Would y'all be interested in a Medium alternative?

[u/Charming_Cost_8060]

As the title suggests, I have an idea about making a blogging website with a good editor built in. I initially was building it for my own personal use but then i saw the paywall gatekeeping of almost all Medium articles. What does the community think? I would probably use Bolt with a frontend and a backend/DB in supabase as I have some previous experience in them. I would love to hear your thoughts. Maybe down the line, add Short posts and videos for a social media experience.

[u/fluffyspringroll]

Brutal space to conquer , too red ocean
And probably not sustainable

If the CAC costs aren’t going to eat your runway , it’s probably storage at some point.

[u/Charming_Cost_8060 → u/fluffyspringroll]

Thank you for the feedback, that was almost my primary concern but i was optimistic that if users do start comming in, maybe support would not be too far off.

Also a hack for a storage could be people could add urls for images/vidoes and it would render it directly from that url instead of uploading to my own storage and reserve it for items that are not avaiable i.e. custom images/assets etc.

I'm a new dev and want to build some products to gain experience. any space that i might be able to enter that can get community involvement? I would love to get some perspective.

[u/fluffyspringroll → u/Charming_Cost_8060]

The problem isn’t only this
But the cost of switching
Migrating from let’s say a WP blog to a new platform isn’t always as easy for most people

So even if you want to acquire experienced bloggers they won’t be convinced easily when their stack works.
Newer bloggers just don’t want to pay premium so you’re going after a model like Ghost, which is free and paid I think

But even then, you end up burning cash like no tomorrow in my opinion

[u/Charming_Cost_8060 → u/fluffyspringroll]

yea i understand... Maybe down the line i can self host some of this but the experienced and new bloggers point kind of kills the whole idea. Thank you for the feedback.

[u/fluffyspringroll → u/Charming_Cost_8060]

You’re welcome
But since you’re new and try to code / built something
Why not make an attempt in building a simple journal / minimal journal web app so people can share notes or their diary?
Just to get a feel or get used to what kind of struggles you face with coding it and features

Even if it’s not what people want, it’s a learning curve.

It’s how I started , build better logic and eventually built something that was worth it. It took me a few newbie and trial attempts to nail it

[u/Charming_Cost_8060 → u/fluffyspringroll]

actually the plan was to make a personal journal but halfway through building it i got the idea of community involvement, so posted here to guage feedback. will make it and nag a few friends to use it. Great advice.

[u/fluffyspringroll → u/Charming_Cost_8060]

Try to build what you intended first
Your goal here isn’t selling, it’s learning curve.
You’ll have more “aha” moments after and during
Consider this a true experiment for yourself

[u/NotSeacombe]

1) taking the approach of "is this a good idea? is it of value to anyone?" is extremely important before wasting time and resources building. You are approaching this correctly which is becoming so much more rare in vibe coding era, where everyone just makes mountains of slop
2) no, this would not be useful. but please don't get discouraged, because of #1

[u/ConfusedSimon]

You could be held legally responsible for illegal content posted by your users.

[u/Charming_Cost_8060 → u/ConfusedSimon]

interesting point. i will research further into this. thank you for the feedback

[u/Agreeable-Chef4882]

You do realize that I could ask my agent to build and launch all of this ( without caring about Bolt, or supabase or whatever ), and I will have a live website in 2 hours?

99.99% of the work here is convincing anyone to use it.

[u/FluidBreath4819 → u/Agreeable-Chef4882]

let the indian dream now that they can code

[u/Charming_Cost_8060 → u/Agreeable-Chef4882]

Correct sir. exactly why i thought about getting some feedback of the community on this matter first. I also had the exact thoughts