holler

> Please don’t just move to another centralized platform.

Do you believe that all centralized platforms are inherently evil?

Thank you! Appreciate that. Hoping to find ways to get the word out and grow the community. So far it's been a fun ride!

I had a few folks at thanksgiving dinner talk about being active in NAFO, which I had never heard of. They shared some hilarious memes. Seems like a pretty big group.

100%, it's something I do struggle with because I enjoy building, and not marketing lol. But the latter is absolutely critical to even be able to continue building.

What you working on?

I do agree with you. I've had more positive feedback than negative and there's been a cohort of supporters who seem to enjoy it.

Def have to be careful about building features, throwing darts, etc. For this project the genesis was that I wanted to use the product myself and didn't see it in the market; I wanted to scratch my own itch, so I did indeed just build it.

But when I initially did a Show HN[1], the client wasn't far along other than supporting the basic chat feature. By the 2nd Show HN[2], the client had matured a bit and it both withstood the hn blitzkrieg and led to people from all over the world having realtime public conversations - the core idea in action. But people were asking for expected features including tags, search, message permalinks, and other stuff that wasn't there yet.

So that's what I've been building since...

All that said I could be blind to my own biases and it's taken awhile to bring it to maturity. I've also had slowdowns due to outside normal job stuff etc.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25470672

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31160302

Building https://sqwok.im and love to have ya! Just added search and unlisted posts, more on the way.

> Twitter as an application is laughably easy to build.

I think parts of Twitter may be easy to build in isolation, but the entire platform as a whole is certainly not easy by any means and would be very expensive to construct.

Really hope it does, it's a marvel of engineering.

100%. I've been going through this exact concept in building https://sqwok.im. I got a ton of positive feedback but also "it's not fully baked yet", "not quite there", "missing X feature". It's a challenge but you have to believe in it and keep pushing, try new things, and constantly collect feedback.

No voting but working on a clean/minimal link aggregation + live chat site at https://sqwok.im

bonus points: "hacker theme" to make the hacker feel at home https://i.imgur.com/AleBLed.png

https://sqwok.im/p/TXmiluFNUILE_Q (cross-post)

Just spent past 20 mins talking to a guy who seemed in great distress! Seems happier now :)

Seems like this could apply to startup founders as well.

> https://nobody.live

Something about that name is hauntingly sad.

You fixed the cold start problem! Not a bad idea :)

gotcha, certainly a win so congrats! Would be interested to hear what it did.

I know Meta pays a lot, but did you ever consider an alternate path where you didn't take that job and instead grew the service out further? $23k/month is good money.

Never heard of that tld, but "thats.sexy" is available for the bargain price of $250,000! What a world.

What's your thought on AWS Neptune?

From the marketing page below:

"Scale your graphs with unlimited vertices and edges, and more than 100,000 queries per second for the most demanding applications. Storage scaling of up to 128Tib per cluster and read scaling with up to 15 replicas per cluster."

https://aws.amazon.com/neptune/

true! time starts to blur the older I get...

Totally, but also excited to see what ex-blizzard creatives at Frost Giant Studios and their upcoming RTS Stormgate will bring. Happy to see the talent reform elsewhere.

https://playstormgate.com/

Interesting, have you had any success stories?

Ah ok had my timelines a bit off, so it was the year they launched in 2014 :D I just remember I somehow heard about it, maybe on HN(?), then started looking through their backend codebase and was impressed by it.

One feature in particular I learned a lot from was their permission system, which I had never built before. It helped me reason about how to build permissions into an api.

10 years ago when Taiga was relatively new, I used to browse their source code to help learn how to build a solid api using django / django-rest-framework. They built a quality piece of software from the start and it was really helpful to learn patterns by looking at their code. Eventually they slowly replaced drf with their own implementation, cool to see it worked out.

Funny I just had the thought this morning that the common held view of q-tips being bad feels bogus. I couldn't imagine not using them as after a day or two my ears start to feel noticeably clogged. My strategy is to twirl the q-tip around the outer edge of the inner ear, gently moving it further up a tad. It seems to work well.

Wouldn't that just result in a hyper efficient AI trained against that list of test cases only?

How would it know what a better version of itself were? Seems like that's a particularly human instinct. It requires a certain level of introspection and purpose, coupled with desire, ambition, a goal etc.

Time heals all, be kind to yourself. Happy Thanksgiving.

Ah you're right, and how could we forget <frame>(s)?!

The most OG tag for sure.

Raise your hand if you remember guest books, site counters, marquee tags, and using 4 small positioned images to get rounded corners!

I think you have to just pick an idea you're passionate about and build it.

I've had the same thought before yet even here on HN I've seen many startups shared that feel like rehashes of past ones. But those past ones got acquired...

Now I believe in just build a solid product and attract customers/users.