

[1]: https://gurjeet.singh.im/ [2]: https://github.com/gurjeet/gurjeet.singh.im

Just add DNS records pointing to both those CDNs. Your DNS hosting provider can serve them in rotating order to different users, there by spreading the load across your CDN providers. In case one CDN goes down, the browsers will try the next addresses in the DNS response.

You could get redundancy for the authoritative DNS hosting provider as well. Add both provider NS server records at your domain registrar. Then, your only single point of compromise would be your domain registrar.

You could get two different domains (on different tld) via different registrars and have both domains point to the same site. Of course, unless people know the alternate domain, this isn't of much help. But for a mobile app's api endpoint, I would recommend a setup like this to make it truly bullet proof.

I feel like Hugo / Jekyll (or equivalent) + GitHub Pages (or equivalent) is much much easier to set up. Is the resiliency really needed for your personal blog? Github Pages (which I use for my blog [0]) is pretty good at uptime afaik.

[0]: https://param.codes

I also feel like Jekyll plus GitHub Pages is the easiest solution. I feel it is more minimal than the posted product. Jekyll plus GitHub is free, and aside from an initial setup and small learning curve, it is basically automatic. I am getting ready to publish my blog, and it's been nice to be able to customize things (like adding in MathJax support).

Nice theme by the way. :)

If you want even more raw, why use git? Do you need version control for a blog? Just use S3 as a file system and serve directly from there. Can still use cloudflare if you want.

If you want a templating system, it wouldn’t be hard to run a script that deterministically takes all templates in folder X and compiles them into folder Y.

Depending on your JS ethics, and care for SEO, each page could be like this, allowing you to change style and layout at a later date.

    <body>
       <script src="./magic.js"></script>
       # Markdown goes here
       * etc.
    </body>

Where magic.js converts MD to HTML, adds CSS/Templating, and somehow if it can get a list of files from the server can produce a list of posts.

I think we have different definitions of naked! I think you're taking it to mean: use a lot of infra, but maintain none of it. I thought it would mean: strip everything down to bare essentials. Services like CI are niceties, not essentials.

But I'm not the target audience. I think the idea of naked blogging is kind of silly. Blog if you want to blog, your clothing choices are your own.

> Data centers in the EU, operated by a German company

so?

Gdpr etc.

How did Markdown, originally created for writing documentation got so popular that we are using it to create web pages? Wouldn't Rich Text be a better choice here?

It has a nice simple syntax that can be easily understood by someone unfamilar with the language. Also many forums, Github, and Reddit use it.

I see nothing here that is minimalistic or different.

First of all, having a dark mode by default is not minimalistic.

Edit: wow, downvotes without any explanation. You guys must be having a lot.

It's not dark mode by default. The text color is initially undefined and the background-color transparent. If the user's device is set to prefer dark mode, color and background color are set to be white text on a dark background.

It would be good if it was possible for a reader to choose to use the opposite of their device setting but that would would less minimal (needs a UI, JavaScript, and client-side storage of the setting).

Probably because you're commenting without being familiar with how your browser sending information to pages to use a dark scheme for you. A website that supports "@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark)" is not really a maximalist design these days.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com