>Why can't we just have a minimal place to just publish our thoughts, without having to use a static site generator or setup a Wordpress/Ghost instance?
Because if this gets even remotely successful (actually used by people) you'd need a way to pay for costs at minimum. So you either get people to pay (hard sell given the "free" competitors) or monetize by other means -> bloat
Self host (open source) and you're probably worse off than just using a static site generator.
Not trying to flame your effort here, just that there is a really fundamental reason for why we can't have nice things. This model only works... if it doesn't work (doesn't get popular, doesn't actually get used by people)
I don't know if this service allows uploading images, but if it doesn't, storing text is cheap. "Too cheap to meter," as they used to say about nuclear power (although that turned out to be a pipe dream). For simple sites like these GitHub & GitLab Pages is free, or NearlyFreeSpeech is "nearly free" as the name implies. Hell, set up an sdf.org account and serve out of public_html. One of my hopes for the future of computing is as storage, bandwidth and compute get more efficient and cheaper (and fees on financial transactions don't, and adblockers become more prevalent), people decide it's not worth the effort to charge users fractions of a penny for their use of a service. Having the site's admins cover the cost isn't a big deal if it's on the order of $5/month.
I would be more concerned about moderation than storage or bandwidth usage. It's more difficult for text to be illegal than images, but it's clearly still possible: hate speech, copyright violations, etc. (whether it should be is another argument...)
The author has deleted their Twitters and Discord too, and the domain has gone. Seems very scorched earth, I hope they're OK. (Not least because I love to see new publishing platforms and wish them all the best)
Sometimes when something someone created gets unexpected exposure, it also creates an opportunity for people to critique with more vigor and less context than the creator is prepared for. It can be really overwhelming.
30 votes and HN front page has ripple effects, and might have overwhelmed the creator. Sometimes it’s not even a matter of being sensitive to feedback, sometimes it’s just not being fully prepared for the emotional toll it can take.
If this hit HN front page, it almost certainly made the rounds on Twitter and Reddit, where criticism can be even more harsh and even less considerate of the human(s) behind the project.
I will say I was very pleasantly surprised to see only a single domain in NoScript's list of domains. That is extraordinarily rare, even when on sites that are ostensibly pro-privacy. So thank you for not stuffing your site with tracking and analytics.
The feature where clicking a user's name immediately gives you their RSS feed is a super cool idea. I'd make that a little more obvious by adding hover text saying that's what it is, so you don't need to look at the URL/click it to figure it out.
A suggestion would be to, on the edit page, add a link to or a pane with markdown syntax, just in case people forget something, or also to make it easier for people who might not be familiar.
There isn't really anything to look at right now - it's just a place for you to post stuff. If people use it more, I'll add top posts to the homepage :)
Because if this gets even remotely successful (actually used by people) you'd need a way to pay for costs at minimum. So you either get people to pay (hard sell given the "free" competitors) or monetize by other means -> bloat
Self host (open source) and you're probably worse off than just using a static site generator.
Not trying to flame your effort here, just that there is a really fundamental reason for why we can't have nice things. This model only works... if it doesn't work (doesn't get popular, doesn't actually get used by people)