▲ 5 points

Ask HN: It's 2024. What would be your ideal blogging service?

by xenodium·2y ago·9 comments·view on hn ↗

Happy New Year. It's now 2024.

With everything you know and seen as of today, what would be your ideal blogging platform? Please give your opinion as either content consumer and/or producer.

With the proliferation of walled gardens (specially for consuming web content), lock-in, continuos nagging to sign-in everywhere, spam, push for social validation, adverts, bait and switch offerings, etc. can't help but think that blogging is again ripe for disruption.

For example, could we make blogging platforms more competitive? Enable blogs to be more provider-agnostic and portable? Empower clients and encourage portability? Establish a platform-agnostic blog spec (file format)? Had enough of your current provider? Easily move to a better one.

Are there new (or lesser known) blogging services you like, which provide great value (while remaining genuinely honest)? How should it fund itself? Would you pay as a producer, to enable your content to be freely available without sign-ups or paywalls?

What are your must-haves? Offline editing? Rich text editing? Markdown editing? Mobile/tablet editing? Native editing? Bring-your own text editor? Anything is game.

9 comments

I have a personal website that I guess you could call a "blog", at least for the last year I've written semi-regular posts. I don't want any money for it (and I wouldn't expect to get any). Part of the reason I write stuff is to clarify my own thinking, a big part is to try and get my opinions "out there" and another smaller part is to try and establish myself as someone who knows about stuff - "personal branding" though I hate to say it that way.

I could go on, my point above is that, in principle, the blog provides value for me the producer that does not depend on charging people to read. The biggest value is trying to get more interested eyes on it, with as little friction as possible.

If you could find a market for people (writers) that basically value dissemination information and being part of a discussion, and not get stuck with people who just want to write marketing or promotional content, you might be able to get writers to pay if you could give them legit interested traffic. It would be a reframing of the value for most people though, you'd have to do some good convincing and show people why it would be worth it.

Edit: and just seeing a sibling post, I'd prefer any commenting or discussion doesn't happen on my blog specifically. Either HN or equivalent, or if a new platform could offer an HN like board with a critical mass of interested commentors, that would be best.

Also please resist any temptation to fake a community with AI comments, it's only a matter of time before someone does that.

Thanks for this! I'm thinking part of decentralizing and making the web more portable, is decoupling discussion from blogs/content itself? Producers can host their blogs anywhere and trigger discussion elsewhere (HN, Reddit, X, Mastodon...).

> The biggest value is trying to get more interested eyes on it, with as little friction as possible.

That's tough to guarantee. We all have access to platforms that can get many eyes on the content (HN, Reddit, X, Mastodon...), though whether or not we blog/produce content that's interesting to many eyes is a different story.

If the content is fairly niche, there's usally a subreddit where one can submit their posts and generate some discussion.

Nowadays, I just use hugo and a personal host.

Full freedom of formatting, all the data is mine, deploy via push-to-git.

What a good idea. My ideal blogging platform would be one I could send an email to from a throwaway account, plain text, one image max, Subject becomes the heading, signature the authors name and done - post published.

For real blogging we could maybe each have one Honest Static website, on a shared host with no comment functionality.

I think its ok to pay hosting to make what I write freely available. File Format could be plaintext, possibly even html. Offline editing would be a side effect but I am not sure about richtext editing. Tablet editing would be ok with an attached keyboard I guess, oh and if anything is game I might use the editor on my machine actually.

Sites like HN, Reddit & maybe even Twitter feel like a poor-man's blogging platform to me. Most topics I would write about cross the various front pages often enough.

Specifically with HN, the moderation experience is hard to beat. It has definitely kept me honest over the years. I'd be inclined to be more extreme in my writing without this kind of pressure.

I don't really have urgency to publish my own static content when I can have a more immediate conversation with interested parties here. The feedback loop is much tighter and I can iterate my ideas a lot faster.

> I don't really have urgency to publish my own static content when I can have a more immediate conversation with interested parties here.

This makes sense, but the content generating the discussion is usually hosted/linked elsewhere (with the exception of Show HN, Ask HN, etc, which aren't the majority of posts), right?

Aren't content and discussion platforms usually decoupled today?

I think where technically the disruption never happened was marrying the blogs with diaries. You write something in your diary app, decide that you want to publish it and just do it to a platform of your choice.

But maybe it all is a wish from different times, because today blogging has to identify the audience, care about nouvelity of the content, care about visitor statistics and self-promotion... Back then, maybe 20 years ago there were a lot of bloggers just telling about their little life and I miss them.

Funny you mentioned diaries. I have been toying with a plain-text-based journaling app https://xenodium.com/an-ios-journaling-app-powered-by-org-pl... Blogging (powered by static site generation) could certainly be an extension to that.

Off the top of my head…

Tools for transclusion, inserting parts of other docs and rich references to them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transclusion

i.e. I refer to lobste.rs and Hacker news stories in posts like this:

https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2021/04/build-ci-comments.html

I wrote a bit of (offline) JavaScript to do it, but I could see it being expanded. I find it makes the posts more like a conversation with others

Twitter/Facebook do this with OpenGraph <meta> tags too

Also better support for keeping the source of diagrams and images synchronized with the post. It’s sort of a build system problem

I thought that Joel Spolsky was doing something like transclusion - https://blockprotocol.org/

Though maybe it’s a bit different.

The holy grail is to have both a nice GUI/rich text preview and also “plain Unix” formats like CommonMark / HTML. It seems like you have to choose one or the other these days.

(copy of lobste.rs comment)