[HN Gopher] Show HN: I made paperboat.website, a platform for fr...
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Show HN: I made paperboat.website, a platform for friends and
creativity
Author : yethiel
Score : 49 points
Date : 2026-02-10 16:57 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (paperboat.website)
(TXT) w3m dump (paperboat.website)
| yethiel wrote:
| 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!
| duck wrote:
| 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?
| yethiel wrote:
| 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.
| dreadsword wrote:
| I haven't gone through and created a paperboat site (as I'm kind
| of drowning in channels at the moment), but I love the aesthetic
| and the spirit of a stripped down social space. Congratulations
| on the launch and best of luck!
| yethiel wrote:
| Thank you so much!
| Nephx wrote:
| Congrats on the launch! Love to see more minimal, single-purpose
| sites like this popping up. The no-JS, no-ads approach is
| refreshing.
|
| Two quick questions. On data ownership: do the ToS allow you (or
| a future acquirer) to sell or commercially use the content people
| publish on their blogs? And is there a way to export blog posts,
| say as Markdown? Portability is a big deal for me before
| committing to a platform.
|
| Will definitely subscribe either way. Nice work.
| yethiel wrote:
| 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.
| chankstein38 wrote:
| 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!
| yethiel wrote:
| 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.
| chankstein38 wrote:
| 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!
| nicbou wrote:
| This reminds me of bearblog.dev, in a very positive way.
|
| One thing I adore about Bear is their discover page. Have you
| considered adding one?
| yethiel wrote:
| 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.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Congratulations on your launch!
|
| Like others have mentioned Bearblog, I'd also like to mention
| fika.bar, which is a service similar to yours. I wish success to
| all of you!
| varispeed wrote:
| 10-20 years ago running a social network platform was viable for
| individuals. Today, in the era of information warfare, SEO,
| trolling and in general magnitudes more bad actors, it's almost
| impossible.
|
| Friend has encountered things like people uploading illegal
| content and then reporting to hosting provider or various
| terrorist or political organisations publishing their manifestos
| and vile content then making death threats for taking it down and
| so on.
|
| Also no ads, means how the platform is going to survive once
| provider runs out of money or figures out it is not as easy as it
| looks like?
| yethiel wrote:
| 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.
| schmooser wrote:
| Lots of mentions of bearblog.dev, I want to mention
| https://mataroa.blog which is even more similar.
| csense wrote:
| Whenever I hear the words "paper boat" I'm put in mind of a
| certain [1] vtuber [2].
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/pYVEIX7nSEs?t=769
|
| [2] For those unfamiliar with the vtuber scene: This video is not
| AI generated. She's a legitimate content creator; the views and
| subs on that video are real and organic. She's a real human with
| a video camera and face tracking that maps her real human face's
| expressions and movements onto an anime character model in real
| time, broadcast on a livestream. There's a whole ecosystem of
| supporting software, specialized model artists and riggers,
| agencies that provide all sorts of support to individual creators
| in exchange for a cut of ad / superchat / sub / merch / event
| revenue...the vtuber rabbit hole goes quite deep.
| mastermedo wrote:
| What did I just watch... Alright, something for everyone, I
| guess.
| Shank wrote:
| Sameko Saba/Gawr Gura/senzawa, the most popular/notable
| virtual youtube personality (vtuber) is what you just
| watched.
| stbtrax wrote:
| is this innocuous or does it have hints of child abuse like the
| whole loli anime scene?
| csense wrote:
| Innocuous. Saba streams on YouTube; any NSFW content would
| get age-restricted or taken down. There's nothing immoral
| about a 20-something woman finding an audience streaming with
| a cute, petite anime cat girl avatar. (Or maybe 30-something,
| I have no idea her real age.)
|
| You should be able to stream with an anime character of any
| body type you want, especially if it's your original
| character and you commission the art yourself, as Saba did.
| It's fantasy. When you choose your animated avatar's body
| type, it could match your real body type; be an aspirational
| body type you wish you had; or be a business decision
| responding to what kind of content has viewer demand. Who
| cares?
| Bukhmanizer wrote:
| As a coincidence there are 3 ShowHNs on the front page right
| now all with "boat" in their name. Showboat, Rowboat and
| Paperboat.
| nkrisc wrote:
| Technically impressive, but that's about it.
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(page generated 2026-02-10 23:01 UTC)