New users

Backstory

I shared a bit of my story, in this post the other day, about leaving a mainstream writing platform and starting my own. I'd only used the platform in question for a few months, growing disenchanted with it and building tuhat in March, and didn't have a large number of subscribers. I cross shared the article on the previous platform as a bit of a farewell.

This wasn't some slick marketing ploy; a few hours after sharing the article on Friday I got a ping from my log monitoring service about a spike in errors, as I hadn't checked if people could sign up for new accounts. Over the weekend, over a hundred people did. I didn't really think that people would take it as a call to action.

This isn't the front page of hackernews or producthunt, or even in the ballpark of viral in the world of the global behemoths and venture fueled crazy town. But it is a step in a positive direction, in finding people willing to try something different. Its my sapling, in what could be a global forest, of a truly distributed internet.

How & Why

I've started and run a handful of company in a box platforms for small businesses (one to five people small), and a food co-op network under the 8by3 umbrella, all with a geographic focus on South Africa, where I am based.

8by3 is a fully bootstrapped businesses, with no outside investment, no ridiculous cloud bill and very low overheads. I've been some twenty years in tech and got off the hype cycle, after seeing microservices and kubernetes everything gone very wrong. Now I run things small and simple. As I am already running all the infrastructure for those other endeavors, tuhat doesn't cost me much. And, doesn't have economic goals beyond scratching my own itch of wanting somewhere clean to write, and hopefully read.

Money

One day I'd like a way for authors to support themselves, I thought of something like librepay or one of the many buy me a coffee sites. Though am loathe for people to have to shell out to credit card companies. For now I am fine with having no profit motive, and for my other ventures to cover the costs.

New Features

Now that tuhat isn't just my personal blog, I figured I should add some niceties that people have come to expect. So you'll get dms, up voting, live video feeds, the ability to order a cab, lots and lots of articles promising five ways to hack the algorithm and win at tuhat'ing or some such.

Or, none of that. Just a quite place to write long form thoughts, privately let people know you loved their work and go about your day.

Actual new features, launched today.

Global Tags

Tags existed per user under eg. /u/sbr/t/social and they still do, but there is also a global /t/ and tags on the front page link to the global version eg. /t/social

The tag input field, takes a list of #random #words #with #hashes and it now suggests tags from the global index as you type, also shows the top 6 most common ones.

Better SEO

I always feel a bit dirty using the abbreviation SEO, but even the crusty anarchists want their articles on building a better world discoverable. There are some standard fields added to pages, improvements to the RSS feeds and the excerpt field and cover image which you can now set. These are pulled when sharing your links by crawlers.

Custom themes

Under site settings, you can pick one of a handful of predefined themes, which have different colours as well as styling etc. If none of the existing themes fit the bill, you can go to DasiyUI's generator and either artfully create your own or press random a few times and then tweak. Copy the generated css fields and paste them into the custom boxes. It allows you to create both a light and dark theme, there is no manual override, the page uses whatever your system is setup to do.

Whats next?

Probably not very much. I'm pretty time and focus poor with two small children and even more infant businesses on the go.

If something isn't working, either try again in 30s or use my contact form. I normally run a matrix server and can be found on there but its currently down for rather specific reasons that will make sense when its no longer down. I can also be pestered on irc.libera.chat #8by3.

Some idea's I've been toying with

A picture is one hundred words

I do a lot of photography, and sometimes might like to not write an actual 1000 words but share ten images, or 500 words and five images. A series of images is often called a photo essay and it feels true to the intent of long form content.

Supporting an author

I fully realize that people use substack or patreon as a way to make a living, and that's wonderful. I'd like to support that, I'd actually like to do it at a fraction of the cost that those platforms do, because I can. I don't have to pay off any investors and I run a very lean ship, I don't want to get rich quick, I want to support a sustainable lifestyle. I'd be curious if anyone has a novel approach to this problem and how it could be done without giving ~3% to credit card companies.

Something else

If you have an idea that is true to the principals of simplicity and privacy, feel free to suggest it. I might ignore it. Or if you've spotted something on tuhat that is plain wrong, either technically, legally or morally i.e from a design perspective. Let me know. I am a real person, reading and writing these words and can take real action to affect change on this platform.

Best,

sbr.

ps. For clarification, /o/tuhat is the official tuhat page, /o/8by3 is my company page, and /u/sbr my personal one.