Show HN: SinglePage – Quickly and anonymously publish a page to the web | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: SinglePage – Quickly and anonymously publish a page to the web

singlepage.cc

175 pointsryandetzel132 comments

Creating a basic webpage has become way too complicated and expensive. Often there are those times when you just want to share your thoughts with the world but don't want the overhead and complexities that come with maintaining a website. Sometimes, you have an interesting thought piece, an education article, or just a quick and simple bio page that doesn't need the heavy hand of a WordPress blog or Medium post. That's where Single Page comes in. Publish a single page instantly to the web with no fuss.

I was laid off three weeks ago from Twitter and I decided to work through a couple of my projects and this was one of them. I've tried blogs over the years, Medium didn't feel right but yet I wanted to quickly post pages online and couldn't find an easy way to do it. So I created it.

Feedback appreciated!

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One cautionary tale for you.

Justpaste.it is a page that offers exactly what you do - free, anonymous sharing of formatted pages, with images and all. Accessible at Tor, very lightweight.

Because it was so easy and anonymous, it started being used mostly by Islamic State to share their propaganda; so much that they needed to remove the "most popular" feature (as it was always either beheadings or other propaganda).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JustPaste.it

edit: ah, you have credit card info down. So it's not really as anonymous as justpaste.it, as the ISIS guys won't share their credit card. OK that can work.

I'd also mention telegra.ph as a free, extremely simple and very fast alternative

That is one hell of a cautionary tale. Better than modern VICE.

> the ISIS guys won't share their credit card

They will share someone else's (who will then get swated), won't they?

Not really, if there is an easier way. Buying cards is risky; if there is a free service they will go for that instead

Technology advocate: Wouldn't it be cool if there was a way to -

The real world: PORN! BEHEADINGS! BOTNETS! STATE SECRETS! DOXXING! IDENTITY THEFT! FASCISM!

Technology advocate: /sobs/

Always relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTJvdGcb7Fs

Rentry and Txti.es have similar issues. Love those sites for giving me markdown-friendly alternatives to Pastebin for writing FAQs and guides and stuff, but man I cannot imagine what their spam/moderation is like.

> Very rarely do you need to update a page once it's been posted so we punted on that feature for now.

Excuse me?

OP worked at Twitter, we should expect as much ;)

Twitter started adding an edit feature its limited to 30 minutes, and I think its only allowed for original tweets, not replies. It's kind of neat for when you realize oh crap I typo'd.

Yeah. "started adding", after 15 years. Technically correct but not what was meant.

I'm aware, mostly posted my comment to inform, honestly, I never understood the design choice.

This sounds interesting! What are your thoughts on (for lack of a better term) the marketing of each single page? Is the idea that each page should live on an island, that writers will promote through their own separate channels, or is the idea to eventually have a sort of front page/recommended links? I jumped to this question because it seems like the urge to promote tends to undermine the privacy impetus. It’s not a black and white thing, though.

There is no promotion or even an index page to list out what pages exist. The pages can be indexed by search engines if they're submitted. An idea for the future would be to allow people to opt in/out of notifying search indexes or making the pages not crawlable if they want

"Very rarely do you need to update a page once it's been posted so we punted on that feature for now."

Uh... okay.

Immutable pages

The most likely scenario is: edit, read, edit, read (repeat N times), publish the page, read it again, find a mistake, no way to fix it unless deleting the page and paying again.

He's from Twitter. It's part of a culture.

It's weird this is an issue. I don't think I ever edited a page when I posted on a blog and I maintain a couple WordPress blogs for businesses and associations and they never update posts after they've published either. I don't think it's as uncommon as you think, that or maybe people need to proofread before publishing?

I don't think "issue" is the right term. It's a caveat and as long as it's displayed visibly (it is) it's fine.

But JFTR, I think I've edited around 50% of all blog posts I've written in the last 10 years at least once. And not only because of typos. Some people might need to change their workflow.

It's really an opposite of anonymously as you have to pay for publishing using your credit card.

Not when you use a stolen CC lel

But from that perspective, everything can be anonymous.

According to the FAQ, the uploader’s identity is decoupled from the page after it is published.

So, at least theoretically, they can maintain anonymity, except for maybe a list of people who have paid money.

Walk into a store with cash.

Buy a pre-paid debt card.

Use that card to publish.

That's anonymous, isn't it? Or does this site not allow that?

not forgetting to steal the cash and car before going there, so they cant easily be traced

Anything involving payment methods is where HN usually gets flooded with people from China and Scandinavia flogging the "cash is dead" horse and how wonderful their rainbows and unicorns world is now that absolutely nothing in they ever encounter requires the use of low-tech bits of evil legacy paper.

Then someone like you brings up the value of anonymity, and it's all crickets crickets crickets.

I can safely say I've never experienced such a flood

However I strongly agree with the need to support cash transactions and boycott stores that are "cash free". Most of the time it's just another way to make an environment more hostile towards houseless folks

It's stunning how we've made it so illegal to be without a house.

Truly. A houseless person was explaining to me the other day how cops can essentially kidnap them whenever they want, leave all their belongings on the street, and bus them to [[nearest city]].

The cops don't care. The legal system's specifically built to protect them and it's not like someone's gonna hire a lawyer sue even if they did have a legal case to make.

I knew a few folks at this one encampment near where I live. The encampment was at the community cultural center's parking lot and the city had been trying to get rid of it forcefully but the cultural center managed to negotiate a deal that they'd have X number of months to peacefully find each member a different place. The main thing most houseless persons want is safety and that encampment was one of the few places people felt safe so there was a lot of pregnant folks and other vulnerable people. Eventually the cops came in illegally at ~5am (they'd tried to do this a few times before but activists were there to scare them away) and kicked everyone out. Many of them lost their wallets and were left with no id or documents or any way to access any benefits or even apply for a spot in a shelter (which were all full and famously shitty places anyways).

We got a few of the most vulnerable folks a few nights at motels but didn't really have a budget for it. One of the motel owners found out that the motel was paid for under a different name than the person who was staying there and they locked them out of their room and kept their stuff

Nothing you can do tbh. The people in this world that are most commonly robbed are houseless people

I love the concept. It's really unique. I think the per-page cost is a bit high, especially given lack of editing. I think editing ability should be the first bridge to cross, even if it's really crude like delete-and-replace.

This is a good example of how microtransactions make more things possible. Going lower than $1 is difficult with standard transaction fees.

Agree with you, but the CC fee's are like 26% @ €1 (at least here in the EU with stripe) - so around $0.50 would be more 'fun' but I can see why it's $1.

What they could do is change the model so that you can buy X number of unique tokens for $Y that can then be redeemed to create a page.

I think this idea is really cool, I just don't see myself using this due to the alternatives (GitHub pages, static blog generators etc.)

I've done all the static site generators, I just don't post enough to justify the maintenance, if you do they're probably a better solution! As is, it's pretty basic but I want to add features that GitHub pages don't support

Care to tell what features GitHub pages are missing?

Anonymity. Maybe I'm wrong but I thought it was only markdown which isn't ideal especially for no technical people.

Last time I tried, there is no verification other than and email link for Github accounts. I think you could make an account and publish with just a throwaway email.

GitHub Pages have the unfortunate anti-feature of being impossible for normal people.

Creating a GitHub repo with one file titled “index.md” and publishing it to GitHub Pages creates a single-page site using relatively sane defaults. There's no maintenance involved whatsoever. You can add multiple pages as well by creating new .md files and publishing them.

Do the new pages/posts automatically populate on the front/home page? Guessing yes via some kind of basic Jekyll template?

Try telling my mom to do that or my friend who is a landscaper. Not everyone is technical. GitHub pages are also tied to your account.

Yeah but would I tell my mom to pay a dollar on this site? Would she trust it? Does she need a website or does an email/google doc satisfy her needs. What are the use cases for entirely anonymous sites that you have in mind?

> GitHub pages are also tied to your account.

No, GitHub pages are tied to "an" account. It can be a secondary "anonymous" account. You can create an anonymous bear blog or one of the other million free writing and zero maintenance tools. It's certainly more anonymous than having to disclose your real identity via a credit card on a random person's page.

Also, what sort of content do you hope that your target audience (Bob the landscaper who is non technical but has a super urgent desire to send a message to the world in an anonymous way) will publish?

Yeah, honestly there are similar things and other things that do this better if your goal is to just run a blog. This was a simple project I figured I could finish in two weeks and refresh some skills along the way while using some new libraries and technologies.

I run a similar service which is free and editable.

https://html.cafe

Hah, I misread "editable" as "edible" the first time I read that. My subconscious must have seen "cafe" early.

I love the domain name!

My own collection:

- [mmm.page](https://mmm.page/)

- [odie.us](https://odie.us/)

- [carrd.co](https://carrd.co/)

- [write.as](https://write.as/)

- [withknown.com](https://withknown.com/)

- [micro.blog](https://micro.blog/)

- [neocities.org](https://neocities.org/)

From this thread:

- https://bearblog.dev/

- https://telegra.ph

- https://rentry.org/

- https://brick.do/

- https://prose.sh/

I guess there's some category bleed going on here. I was originally maintaining a list of "micro-blog"-y sites I wanted to try out. Somewhere along the way it got mixed in with these "easy quick single static page" of services or "basically a txt file" site (e.g. rentry.org)

At this point I feel the need to bring up Etherpad which is essentially an encrypted Google Docs alternative but can be used similarly. Ofc there's also Notion which is in a similar vein.

You know, the more I think about this problem the more saddened I am by the state of social media. You can't share a FB or Instagram post without forcing people to sign in or make an account. Twitter is one of the last ones that allow their content to be freely shared but the char limit is a pretty significant limit and even that has popups

It seems that the problem of "how do I make a quick and simple static site to share with anyone with internet access" isn't really a hard problem. Instead all these major social networking services have worked their ass off to make sure their platforms can't be used in that way

> Twitter is one of the last ones that allow their content to be freely shared but the char limit is a pretty significant limit and even that has popups.

I do not believe this to be the case. If not logged in, it will lock the screen and block you reading after a few entries. That's not "free".

Ah I didn't realize that. I think I have a browser extension that prevents this. I agree that's not "free"

https://prose.sh which is a blog that can be used to share rendered markdown pages

telegra.ph and rentry.org are the easiest to us over tor. Others require some kind of signup, or block tor, prose.sh looks cool, but ssh is less anonymous than tor. Maybe you can ssh through tor, but that seems like a heavier lift.

Paid write.as user here. It's a blog engine, supports markdown, and that's about it.

That's what I love about it. Simple, clean, and I don't have to maintain it.

I like https://telegra.ph, but META blocks it at least on instagram stories.

https://txt.fyi/ is quite similar

Thanks but I can't edit anymore :/

Also found https://thoughts.page/

This is beautiful.

I made something similar, Write.wtf

https://www.producthunt.com/products/retiring-write-anonymou...

Lack of interest killed it.

I'm not excepting much traffic. It's 100% hosted on aws so no maintenance and is basically free to run indefinitely.

Found the source code. https://github.com/ryanrdetzel/SinglePage

Looks like a nice idea, but looks a little incomplete.

How is this anonymous when your user is providing you their intimate payment information.

There is no connection between payment and the published page. No logs are kept either. It's open source if you want to host it yourself or audit the code

Can you provide a link to the source, please?

https://github.com/ryanrdetzel/SinglePage

You may want to set up a different payment technique. Maybe a gofundme donation recipient.

Still, the wording 'anonymous' goes out the window with 100% of your users when credit cards are mandatory, even if you pinky promise not to connect it to the page.

I highly recommend BTCPayServer for handling (non-custodial) crypto payments.

A good free alternative is Telegram's Telegraph service: https://telegra.ph

Didn’t they just release logs and ip addresses of users in India?

tbf, singlepage.cc can't claim to be anonymous if it requires credit card payments and runs over regular web (as opposed to .onion). I believe, the only way to take anonymous non-cash payments is via Monero.

Besides, telegram has a massive userbase, which makes them a lucrative target for law enforcement.

A run a handful of sites I just toss up on Github Pages that are only HTML and CSS. The dynamic stuff is .Net in the background.

I feel like I've time-travellled back 20 years sometimes, but this is now perceived as "cool" and given buzzwords like SPA SSR.

Cool. That's not really the purpose of this though, but github pages works for a bunch of people. SPA and SSR are not anything like this, or github pages for that matter...

No, but from my timeline 30 years into the industry, JS took off, a bunch of front-end developers created an entire slew of frameworks, then they realized that parts of it could be rendered first on the server and hydrated, etc etc.

Then we're back to where we were. Might as well just use JS to fetch the async bits and serve the whole page from the server.

I work on a massive Angular codebase for work, and then try to stay as plain as possible with any side projects.

The obvious (to me) question is: what happens when something goes viral? I love the dollar-per-page idea.

These are static html pages hosted on s3 behind cloutfront so I'm not sure of a better solution to handle high traffic spikes

Sure, I'm more asking about the economics than doubting the ability to handle the load. If the average page has a lifetime hosting/serving cost of $0.20, then great, you're making a tidy profit. But even if that is the average, if there's one page that incurs $100, $1,000... of serving costs, it will be painful to contemplate.

Really liked the idea and execution, probably is something that I will use in the near future. And good luck with your moderation issue! hehehe

Yeah, that was the reason I added the fee. Hoping, maybe naively that that will keep the baddies away.

In terms of simple blogs, I use https://bearblog.dev/

I think your project suits more simple static pages. The competitor is more Notion rather than blogs and static site generators.

Nice work all the same. I think what's really missing is a minimal copy of something like google sites.

I want to be able to create something like my website at http://illabundavillage.com.au but I want it to be faster, not tied to google, and a little easier to edit.

There's a spectrum of flashy sites to single page texts. Many projects should aim to be in various shades of the middle.

Sweet thanks for sharing

Have you considered putting your community up on ic.org?

https://www.ic.org/directory/

I like the concept but the act of paying $1 means it is no longer anonymous.

It could be anonymous if cryptocurrency were accepted. For now, I see now reason to use it over rentry[1].

[1] https://rentry.org

It is anonymous but you're trusting the provider. The payment isn't tied to a page. No logs are kept. It's open source, but, in theory I could be running a version that does log or keep records but I have to reason to.

Don't forget that the payment provider (bank, cc, paypal) also has logs.. using the word anonymous here is a bit dishonest in my book.

I'm using it in the sense of

not named or identified

Not, if someone really really wanted to track down who wrote a page they couldn't.

Does this fill a niche that pastebin and bearblog don't? (well designed, but I don't think there's a userbase)

I'm the userbase! I built it for myself and now I'm sharing it with the world. I doubt there is a huge market but even if a fee people find it useful that's good enough for me!

Fair point. Hope you had fun :)

I felt like you may have created solutions anticipating problems that may or may not happen.

Why did you choose to use Stripe, given you wanted an anonymous publishing platform?

While the use doesn't need to enter their cardholder name, their card details, ip address and any reference numbers can be tracked in Stripe's dashboard (Payment method info, Risk Insights, Related Payments).

While scheme payments are never truely anonymous, an approach you could use would be to tokenize card holder data and charge it to various linked PSPs. Such an approach would avoid all payments to one provider and obfuscate the user's ip address (since you are doing a server-to-server integration). Such a solution would typically add ~4c to your transaction costs.

Easy and I've never really used it before so I can add that to my skillset. This was a project I wanted to finished in two weeks so I didn't put a ton of time into it.

It took you 2 weeks to put stripe library code, and wysiwyg editor library code on one page? This makes this even more funny to me with how you approach people who want an edit feature, as if its surprising and "weird" to you.

Heh, I'm sure you're one of guys that always comments how you don't understand how company X has so many employees, and that you could just write the entire app in a weekend. lol.

Note, I didn't say I spend two weeks writing it. If you read the original post you would know that I was doing it to refresh and learn new skills so research and planning went into it to.

You win the Internet today bud, thanks for playing.

edit: Holy hell, you're toxic. You comments are always negative, I feel bad for you man, I do...

Hmm, I have over 100+ non-trivial projects under my belt which have ranged anywhere from 3 weeks to 3 years each, working as only a single developer (and my business partner)... everything from an arbitrage platform with more than 8 billion outgoing requests per day, multiple payment processing platforms (actually building them, not just interfacing with them), machine learning-based high volume routing systems. I built the 50th largest site in the world at one point with only 1 other person... so I would say I'm not "one of those guys." sorry to burst your bubble. I know it's probably much less painful on your ego though to think any person that criticizes you must not know what they're talking about.

> Can I modify my page after it's been published?

> Not currently, but we're thinking about it. Very rarely do you need to update a page once it's been posted

… what?

edit: I literally had to edit this post because the quote formatting was off

You should clearly define for users what you mean by "anonymous".

Right now, you, Google, Stripe, and possibly others (e.g., ISP, owner of LAN, etc.) could probably determine who the majority of users are.

Anonymous is this context means I don't want my name attached to the page, not that someone couldn't easily get a subpoena to get it.

I run https://brick.do, which is almost the same thing but with optionally nested pages and CSS.

I might be wrong, but I feel that if you're aiming to make money with this, you have three markets:

1. People who just want to put their own stuff on the internet, potentially/hopefully anonymously, but are not making any money from it. In this case it might be better to have free pages with ads (and write a small script that would try to catch phishing/spam — in my experience, the words "PDF" and "Microsoft Office" have been catching 95% so far).

2. People who actually use it for their business needs (one-page portfolios, business proposals, inventory lists, whatever) — then you need custom domains and possibly accounts but I dunno.

3. People who are doing dangerous things. This applies to drug dealers as much as it does to political dissidents. Then you probably need cryptocurrency payments.

Regardless of what you do, I suggest you create some kind of a public discussion forum (FB group, Discord server) for this project. You can do it right now, and you'll likely learn a lot about what your users want and how they are actually using your product.

At any rate, best of luck. I think it's a good idea and I'd like to have more projects in this space (as someone who wants to start new projects all the time and hates small obstacles).

No, things have become easier now. There're tools called SSG (static site generator) like Hugo where you write markdown and get beautiful pages. Its flexibility is optimal.

Using stripe for payment processing is about the least anonymous thing you could do. You'll have my full name and country if I use this service.

Finally, a use for crypto!

This is a really great product. I do think I'd want to edit a page several times. Other feature that could be useful is optionally access control the page; may be via a fixed password.

There are times where I share a text file via DocSend. The entire experience is very poor. Singlepage can be very useful for such use-cases

In what might be the only non-editable text on the page, there in the payment box you have two boxes that the user must agree to with a check mark.

The text associated with those boxes could use some work. Perhaps you need a hammer to smooth out the grammar.

>I agree to the not post anything illegal.

>I have saved by secret phase and

Agreed. That's me rushing to get it done this week, these were links to published Single Pages with more details but the content wasn't done so I removed them.

Ya’ll complaining about not being able to update a published page:

There is an edit and preview mode to draft the doc.

Hence once something is published, it’s actual GOOD that the original cannot be edited. Write a correction/apology/I was wrong /I made a mistake instead and have some accountability.

How would anyone find it if you can't link to it from the original?

I like the simplicity and convenience of this. Does the secret phrase allow user to delete the page? Probably a good application for crypto currencies, or would be if the dream of micropayments ever comes to fruition!

Yeah, the secret phrase is the only way to delete the page once it's been published. It wouldn't be a big leap to accept crypto, the fees would just be crazy though for a single page. Thanks for the comment

If you do go the crypto route, may I suggest you consider something... cleaner? A single BTC transaction uses ~2 months of electricity of the average household

ETH is a bit better but still not there yet. There's "3rd generation" systems like Hedera[0] that use hashgraphs instead and consume about as much electricity as anything else you'd do on the internet.

Or at least choose one that's actually dedicated to privacy like Monero

Cool project! I like the design and hope you had fun with it

[0] https://hedera.com/

Btw $1 might not be as unattractive to spammers/scammers as you'd expect. It all depends on their monetization scheme. I've seen scammers hire captcha farms if the scheme is scalably ROI positive.

I don't think the charge needs to be unattractive to spammers to mitigate the costs associated with them: 1$ likely covers the CPU time to produce the page, and then it only costs when displayed (which will be little, if spam).

Having a hard time believing that nobody has mentioned the Easter egg from The Net with now you can access your page after creating it!

I think this crowd is probably too young for that reference.. :-) Good catch though

I would like a link to an example page. Current there are none indexed by Google so I only have the preview to judge from.

Missing ToS or anything about the company / service, a 100% deal breaker.

> secret phrase in a safe location

Smart stuff with the secret phrase, but i'm afraid the security in the number of words there is just not sufficient for any practical safety.

> Very rarely do you need to update a page once it's been posted so we punted on that feature for now

LOL seriously?? Maybe you're a more sure shot than I am but i even update my gists more often than not

It's a project I did in 9 days, it's not perfect or done. ;)

Practical safety? It's a single page not a bank account. It's odd you would jump to that conclusion without know the dictionary. You don't think 5^1000 is secure enough for a single page?

If you edit your pages, use a blog. This service isn't for the person that wants mutable pages. Different strokes my friend

I think you meant 1000^5?

Most definitely 1000^5. = 10^15 ~= 2^50

As long as the system to delete isn't fast, or has a max-tries-delay mechanism, it should be fine.

For anyone considering creating private keys, 2^50 is borderline ok, but nowhere near safe to give someone true ownership of something, and I'm not just saying for some theoretical argument. 2^256 is considered extremely safe (altho arguably not quantum resistant depending on the hashing algo) See Bitcoin bips for an (optionally i18n) list of 2048 words that is fairly standard and several libs can help with implementation. Pick at least 10 words - don't worry, users won't remember either number of words for life, they have to back up somewhere safe anyway. https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0039/bip-003...

Congrats for launching! Is it practical these days to accept 1$ payments? Is stripe the best option?

Sorry, could you clarify what is a valid url? Is it a sub of singlepage? A url we already own?

grammar: "cost-prohibited" should be "cost prohibitive"

Hope you can edit the page :)

This really neat ! The idea is just straight back to the roots of web publishing

This is so awesome, the concept is great and it is well made, simple and clean…

Where is the new page hosted? Only at singlepage.cc? Can I host it myself?

What are you using for the richttext editor? Works very well!

I see it's https://quilljs.com/ , if anyone is interested

i personally dont know how you can beat rsyncing to a cloud bucket, but hey

Since you have a Twitter background, what's your opinion of the social components of https://bearblog.dev/? Could you imagine to have an RSS and ActivityPub stream for pages that want to gain publicity?

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