Did you read the article? The entire point of building this was to solve a problem for myself. If anyone else wants to use it, that's also fine with me, but the goal of this was not to monetize this nor turn it into a serious project or business.
288 karma · joined May 8, 2015
Privacy-first, simplicity and speed are the core tenets. Export posts at any time, send posts via newsletters, and no feature-bloat.
Disclaimer: I built Papyrus because I was fed up with Medium, Wordpress and Substack.
Thanks again for the feedback!
2. I'm not sure yet. One of the selling points is no third-party trackers, so I'm not sure how readers will feel if some of their blogs started tracking them.
3. Thanks for the feedback, and I appreciate the mockup! Agreed that section can be clearer - I've added this to the backlog.
Yes, I've been meaning to do this - I haven't prioritized it yet because we have not had enough quality blogs on the platform to showcase, but after all the HN traffic I think this will change :)
This is something I'm actively working on. I've already begun to implement functionality to import subscribers from Substack (you can test it out in the /settings/blog page).
After I finish Substack, I'll begin adding support for importing posts/subscribers from other platforms.
This definitely sounds like a bug.
I invested quite a bit into speed, and thankfully Next.js has a lot of great built-in support to make things fast - incremental static regeneration, link prefetching, image optimization, etc.
For the editor bugs - thanks for highlighting, I filed a bug and definitely hoping to tackle this eventually.
Agreed on the documentation as well - it's on my radar to improve.
For custom domain support and RSS - both features on the roadmap! Likely RSS first, as that's quite a bit easier to implement, and custom domain support shortly after that. (Custom domain support is probably the #1 feature request at the moment).
The editor is currently markdown combined with a rich text UI-based editor. I haven't explored supporting other types of editors (beyond extending the UI), but I'd be open to it.
We're still in the early stages so no large blogs to show just yet.
Here's the Papyrus blog, if you're more curious to see how a demo blog operates: https://papyrus.so/@PapyrusBlog
And thanks for the tip about the JS issues - I'm absolutely focused on making the entire site accessible without JS, so this is important to me. I'll take a look at shortly.
https://thehypothesis.substack.com/p/heres-why-substacks-sca...
https://doyles.substack.com/p/in-queers-we-trust-all-others-...
https://www.vox.com/recode/22338802/substack-pro-newsletter-...
The TL;DR is that Substack has allegedly paid large sums of money to bring writers onto their platform. The writers they've paid have historically been on one end of the ideological spectrum, and Substack has not been transparent about who is being paid, nor how much.
And thanks for that -- should be fixed now on a majority of pages.
At the start of this year I set a personal goal to blog more. I wanted to 1) improve my writing skills, 2) build an audience, and 3) if the stars aligned, start earning a bit of supplemental income via paid posts or subscriptions.
I looked at the existing blogging/newsletter solutions out there, and none of them quite fit what I was looking for. They had paywalls (Medium), features I didn't need (Wordpress), too minimal a design (Buttondown), lacked transparency (Substack), or cost money even when I wasn't earning yet (Ghost).
So, I built my own.
No trackers or tracking cookies are used (beyond Plausible, for privacy-preserving analytics). Speed and minimalism is a big focus: all blogs are rendered as static HTML, using as little JS as possible.
You can write blogposts in markdown, publish them, let your readers subscribe, and (when you're ready) connect your Stripe account to start charging readers for access to paid posts. You also always maintain ownership of your posts, and you can export all data at any time.
Still in the early stages, so any feedback would be great.
Thanks!