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Comment by philip1209 | Hacker News Reader

I'm working to reinvent personal websites. My goal is to replace social media with personal sites + newsletters, which are more distributed, privacy-friendly, and calm.

https://postcard.page

The product seems simple, but there are so many opportunities for optimization. There's caching, CDNs, custom domain support, dynamically-generated open graph images, image optimizations, email sending, email reputations, analytics, and more.

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I've always thought that plans where custom-domain-or-not is a differentiator between free and paid are unethical. In this case, antithetical, too. (If a sufficient number of people abandon Twitter as part of the your-own-personal-homepage bandwagon, but they make the unfortunate mistake of letting their dart land on Postcard and signing up for a free plan, then you really haven't achieved the stated goal. You've recreated the way she was tethered by name to twitter.com/alice, except the difference is that you're the beneficiary, not Twitter—because she is now held captive at alice.postcard.page.)

Previously: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21921176>

In this case, it's just cost-based pricing. I'm using Render.com to host, and they charge $1.25/mo per custom domain. I can't afford to give away domains for free.

I'm open to some kind of free trial, too.

I don't offer domain name purchasing - so people own their domain, independent of Postcard.

The effect (see "antithetical") is the same, even if you're just passing on the costs that someone else is imposing on you, instead of capturing it all for yourself. That's one oversight in this response/rationalization. There's at least one other oversight (or possibly dishonesty) at play here.

That Postcard is merely passing on the cost of custom domains doesn't actually explain Postcard's pricing wrt this issue. If someone wants to use Postcard without having to use a postcard.page domain, they have to pay $8 a month, not $1.25 a month.

One product in that space that I particularly like is https://mmm.page/ It's just so much fun and adds all the tools to have fun when building a website. I wish that aspect of old internet would be more present in website builders and by extension in personal websites.

Nice. Feels like you are a “Ghost” or “Bearblog” kind of offering. Always good to have more choice here.

It sounds interesting. People would then own their data. The social part will then be done by signing up to a newsletter on that friends page? Finding friends will be hard like that. A opt-in registry service could improve search and connecting between friends.

Beaker browser wanted to do this, and it was awesome

Please move away from email to something more decentralized and powerful. Email is the source of so many lost productivity hours and is now wholly controlled by large entities like Microsoft and Google.

RSS feature coming soon! JSON API to follow.

Any suggestions of what to offer instead of email? For instance, it's definitely more decentralized than push notifications.

Every post that gets sent through email also has a permalink on the site. So, you can write it once - then share it across any channels (including social media). For instance, I'm generating opengraph images automatically now to make Postcard more friendly with sites like Twitter and LinkedIn: https://twitter.com/philipithomas/status/1570770548988465152

This is just creating FUD about e-mail.

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