Show HN: Sora, Personal Publishing Platform

[chrispuska]

We wanted to create, to express ourselves without being judged either by strangers or some algorithm. We wanted our own space on the internet, where our photos and words would matter.

So we started to build an app that can showcase our content, without having to pick a platform. You can use Sora to publish a few different content types.

- Blog - Polaroid - Poster - Microblog

You can either display them all on your Sora profile as a summary (like mine https://topcat.sora.city), or put any of them forward for the world to see.

We plan to run this app for a long time and looking for feedback, so let us know what you think! ([e-mail], or link on website)

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Our stack today is Node, Typescript, NextJS, atomic CSS, with everything stored on Supabase.

[phoe-krk]

0. How does this compare to Fediverse-based solutions, such as Write.Freely for articles, Pixelfed for graphics, Mastodon or Pleroma or Misskey for microblogging? Do you plan on supporting ActivityPub for federation?

1. What are your funding plans? If you plan on being free, what sort of user data will you be selling to pay for your costs?

2a. You mention on the bottom that Sora is Forever: "We're building Sora because we need a place to showcase our content too. We're bootstrapped and in for the long run." What sort of longevity plans do you have in case your servers/your backups/your company/your team goes under?

2b. Do the users get to own their data and move it elsewhere? Is your software FOSS so that users can run their own instances?

[chrispuska]

0: We're going to support ActivityPub at some point this year. Also monitoring all the other protocols popped up recently.

1: Won't sell any data, ever. Bootstrapped for now, user funded once we scaled up. We might temporary suspend signups at a point to ensure uninterrupted service.

2a: Good callout, will update the site with future plans!

2b: We're actively working on making content exportable, so you'll be able to take all of your stuff. No short term OSS plans, but might consider down the road!

Appreciate the questions!

[lrvick]

> 1: Won't sell any data, ever.

Until someone buys the company, and the new owner sells the data. We have all heard this before.

[scrollaway]

What’s the point of this post? The GP asked if they plan to sell user data, they respond no. Did you want them to just not respond? What?

[lrvick]

I would hope they would respond with how they can -prove- data can never be sold, by having accountable cryptography, etc.

[chrispuska]

At this point, there is not much to e2e encrypt--as most of the time you're posting for the internet to see. With more personal collections coming, we'll introduce encrypted content as well.

Although this has nothing to do with selling users data—will work on our tos to communicate our expressed intents more clearly.

[esperent]

> Won't sell any data, ever

Is this clearly stated in the terms and condition, including what happens if you sell the company in the future?

If it's not, then your words are meaningless, sorry.

[phoe-krk]

Thanks for quick answers, all clear now!

[rg111]

What will the pricing look like?

Can you give me a ballpark?

[WA]

On first sight, the design looks nice. On second sight, it’s a slow SPA, showing placeholders for way too long. The usability around navigation has the typical buggy SPA feeling:

Go here https://topcat.sora.city/found Tap an image, use the back button of the browser and you’re all the way back to the client-side no-cache loading of the profile.

Or again, tap an image, try to copy the description. It swipes to the next image or something (on mobile). Very weird usability.

Or tap one of the last images, close it with the close button and Safari will scroll all the way to the top again.

Imho, the SSR experience of most personal blogs is quite important if you want to compete with other platforms, because broken back buttons and obnoxius content loading is what you get from places like Medium or LinkedIn. A SPA is totally the wrong way to go here I think.

In short: it looks nice but feels shitty.

[cycomanic]

> On first sight, the design looks nice. On second sight, it’s a slow SPA, showing placeholders for way too long. The usability around navigation has the typical buggy SPA feeling:

Actually I'm on mobile right now and I was impressed how speedy it was.

> Go here https://topcat.sora.city/found

> Tap an image, use the back button of the browser and you’re all the way back to the client-side no-cache loading of the profile.

> Or again, tap an image, try to copy the description. It swipes to the next image or something (on mobile). Very weird usability.

Works for me just fine (maybe been fixed in the meantime?) on Firefox on android.

> Or tap one of the last images, close it with the close button and Safari will scroll all the way to the top again.

Again no problem here on Firefox for android.

> Imho, the SSR experience of most personal blogs is quite important if you want to compete with other platforms, because broken back buttons and obnoxius content loading is what you get from places like Medium or LinkedIn. A SPA is totally the wrong way to go here I think.

> In short: it looks nice but feels shitty.

I don't agree compared to many other offerings this feels quite snappy IMO.

[LoganDark]

"works on my machine" doesn't mean the issue doesn't exist

[chrispuska]

Appreciate the feedback, will fix the navigation issue.

> Or again, tap an image, try to copy the description. It swipes to the next image or something (on mobile). Very weird usability.

Will spend some time on this too—not too easy to keep the swiping natural and maintain all expected behaviors.

> Imho, the SSR experience of most personal blogs is quite important if you want to compete with other platforms, because broken back buttons and obnoxius content loading is what you get from places like Medium or LinkedIn. A SPA is totally the wrong way to go here I think.

Pages are loading from cache most of time (sub 100ms), but SSR does need some time to populate SEO data for bots. But agreed that perceived speed is very important, we have some tweaks coming in this area as well.

[melx]

Nice one! However I'm not trying/paying for a service that its own terms and conditions look like unfinished business. Sora is "a company"... Hmm. No basic details who's behind it. Then there's this "Our servers are located in." In where exactly? Lots of questions probably.

[LoganDark]

> "Our servers are located in." In where exactly?

This is actually hilarious though. Terrible for a ToS, but hilarious.

[chrispuska]

Posted our app here for technical feedback mainly, but appreciate you looked through our ToS. Will go over this part with our lawyer.

[Shank]

I really like this, but maybe I'm a sucker. I was an early lover of Svbtle, and have tried Bear, hosting my own Jekyll + Hugo static sites, etc.

First of all, I love the clean design + aesthetic. I also like the fact that you don't seem married to one format, unlike most blogs, which are married to...linear blogs only. I hope this leads to more types -- in particular, I dream of having a CMS that can create a site as powerful as Gwern's [0] without the headache of having to maintain it. Things like table-of-contents, built-in citation tools, popovers to other pages, etc. sound like they could work well, if they were a separate type from what you currently offer. But this is just me wishing and dreaming.

If I had to articulate anything, it would be that I hope (but do not see) you offer support for custom domains? Custom domain support typically is a given with paid plans. I can see this being future-work related though.

Typographically, I really like everything. The design is really fresh. It looks well thought-out. I genuinely really like everything you've done!

[0]: https://gwern.net/problem-14

[chrispuska]

Thank you for the feedback—still lots to do obviously!

> Things like table-of-contents, built-in citation tools, popovers to other pages, etc.

This is on our roadmap already. You will be able to create a book-like page with Sora later.

> If I had to articulate anything, it would be that I hope (but do not see) you offer support for custom domains?

This is also coming.

[throwawaysky]

Would it be possible to provide free trial / demo code for HN?

The $9.99 hop from basic blog to micro blog, polaroid, poster is to high. I don't know what exactly I'm getting for that price. Even if there was a credit card gated trial, that would be too high friction for people.

Especially given there is no transparency about the team, investors, customer success stories to help with trust.

[defanor]

> Restricted.

> Sora isn't available in Belarus, Hungary and Russia.

Why these countries in particular? I guess it's about having oppressive/authoritarian regimes and being in Europe, but why to restrict it that way?

Edit: or perhaps it's because of the war, but Hungary doesn't seem to be involved as much. Though maybe I missed something there.

[chrispuska]

List is longer, copy was outdated.

It's more like a principle question than anything else—we know it won't make a dent in the world, but we aren't comfortable providing service for countries that openly pro-war.

[LoganDark]

Wait, is this just a fad now? People just implementing security measures to specifically deny access from those countries, even for completely innocent services?

[defanor]

Seems to be so: in the past year I encountered notably more seemingly geoip-caused HTTP 403 errors than previously, often with CloudFront or Cloudflare, but usually they don't provide a list of blacklisted countries like that. It's rather surprising to see Hungary there, but not NK and Iran, assuming it's just political (and not a response to some attacks, or has to do with some legal issues).

[ginkoutest]

Great job building this! I can tell it took a lot of time and work. How long, from idea conception to this Show HN, did it take you?

And how did you determine whether there would be a market for this? Was it more something you built for yourself, or did you have some feeling there would be an audience for this on HN (or elsewhere)?

[chrispuska]

Thanks! I had a working version a few years ago, but started a complete rewrite 6-ish months ago, mostly working on weekends.

> Was it more something you built for yourself, or did you have some feeling there would be an audience for this on HN (or elsewhere)?

It was 100% for ourselves at the start, but figured others would love it too, so second time I built it to scale. HN is not especially our target audience, but wanted to show it off, stress-test and get at least some outside feedback. :)

[user_named]

Looks great, but for me to start using it I need to be able to set my own username and url

[csmeyer]

How does this compare to something like bear blog?

[diytiara]

I'm reading this comment thread and I realize that you misunderstand a lot about what the OP created and wanted to share with y'all (yes, I know him and I've been useing Sora since it exists).

Let's say - I'm an average internet user who likes to create and share content and yes I've been using social media platforms for it because for us, there aren't many other options these days.

I don't think I need to tell you what makes me so angry about social media because you know it all better than me.

On Sora, I can create a personalized profile with the info I want to share about myself and I currently have two blogs of different topics, a microblog for my random thoughts and a polaroid collection and you can reach all of them when you open this same profile. For me, sharing the profile page with all my content on it, too, gives the feeling that I have some kind of "online personality" I build and control, in other words, I can be fully seen - it's something social media would never give me, especially because I have to share all my content on separate sites.

It's everything I want to share at one place. I have many options to customize my stuff, another thing I, the average user would never get from the big platforms.

You see Sora simply as a blog engine and you've seen enough of those already.

Difference is that it's much more complex than that. It's something I've been looking for for years and I couldn't find anything similar to it.

What I want to say... is that when you can build your very own blog engine or you can find a more complicated one that satisfies your needs then Sora isn't for you and that's cool.

For those who are looking for a less toxic alternative to social media (and they don't necessarily need it to be another form of social media), it could be something interesting. (Even when you can but you don't want to put all that effort into creating it yourself, it's worth a look - and when you don't understand what should you see then again, it's not for you and that's still cool.)

I still think it has a lot to offer, just look at it from a different perspective.

[zwaps]

It’s a blog with photos?

Even with your description I don’t get it. If I make a website, which is easy to do nowadays, I can also share that link.

What exactly is the revolution here?

[cxr]

You are not the target audience:

> [if] you can build your very own blog engine or you can find a more complicated one that satisfies your needs then Sora isn't for you

[TheGlenn88]

Is there any reason this is dynamic and not static?

It looks like this could be:

Creators use a dynamic system for creating/publishing

Readers consume a static website that’s is generated incrementally upon create, edit, etc of a writer.

[chrispuska]

Reading is cached 95% of time for now, which is as fast as static. ISR for n users is more complicated (at this point at least) than just letting edge cache.

[diceduckmonk]

Do plan on having a native mobile app ?

[chrispuska]

Yes, the iOS app should be available in the App Store sometime next week! Drop an email to [e-mail] and I'll send a TestFlight invite.

[diceduckmonk]

Also curious about your tech choices.

Why did you opt for Supabase instead of headless CMS like Netlify?

Why did you opt for Atomic CSS instead of Tailwind?

[LoganDark]

> Why did you opt for Atomic CSS instead of Tailwind?

I've been using Tailwind since 2019, and I would recommend Tailwind to anyone, but I still don't understand why people always try to get others to use it over something else. Is something wrong with Atomic CSS?

[chrispuska]

Maybe the "atomic CSS" part wasn't very clear—we just meant the concept of atomic CSS.

We love tailwind as everyone else in their right mind, but we're using our own flavor of the concept I started years ago: https://fractures.dev

On the why: We plan on having a lot of novel, one off interfaces, which TW isn't just right for. CSS is. We also don't have an frontend scaling problem, as I'm the sole developer here.

[LoganDark]

> We plan on having a lot of novel, one off interfaces, which TW isn't just right for.

I think you misunderstand Tailwind, but there's nothing wrong with your technology choice. :)

[vouaobrasil]

Did you name it after the rail (a bird)?

[Dalewyn]

It's Japanese[1], "空" can be read as "sora" which translates to "sky" as in "a blue sky", etc.

[1]: https://jisho.org/word/%E7%A9%BA-1

[lrvick]

-Forever- is never true unless your offering is open source. 9/10 startups die and I will not pay for a service unless I have an path to migrate to my own server if the service goes under.

[chrispuska]

There is this paragraph right next to the forever one:

> You'll be able to download a snapshot of your content, store and view it locally with a light version of Sora.

[lrvick]

A light version still means I need to write a replacement for your whole proprietary engine to re-host my content.

Leaving a blog engine should be no different than changing an email provider. Point DNS somewhere else and optionally backup/restore via IMAP to the new service.

[loveparade]

You want me to sign up and own my content/audience? No, thanks. These times are long over and there are hundreds of similar services. For publishing online, I would only ever consider self-hosted options where I truly own both my content and audience. I'm tired of these platforms.

[Dalewyn]

Yeah, I had a good laugh from the dissonance between "our own space on the internet"(tm) and a Web 3.0 website for a service that describes precisely nothing useful.

I don't even know WTF I'm "try[ing] for free, no credit card required", this looks more sleazy than pr0n sites to be giving out card numbers to.

For however much of my money they want (they don't say), that money would be better spent purchasing a proper web hosting plan with a proper hosting provider and registering a proper domain name with a proper domain registrar. I would really have my own space on the internet then.

[layer8]

> Sora, personal publishing platform

> So we started to build an app that can showcase our content, without having to pick a platform.

So… you built a platform in order to not have to pick a platform? I’m not sure I understand.

It’s also not clear to me from the landing page what Sora is, other than maybe yet another blog hosting service.

[chrispuska]

We're still focused on making the writing/reading experience better, but content portability is an important feature we're planning to ship in the coming months.

Naming is hard, you won't be tied to this "platform".

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> It’s also not clear to me from the landing page what Sora is, other than maybe yet another blog hosting service.

We're hoping to shape it into a more utilitarian service than anything else out there.

[layer8]

Okay, I still don’t understand what Sora actually is. That is, it’s not clear what type of product or service or software this is, and which problems of existing solutions exactly you’re addressing. It would be helpful to have a bunch of “it’s like x, but avoiding problem y by doing z”.

[diytiara]

Take a look at the page! After that, it's been all clear for me.

[layer8]

I did. It’s not at all clear to me.

[Stealthisbook]

$9.99 a month apparently for hosting with rss and a branded url? Without a much more expensive email component, I don't see the value

[chrispuska]

Subscription unlocks all the functions you can't use in demo mode. Once you subscribe you'll have access to all present and future collection types, image upload and daily statistics.

Please remember that Sora is (and will remain) completely ad-free, and it was built by only a few people. We aren't a big company (yet ;) and we aren't vc-backed.

[vorpalhex]

My personal blog costs me about $1.30 a month, including my image cdn.

Why is your software worth $100+ a year to me? I can go with Ghost and save $1 a month over your price.

[diceduckmonk]

I’m curious, how many megabytes of image are you hosting ? Looking to run my blog with static hosting similar to this.

[vorpalhex]

I use digital ocean. The minimum buy in is $60/year, and it gives you 250gb of storage and 1tb of bandwidth, across as many spaces (ie buckets) as you want.

I also use this as my "share" site, and for a bunch of other uses, so my ~2gb of image hosting is just a fraction of that yearly $60.

The major catch is they don't offer dynamic image resizing. I only resize my images to a few standard sizes and just use a small script to resize + upload in one shot.