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.
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.
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.
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
- 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.
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?