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Hi HN! My name is Marv and I made paperboat.website, a friendly platform for personal websites and blogs. I wanted to create a place for sharing interesting things with your friends and everyone else, without all the annoyances most of the world wide web comes with these days.

The sites are simple and easy to set up. Feel free to give it a try and let me know what you think!

Congrats on the launch! I love ideas like this, but curious how this is different than https://bearblog.dev which has been around for a while?

Thank you! bearblog was a huge inspiration for me. They have many similarities but the main differences are a block-based editor and a feed that shows the most recent posts of the blogs that you're following. I'm also trying to make paperboat.website accessible for people who usually don't use Markdown.

Whenever I hear the words "paper boat" I'm put in mind of a certain [1] vtuber [2].

[1] https://youtu.be/pYVEIX7nSEs?t=769

[2] For those unfamiliar with the vtuber scene: This video is not AI generated. She's a legitimate content creator; the views and subs on that video are real and organic. She's a real human with a video camera and face tracking that maps her real human face's expressions and movements onto an anime character model in real time, broadcast on a livestream. There's a whole ecosystem of supporting software, specialized model artists and riggers, agencies that provide all sorts of support to individual creators in exchange for a cut of ad / superchat / sub / merch / event revenue...the vtuber rabbit hole goes quite deep.

What did I just watch... Alright, something for everyone, I guess.

Sameko Saba/Gawr Gura/senzawa, the most popular/notable virtual youtube personality (vtuber) is what you just watched.

The vtuber rabbit hole is very deep and interesting but this comment mentioning Saba seems to be very random, not related to the discussion at all. Left a bitter taste even on someone who knows a bit about vtubing. Not the best way to show off the community on hackernews

As a coincidence there are 3 ShowHNs on the front page right now all with “boat” in their name. Showboat, Rowboat and Paperboat.

Technically impressive, but that’s about it.

is this innocuous or does it have hints of child abuse like the whole loli anime scene?

Innocuous. Saba streams on YouTube; any NSFW content would get age-restricted or taken down. There's nothing immoral about a 20-something woman finding an audience streaming with a cute, petite anime cat girl avatar. (Or maybe 30-something, I have no idea her real age.)

You should be able to stream with an anime character of any body type you want, especially if it's your original character and you commission the art yourself, as Saba did. It's fantasy. When you choose your animated avatar's body type, it could match your real body type; be an aspirational body type you wish you had; or be a business decision responding to what kind of content has viewer demand. Who cares?

Congrats on the launch! I find the name really nice and i think it has lot of potential for marketability.

Is the goal to have your website/blog only for friends or also for strangers? If its the second I think it would be nice to display "Random site of the day", "Most visited post of the month" and "Most visited page of the month".

This because i think there is people like me who dont write much but likes to read other peoples blogs and would be great for discovery

Thank you! I like the ideas and will think about it. I'm working on a concept for webrings which can be used to discover new sites. They'll work like this:

A webring consists of multiple sites. The oldest one comes first and newer ones get inserted at the end. Visitors can browse their way through all sites by using previous and next buttons. If a site is in multiple rings at once, visitors can hop onto another ring and continue from there. I think it'll be a fun way to discover new sites that doesn't rely on some kind of performance measure like upvotes or views.

In addition to that, every webring will have a feed overview where the latest blog posts of all sites in the ring are listed. I'll have to think about moderation carefully, here.

It's really tempting to implement something like upvotes but I think without them it'll be a calmer experience. I also didn't implement analytics yet (IP addresses are not tracked).

Thanks for your comment!

This reminds me of bearblog.dev, in a very positive way.

One thing I adore about Bear is their discover page. Have you considered adding one?

Definitely a huge inspiration! For global discovery, I'm working on a webring-like feature. Unless users really want it, I'll steer clear of a global feed for now because I'd like users to discover other content more organically. I'm definitely open for ideas, though.

Congrats on the launch! Love to see more minimal, single-purpose sites like this popping up. The no-JS, no-ads approach is refreshing.

Two quick questions. On data ownership: do the ToS allow you (or a future acquirer) to sell or commercially use the content people publish on their blogs? And is there a way to export blog posts, say as Markdown? Portability is a big deal for me before committing to a platform.

Will definitely subscribe either way. Nice work.

Thank you so much! The content will always be owned by the users. I'll never use their content commercially and I will also never sell the platform.

The page content is stored as Markdown and I'm working on an export feature to export raw data and also the entire HTML pages so that users can take it with them if they decide to leave paperboat.website.

Curious. Are you just a good guy whos tired of the way the world is? What's in this for you? This seems like a cool thing to do but I feel like "I will never sell the platform" should be taken with a grain of salt. How long-term are you intending for this to run? How long has it currently run? What is your uptime?

I'm not meaning to grill you here. These are just the questions I had reading through the page. Will I take my blog here and then have it just disappear in a month?

Thank you for your time and thank you for contributing something like this to the world! We need more "things so things can exist" and less "Things so I can have money" so big kudos from me!

Yeah, that's always the big question. You'll have to take my word for it.

I spent many years in the Re-Volt community (racing game from the 90s). This is what lead me to become a programmer, made some of my best friendships and found out how important places for communities are. I helped build the community by starting a Discord server with some friends, set up a website to organize online events, maintained a Blender plugin and documented how custom content can be made for the game, organized meetups and so on. The friends I made through the community and how close we still are today had and still have a huge impact. This time gave me so much and one of the most important things I took from that time is how important it is to maintain places where people can meet, share and learn from each other. That's a part of my thinking and whenever I start a new project, that's in the center of it.

Thank you for taking the time to share and respond! Having to take your word for it makes sense, I think I'll give it a shot! Good luck with all of this!

I haven't gone through and created a paperboat site (as I'm kind of drowning in channels at the moment), but I love the aesthetic and the spirit of a stripped down social space. Congratulations on the launch and best of luck!

Thank you so much!

Lots of mentions of bearblog.dev, I want to mention https://mataroa.blog which is even more similar.

10-20 years ago running a social network platform was viable for individuals. Today, in the era of information warfare, SEO, trolling and in general magnitudes more bad actors, it's almost impossible.

Friend has encountered things like people uploading illegal content and then reporting to hosting provider or various terrorist or political organisations publishing their manifestos and vile content then making death threats for taking it down and so on.

Also no ads, means how the platform is going to survive once provider runs out of money or figures out it is not as easy as it looks like?

Good points! paperboat.website is very simple and focuses on friends sharing their blog posts which each other, which helps limit regular users' exposure to potential malicious activity.

I expect it's going to be tricky if the user base grows but I'm not planning to compete with larger social networks. It's primarily a space to create personal sites and blogs and my plan is to keep it around as long as possible. If users decide to purchase memberships, I'll have even more time to make sure it stays secure and up to date. If not, I'll still run this for me and my friends which is a huge motivation for me already.

Congratulations on your launch!

Like others have mentioned Bearblog, I'd also like to mention fika.bar, which is a service similar to yours. I wish success to all of you!

I am not putting you down - this is a very cool project. But I don't think it's really that impressive after I've seen hundreds of similar projects on HN. Does anyone feel the same?

It's very simple to code (or vibe code) this in a week. Kinda uninteresting.

Thank you! And I agree that it's technically not that impressive. Posting it here was very special for me. First of all, I got tons of valuable feedback and questions. It's also the first step in figuring out how big a role this project will play in my life. I will run it regardless of how many people decide to support it through memberships, however, I want to carve out as much time for it as possible. It's a commitment to something that I've been dreaming about for quite a while now, that's what makes it exciting for me. On top of that, I built a website tool that my friends and I actually enjoy to use.

I wish you luck in running your project! I hope it gets a userbase - no matter how small, to show that a project like this can be sustainable financially.

Btw, it's great satisfaction in seeing your friends enjoy your product, I know that feeling. It's the greatest compliment when they stop complaining (because you've polished your project) and just use it

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