Hey folks! I'm Louis – the builder (founder?) of Nicheless. I'm not sure how it got here, but I'm grateful that it did.
Nicheless is a fun little side project I created for people to share their thoughts with the world without needing to be performative or afraid of trolls.
I'm a firm believer that writing online is a great way to improve your thinking, and I'm hoping Nicheless encourages more people to do the same.
Happy to answer any questions you may have, and grateful that you took the time to try it out.
1. It appears that url for a post is simply based on title of the post and not connected to the user. Wouldn't this mean that no two posts can have the. same title? As in if smoother user tried to write a post titled "learn-one-thing-well", they can't?
2. One of the reasons I keep my personal website+blog is because I'm wary of services that offer a nice place to write and then write a blog post "It was a great journey..... but now we got $$ from VCs or company X , so Byeee.". Nicheless looks very nice almost wanting me to suppress that concern, but it still is a legitimate concern. Do you have any thoughts for users like me?
Cheers on a nice project! You must be very proud of your work!
Hey! Thank you for giving Nicheless a try. I read your post a little while ago :)
Regarding your questions:
1. The URL will auto generate and append a digit to the end in case the title of the post has already been taken before.
2. I don't think of Nicheless as a replacement for a personal website or blog (I have both, maintained separately). I want Nicheless to be a place for more experimental thoughts. A space for ideas, a minority of which graduate into more polished articles on your personal blog. Also, I want Nicheless to be a place that facilitates exchange of thoughts and ideas between existing social connections, both IRL and online, and not with the primary focus being the open network on the internet (like Twitter). I've written a bit about it here:https://nicheless.blog/post/mission
I'm aware that the positioning of the platform is still a bit fuzzy, and a lot of my goals aren't exactly obvious to users, but I'm going to work to improve on that.
Thank you for giving it a try, and for taking the time to leave your feedback here
:)
Also, I forgot to mention. I don't have any plans of getting $$ from VCs as of now. Nicheless is a side project that I run because I believe it should exist. I hope that doesn't change in the future, unless I have no other option.
Thanks for the refreshingly honest response. I like the idea of using a low-friction bounce board of raw thoughts and ideas, some of which may graduate to a blog post. I will continue to use Nicheless. Cheers!
I really like this, and I like the first few random posts I read. Is there a way to view the newest public posts? Discover seems to show random posts from months ago.
The discover page is currently just a bunch of manually curated posts from the platform. I don't want to create a feed of the latest posts because a lot of folks are just experimenting on the platform and it will end up being an overwhelming, incoherent feed, something that i'm trying to actively design against.
My goal is to have people invite their friends and other people they know to write on the platform, and follow their nicheless blogs. When that is the case, the default feed will end up being populated with posts that will be more contextual. However, I will admit I am not sure how to reach this goal just yet. It's still early days and I'm still experimenting.
Maybe a random post button? I sort of like the idea of experiencing the overwhelming incoherentness. I often find interesting stuff when clicking the “new” button on HN.
Awesome. What do you plan on writing about? I'm curious about the use cases people have, because they're often surprisingly (and pleasantly) different from mine. I mainly use it to think through things or share experiences, but I've seen people use it as an anonymous public journal, as a photography blog, or even as a public notebook for their poetry.
Not a knock on the author. All power to him for doing this. I worked on similar small side projects years ago. But I'm not convinced. And not of nicheless, just of anything attempting to fill the void where Twitter once was. I think some of these services might find their community and build something with network effects but I couldn't tell you which will make it as much as I couldn't say 3 years into Twitter if it would still exist a decade from then.
But something just isn't sitting right with me in this entire space. As I sit and watch the mindless babble of the Twitter billionaire owner and his groupies, it's causing me to fade slowly into the background of life. Spaces for idle chatter turns out to be a total waste of time. Whether it's about movies, gaming or politics, there's really more we could be doing with our time. Twitter is a void and trying to fill that void with another one isn't the answer. I don't really know what the solution is beyond knowing some sort of community platform is definitely missing. But it's likely to focus on some active component, not idle chat.
Hey Asim. I appreciate you taking the time to thoughtfully (and elegantly) lay out your thoughts.
At the moment, I don't want Nicheless to perform a similar function to Twitter. I love Twitter and use it daily, but I find it useful as a space to reach a broad audience of people I don't know. An open network with unlimited growth potential.
With nicheless, I want it to be the opposite. A place to follow people you already know, either from real life, or from existing social connections. I want it to be a place for a higher density of thought to be exchanged for a smaller group of people. I've written a bit about it here: https://nicheless.blog/post/mission
In fact, I'm even considering capping the number of people you can 'follow' on Nichless. Maybe it will help create an algorithm free feed of interesting thoughts that spark real life conversations. I don't know yet, but I might experiment and find out.
It's a noble goal. I think many an engineer have tried. Even convincing your own social group to try new things is hard so it really has to offer something new or attract a specific type of audience. I think most people's group of well know friends and contacts caps out at 100. So that would be where I'd put a soft limit on follows e.g a little hint that says maybe you want to split this out into sub groups or separate as accounts.
This is an excellent idea, I love the thought you have put into it.
A cap is also great, I've been a member of a wonderful social network that employs this stance, 10,000 all in, every year they open it up by deleting dead accounts. It keeps it running fine.
A lot of time is lost to Twitter. I don't think it ends up being like the social norms of your small group of friends that go to the pub. How big is that group? How do you converse? From personal experience it's vastly different.
Now, one may say that Vaknin isn't important, or that he's too self-important, or whatever. But his analysis (and he's not unique on that) concludes that such social media platforms have a corrosive effect on the individual and on society.
If nothing else, it's a system that essentially echo chambers you, and preys on vulnerabilities in the standard human psychological make up to maximize profit.
Not to mention that it's a private platform, and very specifically not a 21st century version of the agora/public forum.
I think that on principle private enterprises shouldn't be permitted to usurp the public sphere.
As I read your last point all I can think is, no one owns the earth, why should private companies own the digital space. It's frustrating when you can see the problem but not offer a solution. Mostly because the ideas are many but to execute is a multi decade endeavour. Not to get too serious but we're effectively talking about a problem that effects humanity and we now have a clown running the show. Elon is doing great things with his other companies and maybe he even finds a way to fix Twitter but it doesn't feel like he doesn't it with any sort of grace or humility, it doesn't feel like he shares the problems of humanity given his wealth and status. The disconnect makes it hard to trust him or root for him especially when it's at the expense of others as we can see by his public trolling on twitter. That's right, yes he's a troll. With over 100M followers...
Maybe our brains need idle time between intense bouts of thought and flow. And if that bit of writing doesn't contribute to, say, a certain 50k novel challenge for the month, well--now it's really wasted!
Let's go create something today. Or nothing. It's totally up to us.
Also, people can like and reply to your posts, but both those are private. Only you'll know how many likes a post has, and all replies will go directly to your DMs instead of a comment section. This is so that it helps reduce uneccessary trolling and status games among people, with the goal of making it easier for people to write for the sake of thinking, and not to impress their audiences which may or may not exist.
Let me know if you have any questions. Happy that you took the time to try it out.
Yes they can. Currently, the only way to DM a person is to reply to a post. Each post lets you toggle the Likes and Reply (DM) feature for that post. So if you leave the Reply toggle off for all posts, you won't be able to receive them. Folks that have already replied to earlier posts that had the reply feature on will still be to continue the conversation though. I'll probably add a Block feature at some point in the near future though.
For my writing it's both really. I write so that I can better present my ideas and thoughts Ina coherent manner that make sense to other people; not just myself. At the same time I am not writing FOR anyone else. I don't want feedback or commentary. I write to help my own thought process, making sure I understand the topic well enough that I could explain to someone else. I don't write for audience engagement, or for someone else. But I do try and write what someone without my knowledge or expertise can understand. I write for peers and practice.
I say this every time one of these pops up: Just do it yourself. Just get a $5 Linode or a Cloudflare account, make a Hugo/Pelican/whatever site and go.
These niche microblogging sites are so small and insignificant that you can never ever trust them to survive (or even persist). Just do it yourself from the very beginning and you'll have a much better time.
Every time this DIY reply comes it misses the fact that the platforms take care of commenting (account management, moderation), something that's more or less impossible for a DIY solution.
Twitter/FB/etc make commenting painless because everyone has an account and is already logged in. This at least has the potential to get to that position. DIY doesn't.
> the platforms take care of commenting (account management, moderation), something that's more or less impossible for a DIY solution.
This could be a bug, not a feature if you look at it from indie-bloggers' perspective. The DIY types are not target audience for the solution you're proposing.
There is a space for both 1) Substack-like platforms 2) DIY indie blogs.
Some cool things about DIY blogs:
- Email them! You can make friends by just emailing people. Private conversations.
- No censorship, this is a complex topic but DIY'ers probably consider censorship a bug than a feature.
https://prose.sh is a blog platform that is hosted in a free tier.
Authentication and authorization is handled by SSH, publishing posts is as simple as using rsync, and the website itself is read only.
We thought about charging for it but the site costs basically nothing. We have zero intention of killing it off as well because we use it for our own blogs.
What I like about it the most is you can take your Hugo markdown files and upload it to prose and it’ll mostly work so there’s not a ton of friction.
Hey. You're right. But there are lots of folks who don't have the time to build and maintain a site themselves.
Besides, I'm hoping to make Nicheless more than just a micro blogging platform. My goal is to make it into a space that encourages groups of people to share their thoughts without fear, and eventually let the exchange of those ideas percolate into real life discussions.
blogger.com has existed for forever (maybe older than Linode or Cloudflare)
The main advantage of self-hosting on a VPS provider is that you fully own your site... but it's a tradeoff in time, money and hassle of setup and administration.
Why bother when you can let someone else do all that for you... for free?
Hey! Glad this resonates with you. At the moment there are no algorithms by design. I want to make Nicheless a more closed network. A place to discover and discuss ideas from people you already know in real life or from other spaces on the internet. Not a space to discover new people.
"I want Nicheless to grow into a place where you come to read the thoughts of people you know. To take a dip into the depths of your friends' minds. And to turn those excursions into conversations – both online and IRL.
In the ideal scenario, I imagine a bunch of friends following each other, each publishing without fear of public judgment, and then occasionally discussing what they read and wrote about when they meet in real life."
Consider: it’s easier to “be real” with random people that you dont know in real life.
With real life friends, people naturally self censor quite a lot.
But if you do want an IRL friend network, also consider a “friend” system. Because I don’t think fully public posts jives with your idea. If I just want to talk to friends, I don’t want to share with the world.
Thanks! You're right, there's currently no RSS. Might change that in the future, but I haven't given it much thought just yet.
I agree that blogs are making a comeback. It's about time. We're in need of some sort of detox after a decade of social media fuelled lives. Hopefully it leads to a more interesting, less overwhelming internet.
Oh right, forgot I needed to download 1 MB of stuff (incl. 750 kB of JS) for a tiny 6-line article [1].
Performance is absolutely abysmal. If you really want to use a JS framework that much, just use Astro so you don't ship all the unnecessary JS that bloats and slows down a tiny page.
Until this is fixed, anyone would be much better off going for Bear Blog [2] or Mataroa [3].
What immediately scares me is every post on the website by the link having a title. To me inventing a good title arguably almost seems the hardest part of writing at all. A microblog should let you dump a thought quickly without requiring you to name it first.
Also, individual post URL is hidden to deep. You apparently have to open the post, scroll down, click "share", click "copy link", and even that element is not a real link. As soon as I see a post/preview/listing I want to be able to middle-click it to open it in a background tab or Ctrl+click it to copy/whatever.
Hey! I'm sorry you find the title intimidating. You could just use a random character in your title, or even a whitespace, to achieve the effect of a title-free place to post.
Regarding the individual URL, if you don't want to click to copy it using the current flow, you could just CMD+Shift+C to copy the URL?
> You could just use a random character in your title
As a mild-OCD perfectionist I'm literally grinding my teeth imagining doing it this way. If there is a place for a title a post I write has to have a good title or no title at all.
> or even a whitespace to achieve the effect of a title-free place to post.
If title doesn't have to be unique this already seems as an acceptable compromise.
> Regarding the individual URL, if you don't want to click to copy it using the current flow, you could just CMD+Shift+C to copy the URL?
Nice point. Any chance I could copy a post URL or open it in a background page straight from the posts list? I scroll the feed, see some read/bookmark/share-worthy posts and I would normally middle click them to get them all opened in background tabs.
> As a mild-OCD perfectionist I'm literally grinding my teeth imagining doing it this way.
Haha sorry I understand what you mean!
>If title doesn't have to be unique this already seems as an acceptable compromise.
Yes, currently the title doesn't have to be unique. The platform will just generate a unique URL for each post based on the title, and append a digit if necessary.
> Nice point. Any chance I could copy a post URL or open it in a background page straight from the posts list?
It was initially set up like this, but a bunch of users (mainly on mobile) complained that they didn't like the fact that each post opened in a separate tab. They wanted to just read a post and scroll to the next one easily. That's why I've moved to the current format. Maybe I could make it behave differently on desktop. I'll keep this in mind.
Hey! I just noticed that! You're the first person to write in a different script, so it's not a problem I experienced until now. Will figure out a way to make the URL neater by default, although you can currently edit it as well.
Btw, I'm also Indian (from Goa) so it's amazing to see posts in one of our many regional languages :)
This really resonates with me too. I already have a private Discord with just a few others who are both friends and work in software development, which serves as our closed-network way of discussing software and also a healthy dose of memes and real-life chat.
Ive thought about inviting others who I'm less close to, because I'd welcome their contributions to those discussions, but there is always the fear of adding anyone reducing the trust and transparency present atm. In lieu of that I'd love a nice and easy way to follow the thoughts of those peers and friends, without having to switch between substack blogs, LinkedIn posts, medium posts and a range of other things.
The trouble, usually, is that convincing all of those peers to adopt a new thing for this alone is a hard sell, when we're already so oversaturated on tools and platforms.
Agreed. I haven't solved that problem myself. Most of my own friends haven't switched to Nicheless, although most of them don't write elsewhere either. To me, nicheless is an ideal space for those that are afraid to publish online to start doing so. I'm yet to figure out how to make that happen.
Makes sense! One of the things stopping me from publishing is less about time or size of post, and more about focus and method. Nicheless definitely helps with focus/scope because of the limit on post length; perhaps you can incentivize if the platform provides helpful writing tips and suggestions? Just a thought, might be outside the scope of the platform.
I signed up. I actually have 2 personal blogs, so I am unsure about whether I will use your platform.
But there is something about the unfiltered short format that I like and even though I have thought about publishing shorter style posts on my own blogs, I for some reason never get to it.
Thank you! If you're curious about how to use it, I personally use it as a layer 1 for my thoughts. It helps me think about them more deeply than I would otherwise do if I was just talking to myself or writing in a private journal. Eventually, I plan on taking some thoughts and graduating them into full blown blog posts on my main website.
I can see the value. The interesting thing is whether people will notice and follow along. But of course just the act of writing in a setting where people potentially will read it makes you think a little more thoroughly even of "random" thoughts.
I think you should consider making tags case-insensitive. I would just lowercase them all :)
Regarding the tags, great suggestion. Will add it to my list.
And regarding your earlier point, I agree. I'm yet to clear up the positioning of the site. I'm struggling with 2 separate, but intertwined angles.
1. A low-pressure place to write in public, because writing helps you clarify your thoughts.
2. A place to keep up with what your existing circle of friends is up to in life
You can't have 2 without 1, and hence most of the messaging is geared towards 1 right now. I'm thinking about ways to encourage users to invite their IRL friends to participate, as I think there's a powerful, albeit small, network effect to be had.
The site looks gorgeous, fair play. I've seen from the comments that you're looking for people's envisaged use cases, so here's mine - I have moved about a lot, I'm currently living abroad. In a few months time, everyone will start moving about again.
This seems like a brilliant way to keep up with friends that I can't see very often, in a way that seems more genuine than the loop of
"Hey we haven't talked in ages! How are you doing?"
"It's been so long! I'm good, and you?"
"Good :)".
Being able to see what they're thinking and to interact with them from that without having to prompt a deep conversation on a Tuesday afternoon sounds wonderful.
Looking forward to using it more, and seeing where you take it!
I stumbled upon this use case almost by accident, when a few of my IRL friends published stuff on Nicheless. I realised I looked forward to reading what they were upto or thinking about. And then figured other people might like the same experience.
Thank you for sharing that you think about it similarly.
You've put into words the issue I've been having keeping up with friends I don't see often. Scheduled calls are too hard to do, and the awkwardness of those "hey how's it going" messages isn't much better.
While I'm sure some trolls do what they do for the external audience, private responses won't stop griefing just for giggles. I send a troll message to Bob, privately, get a rise out of him and screenshot the whole conversation and repost to some other platform if I want external validation.
I have a friend with millions of followers on social media. She gets all kinds of disgusting private messages all the time. The worst trolls aren’t publicly commenting (or at least aren’t solely publicly commenting), they message you directly as long as you leave an avenue open.
In its current form, in addition to the lack of public comments, you can also turn off the Replies (DMs) on each post, which will stop trolls from reaching you.
I'm hoping this will be sufficient, although it will end up blocking out good conversations/replies as well.
While you have a point, this process may make it harder to be a troll. Nowadays you can be a troll anywhere and anytime you want, specially online. I'm curious how this approach may benefit those who share their plain thoughts without the fear of being automatically targeted by trolls looking for triggered responses and tribal support.
I think it's a little more complicated than that. Trolls are often very fixated on their targets but they also tend to be impulsive and looking for quick fixes of glory. This is why things like shadow banning and slow modes and signup waiting periods work pretty well on them. Very few have the patience to wait for a fresh sock account that's limited to be useful.
"I think it's a little more complicated than that." Agreed, but decades of observation tell me there is more than enough supply across the shitpost to troll spectrum to go around :)
I like the landing page and the example posts. 300 words is a good middle ground between the twitter firehose and SEO-baiting thoughtfluencer essays on Medium.com.
But, Twitter too was once simple and hassle-free.
What happens if this takes off and some crypto-chastened VC starts sniffing around?
So we used to have this thing called telnet BBSes in the mid nineties.
Discord is not too similar, but typically with less moderation.
Bunch of people talk about stuff in subject based rooms, there’s some administrators looking after the health of the channel. Join or leave rooms, etc. Open source would shield it a bit more from commercial interests.
Social media is simply too big for this, it will always be advertised run because of the size of the audience. Also the viral component and manipulation affect how valuable it can be.
The goal here is to help people create and communicate in a one to many & many to one manner within small communities. I'm still working on making it easier or more obvious to do that, but I'm going to keep trying!
I like the extreme simplicity. It motivates me to write something and worry less about whether that writing is a properly crafted story. I think of my Substack as the place that requires something with more polish, and Twitter is for very short takes, opinions, conversations.
This site sits somewhere in the middle. Looking forward to seeing how it evolves!
Yes! Exactly the way I see it as well. A layer 1 ecosystem for thoughts outside my mind. Substack is a layer 2 that is much more polished. Thanks for signing up :)
Thank you! I'm not a designer, but I try. I took some creative inspiration from a few other minimalist blogs on the internet, as well as some stuff I saw on pinterest.
There seems to be a decent amount of lag when scrolling on Firefox (106.1.0) for Android. Other than that, the mobile UI is pretty slick and I'm enjoying reading what others have posted.
I really like the implementation and the idea, but why have a word limit at all? You could encourage short form writing in other ways, but to make it impossible seems really limiting.
Hey! I've found that constraints make it easier for people to take action. The word limit does that for me. It's long enough to allow for nuance around a single topic, and short enough to not be intimidating to start, as well as to force some clarity of thought.
No, thoughts are work done. If they're directed but not deliberate, they're still revelatory.
Imagine a bunch of white tendrils in all directions, and every one of those has their own tendrils, and so on and so forth, like a system of roots, but a 2D manifestation of such. Now divide them and name them after scientific domains, imagine the white is what we know, imagine the black is our absence of knowledge, imagine the tendrils scale to what we do know and what we don't, how big do you think the negative space is? Now you say something stupid, that's off the beaten path, you cast a line and you wonder if it's worth reinforcing through investigation, and so you think more and more on it, and maybe you investigate it, and suddenly that stupid thought becomes fleshed out, and the question is answered.
You start from ignorance, we learn nothing new if you stay in the confines of the known - that is filtering, that is refining, that is ego pressing you to be right. Every statement has a thousand queries nested inside it, and for every answer borne from those...
Thanks Leke. I currently have no clue. I don't want to pursue the advertising route unless I absolutely have to. I might try and take some inspiration from Twitter Blue and create something similar in the future. The platform is still in its early days though, so I want to see where it goes before making any rash decisions.
Looking good. however, it seems like main content are printed through javascript, there is no text in the static html. I wonder the rationale behind this; it is not like you want to make a paywall.
Nicheless is a fun little side project I created for people to share their thoughts with the world without needing to be performative or afraid of trolls.
I'm a firm believer that writing online is a great way to improve your thinking, and I'm hoping Nicheless encourages more people to do the same.
Happy to answer any questions you may have, and grateful that you took the time to try it out.