Is this a dream.
42 karma · joined January 21, 2023
> Was it more something you built for yourself, or did you have some feeling there would be an audience for this on HN (or elsewhere)?
It was 100% for ourselves at the start, but figured others would love it too, so second time I built it to scale. HN is not especially our target audience, but wanted to show it off, stress-test and get at least some outside feedback. :)
We love tailwind as everyone else in their right mind, but we're using our own flavor of the concept I started years ago: https://fractures.dev
On the why: We plan on having a lot of novel, one off interfaces, which TW isn't just right for. CSS is. We also don't have an frontend scaling problem, as I'm the sole developer here.
It's more like a principle question than anything else—we know it won't make a dent in the world, but we aren't comfortable providing service for countries that openly pro-war.
Although this has nothing to do with selling users data—will work on our tos to communicate our expressed intents more clearly.
> Or again, tap an image, try to copy the description. It swipes to the next image or something (on mobile). Very weird usability.
Will spend some time on this too—not too easy to keep the swiping natural and maintain all expected behaviors.
> Imho, the SSR experience of most personal blogs is quite important if you want to compete with other platforms, because broken back buttons and obnoxius content loading is what you get from places like Medium or LinkedIn. A SPA is totally the wrong way to go here I think.
Pages are loading from cache most of time (sub 100ms), but SSR does need some time to populate SEO data for bots. But agreed that perceived speed is very important, we have some tweaks coming in this area as well.
> You'll be able to download a snapshot of your content, store and view it locally with a light version of Sora.
> Things like table-of-contents, built-in citation tools, popovers to other pages, etc.
This is on our roadmap already. You will be able to create a book-like page with Sora later.
> If I had to articulate anything, it would be that I hope (but do not see) you offer support for custom domains?
This is also coming.
Please remember that Sora is (and will remain) completely ad-free, and it was built by only a few people. We aren't a big company (yet ;) and we aren't vc-backed.
Naming is hard, you won't be tied to this "platform".
---
> It’s also not clear to me from the landing page what Sora is, other than maybe yet another blog hosting service.
We're hoping to shape it into a more utilitarian service than anything else out there.
1: Won't sell any data, ever. Bootstrapped for now, user funded once we scaled up. We might temporary suspend signups at a point to ensure uninterrupted service.
2a: Good callout, will update the site with future plans!
2b: We're actively working on making content exportable, so you'll be able to take all of your stuff. No short term OSS plans, but might consider down the road!
Appreciate the questions!