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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!
[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.
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?
Congrats on the launch! I find the name really nice and i think it has lot of potential for marketability.
Is the goal to have your website/blog only for friends or also for strangers? If its the second I think it would be nice to display "Random site of the day", "Most visited post of the month" and "Most visited page of the month".
This because i think there is people like me who dont write much but likes to read other peoples blogs and would be great for discovery
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).
So webrings work by chronological order? That seems odd — wouldn't quality or relevance matter more than "who joined first"? Or is the idea that randomness itself is the discovery mechanism, and you're just making it slightly more structured than pure chaos?
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.
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.
I am not putting you down - this is a very cool project. But I don't think it's really that impressive after I've seen hundreds of similar projects on HN. Does anyone feel the same?
It's very simple to code (or vibe code) this in a week. Kinda uninteresting.
I've been there. The technical simplicity isn't the point—it's about actually shipping something people want to use. I spent months overengineering a side project that no one cared about because I focused on the wrong things.
The hard part is understanding what people actually need and building just enough to validate it. Most "simple" projects here died in the complexity phase before anyone saw them.
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 disagree that technical simplicity makes something uninteresting. The hard part isn't coding a social platform in a week—it's sustaining one for years while keeping it weird and personal. Most "simple" projects die after launch because there's no soul behind them. The creator's commitment here is what makes it notable, not the stack.
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!
Actually, this isn't a social space per se—there's no commenting or public interaction. It's more like a creative portfolio platform for small groups. But yeah, the aesthetic is really nice.
The sites are simple and easy to set up. Feel free to give it a try and let me know what you think!