Nicheless: a micro-blogging platform
nicheless.blog
nicheless.blog
Nicheless is a fun little side project I created for people to share their thoughts with the world without needing to be performative or afraid of trolls.
I'm a firm believer that writing online is a great way to improve your thinking, and I'm hoping Nicheless encourages more people to do the same.
Happy to answer any questions you may have, and grateful that you took the time to try it out.
Edit: jk, just found the "discover" section
My goal is to have people invite their friends and other people they know to write on the platform, and follow their nicheless blogs. When that is the case, the default feed will end up being populated with posts that will be more contextual. However, I will admit I am not sure how to reach this goal just yet. It's still early days and I'm still experimenting.
Happy to hear any ideas :)
Edit: and all other pages.
Two questions come to mind.
1. It appears that url for a post is simply based on title of the post and not connected to the user. Wouldn't this mean that no two posts can have the. same title? As in if smoother user tried to write a post titled "learn-one-thing-well", they can't?
2. One of the reasons I keep my personal website+blog is because I'm wary of services that offer a nice place to write and then write a blog post "It was a great journey..... but now we got $$ from VCs or company X , so Byeee.". Nicheless looks very nice almost wanting me to suppress that concern, but it still is a legitimate concern. Do you have any thoughts for users like me?
Cheers on a nice project! You must be very proud of your work!
Regarding your questions:
1. The URL will auto generate and append a digit to the end in case the title of the post has already been taken before.
2. I don't think of Nicheless as a replacement for a personal website or blog (I have both, maintained separately). I want Nicheless to be a place for more experimental thoughts. A space for ideas, a minority of which graduate into more polished articles on your personal blog. Also, I want Nicheless to be a place that facilitates exchange of thoughts and ideas between existing social connections, both IRL and online, and not with the primary focus being the open network on the internet (like Twitter). I've written a bit about it here:https://nicheless.blog/post/mission
I'm aware that the positioning of the platform is still a bit fuzzy, and a lot of my goals aren't exactly obvious to users, but I'm going to work to improve on that.
Thank you for giving it a try, and for taking the time to leave your feedback here :)
But something just isn't sitting right with me in this entire space. As I sit and watch the mindless babble of the Twitter billionaire owner and his groupies, it's causing me to fade slowly into the background of life. Spaces for idle chatter turns out to be a total waste of time. Whether it's about movies, gaming or politics, there's really more we could be doing with our time. Twitter is a void and trying to fill that void with another one isn't the answer. I don't really know what the solution is beyond knowing some sort of community platform is definitely missing. But it's likely to focus on some active component, not idle chat.
At the moment, I don't want Nicheless to perform a similar function to Twitter. I love Twitter and use it daily, but I find it useful as a space to reach a broad audience of people I don't know. An open network with unlimited growth potential.
With nicheless, I want it to be the opposite. A place to follow people you already know, either from real life, or from existing social connections. I want it to be a place for a higher density of thought to be exchanged for a smaller group of people. I've written a bit about it here: https://nicheless.blog/post/mission
In fact, I'm even considering capping the number of people you can 'follow' on Nichless. Maybe it will help create an algorithm free feed of interesting thoughts that spark real life conversations. I don't know yet, but I might experiment and find out.
Let me know what you think?
A cap is also great, I've been a member of a wonderful social network that employs this stance, 10,000 all in, every year they open it up by deleting dead accounts. It keeps it running fine.
More power to us, through your project.
Really? Is this such a bad thing? Sometimes i just want to take a break from 110% productivity and have some idle, mindless chatter.
If I go to the pub and chat with friends I'm not wasting my time.
> Twitter is a void and trying to fill that void with another one isn't the answer.
You are 100% spot on something here, something that's well known but usually goes undiscussed.
As madeofpalk said,
> Sometimes i just want to take a break from 110% productivity and have some idle, mindless chatter.
That's true - so do I (although I usually opt for a chat with a friend, or for some mindless RealRacing).
But for the majority of Twitterheads, Twitter has become synonymous with the public square, with results that verge on (or fully reach) the toxic.
Here, I'm thinking of Sam Vaknin's position on the question of toxicity:
Pt. 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmXcjvL9VSc
Pt. 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m38W8glySGw
Now, one may say that Vaknin isn't important, or that he's too self-important, or whatever. But his analysis (and he's not unique on that) concludes that such social media platforms have a corrosive effect on the individual and on society.
If nothing else, it's a system that essentially echo chambers you, and preys on vulnerabilities in the standard human psychological make up to maximize profit.
Not to mention that it's a private platform, and very specifically not a 21st century version of the agora/public forum.
I think that on principle private enterprises shouldn't be permitted to usurp the public sphere.
Maybe our brains need idle time between intense bouts of thought and flow. And if that bit of writing doesn't contribute to, say, a certain 50k novel challenge for the month, well--now it's really wasted!
Let's go create something today. Or nothing. It's totally up to us.
> we now have a clown running the show
Nah not a clown, not even a Watchmen-esque Comedian.
If anything, he's a very conscious agent of (Capital-C!) Chaos, like the Joker.
Or, again, just another CIA puppet, who knows - dot dot dot :)
If I'm writing these thoughts for myself, why would I want to post them?
If I'm writing these thoughts to engage with an audience or wider community, why wouldn't I want them to be able to reply?
I wrote a bit about it here: https://nicheless.blog/post/why-i-built-this
Also, people can like and reply to your posts, but both those are private. Only you'll know how many likes a post has, and all replies will go directly to your DMs instead of a comment section. This is so that it helps reduce uneccessary trolling and status games among people, with the goal of making it easier for people to write for the sake of thinking, and not to impress their audiences which may or may not exist.
Let me know if you have any questions. Happy that you took the time to try it out.
These niche microblogging sites are so small and insignificant that you can never ever trust them to survive (or even persist). Just do it yourself from the very beginning and you'll have a much better time.
Besides, I'm hoping to make Nicheless more than just a micro blogging platform. My goal is to make it into a space that encourages groups of people to share their thoughts without fear, and eventually let the exchange of those ideas percolate into real life discussions.
It's still a long way out from becoming that, but it's the goal. I've written a bit about it here: https://nicheless.blog/post/mission
Twitter/FB/etc make commenting painless because everyone has an account and is already logged in. This at least has the potential to get to that position. DIY doesn't.
This could be a bug, not a feature if you look at it from indie-bloggers' perspective. The DIY types are not target audience for the solution you're proposing.
There is a space for both 1) Substack-like platforms 2) DIY indie blogs.
Some cool things about DIY blogs:
- Email them! You can make friends by just emailing people. Private conversations.
- No censorship, this is a complex topic but DIY'ers probably consider censorship a bug than a feature.
- Custom design and personality
- Self-hosting pride
Well said. The outcome doesn't need to be that one dies and the other survives. So much falls into the "there is one ideal way to do this" trap.
HN or Reddit can be my comment site, if anyone actually read my blog :P Or people can write their own blog post in response and host it on their site.
You can embed services such as discourse, and in this case (Nicheless) it appears responses are private anyway.
The main advantage of self-hosting on a VPS provider is that you fully own your site... but it's a tradeoff in time, money and hassle of setup and administration.
Why bother when you can let someone else do all that for you... for free?
Authentication and authorization is handled by SSH, publishing posts is as simple as using rsync, and the website itself is read only.
We thought about charging for it but the site costs basically nothing. We have zero intention of killing it off as well because we use it for our own blogs.
What I like about it the most is you can take your Hugo markdown files and upload it to prose and it’ll mostly work so there’s not a ton of friction.
- Never using Git
- Doing all the writing in the web editor
- Automated building
- Easy customization
This is the best I could do (so far): https://github.com/bachmeil/test-deployment
It seems easy enough that almost anyone can do it.
> Private responses.
> Private subscriber counts.
> No status games. No trolls. No pressure.
This is the real differentiator. Do you still use algorithms around likes and follows to recommend users to each other and such?
Those data points actually are useful to get people more connected to the network and help them find their community
I've expanded a bit on that thought here: https://nicheless.blog/post/mission
Here's an excerpt from that post:
"I want Nicheless to grow into a place where you come to read the thoughts of people you know. To take a dip into the depths of your friends' minds. And to turn those excursions into conversations – both online and IRL.
In the ideal scenario, I imagine a bunch of friends following each other, each publishing without fear of public judgment, and then occasionally discussing what they read and wrote about when they meet in real life."
With real life friends, people naturally self censor quite a lot.
But if you do want an IRL friend network, also consider a “friend” system. Because I don’t think fully public posts jives with your idea. If I just want to talk to friends, I don’t want to share with the world.
For something slightly less minimal but very nice to use, I stumbled across this the other day: https://blogstatic.io/
Feels likes - after being crowded out by FB and Twitter (and the death of Google Reader) - blogs are making a comeback.
I agree that blogs are making a comeback. It's about time. We're in need of some sort of detox after a decade of social media fuelled lives. Hopefully it leads to a more interesting, less overwhelming internet.
Also, individual post URL is hidden to deep. You apparently have to open the post, scroll down, click "share", click "copy link", and even that element is not a real link. As soon as I see a post/preview/listing I want to be able to middle-click it to open it in a background tab or Ctrl+click it to copy/whatever.
Regarding the individual URL, if you don't want to click to copy it using the current flow, you could just CMD+Shift+C to copy the URL?
As a mild-OCD perfectionist I'm literally grinding my teeth imagining doing it this way. If there is a place for a title a post I write has to have a good title or no title at all.
> or even a whitespace to achieve the effect of a title-free place to post.
If title doesn't have to be unique this already seems as an acceptable compromise.
> Regarding the individual URL, if you don't want to click to copy it using the current flow, you could just CMD+Shift+C to copy the URL?
Nice point. Any chance I could copy a post URL or open it in a background page straight from the posts list? I scroll the feed, see some read/bookmark/share-worthy posts and I would normally middle click them to get them all opened in background tabs.
Haha sorry I understand what you mean!
>If title doesn't have to be unique this already seems as an acceptable compromise.
Yes, currently the title doesn't have to be unique. The platform will just generate a unique URL for each post based on the title, and append a digit if necessary.
> Nice point. Any chance I could copy a post URL or open it in a background page straight from the posts list?
It was initially set up like this, but a bunch of users (mainly on mobile) complained that they didn't like the fact that each post opened in a separate tab. They wanted to just read a post and scroll to the next one easily. That's why I've moved to the current format. Maybe I could make it behave differently on desktop. I'll keep this in mind.
Thanks!
How do you feel about timestamps as titles (and URLs)?
Maybe having an option to use a title or just a timestamp.
I tried to write a post in Telugu language and it resulted in rather long and ugly URL. https://nicheless.blog/post/%E0%B0%B9%E0%B0%82%E0%B0%AA%E0%B...
Btw, I'm also Indian (from Goa) so it's amazing to see posts in one of our many regional languages :)
I was able to edit the URL, thanks!
Ive thought about inviting others who I'm less close to, because I'd welcome their contributions to those discussions, but there is always the fear of adding anyone reducing the trust and transparency present atm. In lieu of that I'd love a nice and easy way to follow the thoughts of those peers and friends, without having to switch between substack blogs, LinkedIn posts, medium posts and a range of other things.
The trouble, usually, is that convincing all of those peers to adopt a new thing for this alone is a hard sell, when we're already so oversaturated on tools and platforms.
I'll keep at it till I figure it out though.
But there is something about the unfiltered short format that I like and even though I have thought about publishing shorter style posts on my own blogs, I for some reason never get to it.
I am a big fan of the design as well! Nice job.
I think you should consider making tags case-insensitive. I would just lowercase them all :)
And regarding your earlier point, I agree. I'm yet to clear up the positioning of the site. I'm struggling with 2 separate, but intertwined angles. 1. A low-pressure place to write in public, because writing helps you clarify your thoughts. 2. A place to keep up with what your existing circle of friends is up to in life
You can't have 2 without 1, and hence most of the messaging is geared towards 1 right now. I'm thinking about ways to encourage users to invite their IRL friends to participate, as I think there's a powerful, albeit small, network effect to be had.
This seems like a brilliant way to keep up with friends that I can't see very often, in a way that seems more genuine than the loop of "Hey we haven't talked in ages! How are you doing?" "It's been so long! I'm good, and you?" "Good :)". Being able to see what they're thinking and to interact with them from that without having to prompt a deep conversation on a Tuesday afternoon sounds wonderful.
Looking forward to using it more, and seeing where you take it!
I wrote something similar here that might resonate: https://nicheless.blog/post/mission
I stumbled upon this use case almost by accident, when a few of my IRL friends published stuff on Nicheless. I realised I looked forward to reading what they were upto or thinking about. And then figured other people might like the same experience.
Thank you for sharing that you think about it similarly.
While I'm sure some trolls do what they do for the external audience, private responses won't stop griefing just for giggles. I send a troll message to Bob, privately, get a rise out of him and screenshot the whole conversation and repost to some other platform if I want external validation.
Trolls are not lazy. If anything, their efforts are hype fixated.
I'm hoping this will be sufficient, although it will end up blocking out good conversations/replies as well.
I'm not sure how to handle it better.
But, Twitter too was once simple and hassle-free.
What happens if this takes off and some crypto-chastened VC starts sniffing around?
I can't predict the future, but I can say that I'm a team of one who isn't looking for VC funding. Even if I was, I doubt they'd fund me.
I'm going to keep this platform alive for as long as I am alive, and if I can help it, even longer. You have my word.
Discord is not too similar, but typically with less moderation. Bunch of people talk about stuff in subject based rooms, there’s some administrators looking after the health of the channel. Join or leave rooms, etc. Open source would shield it a bit more from commercial interests.
Social media is simply too big for this, it will always be advertised run because of the size of the audience. Also the viral component and manipulation affect how valuable it can be.
Build and join smaller communities.
I like the extreme simplicity. It motivates me to write something and worry less about whether that writing is a properly crafted story. I think of my Substack as the place that requires something with more polish, and Twitter is for very short takes, opinions, conversations.
This site sits somewhere in the middle. Looking forward to seeing how it evolves!
Logo, Icons, Font, Color selection, everything looks perfect.
Feature request: dark mode setting :-)
Might do a dark mode in the future!
The console is showing several 500 errors.
Imagine a bunch of white tendrils in all directions, and every one of those has their own tendrils, and so on and so forth, like a system of roots, but a 2D manifestation of such. Now divide them and name them after scientific domains, imagine the white is what we know, imagine the black is our absence of knowledge, imagine the tendrils scale to what we do know and what we don't, how big do you think the negative space is? Now you say something stupid, that's off the beaten path, you cast a line and you wonder if it's worth reinforcing through investigation, and so you think more and more on it, and maybe you investigate it, and suddenly that stupid thought becomes fleshed out, and the question is answered.
You start from ignorance, we learn nothing new if you stay in the confines of the known - that is filtering, that is refining, that is ego pressing you to be right. Every statement has a thousand queries nested inside it, and for every answer borne from those...
Got ideas? I'm happy to hear them!