Update: You can now browse through webrings and create your own! https://webrings.paperboat.website/

Thank you! I like the ideas and will think about it. I'm working on a concept for webrings which can be used to discover new sites. They'll work like this:

A webring consists of multiple sites. The oldest one comes first and newer ones get inserted at the end. Visitors can browse their way through all sites by using previous and next buttons. If a site is in multiple rings at once, visitors can hop onto another ring and continue from there. I think it'll be a fun way to discover new sites that doesn't rely on some kind of performance measure like upvotes or views.

In addition to that, every webring will have a feed overview where the latest blog posts of all sites in the ring are listed. I'll have to think about moderation carefully, here.

It's really tempting to implement something like upvotes but I think without them it'll be a calmer experience. I also didn't implement analytics yet (IP addresses are not tracked).

Thanks for your comment!

Thank you! And I agree that it's technically not that impressive. Posting it here was very special for me. First of all, I got tons of valuable feedback and questions. It's also the first step in figuring out how big a role this project will play in my life. I will run it regardless of how many people decide to support it through memberships, however, I want to carve out as much time for it as possible. It's a commitment to something that I've been dreaming about for quite a while now, that's what makes it exciting for me. On top of that, I built a website tool that my friends and I actually enjoy to use.

I wish you luck in running your project! I hope it gets a userbase - no matter how small, to show that a project like this can be sustainable financially.

Btw, it's great satisfaction in seeing your friends enjoy your product, I know that feeling. It's the greatest compliment when they stop complaining (because you've polished your project) and just use it

Good points! paperboat.website is very simple and focuses on friends sharing their blog posts which each other, which helps limit regular users' exposure to potential malicious activity.

I expect it's going to be tricky if the user base grows but I'm not planning to compete with larger social networks. It's primarily a space to create personal sites and blogs and my plan is to keep it around as long as possible. If users decide to purchase memberships, I'll have even more time to make sure it stays secure and up to date. If not, I'll still run this for me and my friends which is a huge motivation for me already.

Definitely a huge inspiration! For global discovery, I'm working on a webring-like feature. Unless users really want it, I'll steer clear of a global feed for now because I'd like users to discover other content more organically. I'm definitely open for ideas, though.

Thank you so much! The content will always be owned by the users. I'll never use their content commercially and I will also never sell the platform.

The page content is stored as Markdown and I'm working on an export feature to export raw data and also the entire HTML pages so that users can take it with them if they decide to leave paperboat.website.

Curious. Are you just a good guy whos tired of the way the world is? What's in this for you? This seems like a cool thing to do but I feel like "I will never sell the platform" should be taken with a grain of salt. How long-term are you intending for this to run? How long has it currently run? What is your uptime?

I'm not meaning to grill you here. These are just the questions I had reading through the page. Will I take my blog here and then have it just disappear in a month?

Thank you for your time and thank you for contributing something like this to the world! We need more "things so things can exist" and less "Things so I can have money" so big kudos from me!

Yeah, that's always the big question. You'll have to take my word for it.

I spent many years in the Re-Volt community (racing game from the 90s). This is what lead me to become a programmer, made some of my best friendships and found out how important places for communities are. I helped build the community by starting a Discord server with some friends, set up a website to organize online events, maintained a Blender plugin and documented how custom content can be made for the game, organized meetups and so on. The friends I made through the community and how close we still are today had and still have a huge impact. This time gave me so much and one of the most important things I took from that time is how important it is to maintain places where people can meet, share and learn from each other. That's a part of my thinking and whenever I start a new project, that's in the center of it.

Thank you for taking the time to share and respond! Having to take your word for it makes sense, I think I'll give it a shot! Good luck with all of this!

Thank you so much!

Hi HN! My name is Marv and I made paperboat.website, a friendly platform for personal websites and blogs. I wanted to create a place for sharing interesting things with your friends and everyone else, without all the annoyances most of the world wide web comes with these days.

The sites are simple and easy to set up. Feel free to give it a try and let me know what you think!

Congrats on the launch! I love ideas like this, but curious how this is different than https://bearblog.dev which has been around for a while?

Thank you! bearblog was a huge inspiration for me. They have many similarities but the main differences are a block-based editor and a feed that shows the most recent posts of the blogs that you're following. I'm also trying to make paperboat.website accessible for people who usually don't use Markdown.