Heya everybody, it's your local lurker, greduan. Haven't been very active, but I sometimes come by to read stuff. :)

Anyway, I was having an idea to develop a commercial (albeit cheap) product.

You know how there's Medium or dev.to or other similar platforms to publish your content easily in a really readable format and without any of the hosting hassle?

And you know about the modern web obesity crisis[1]? E.g. a Medium 400 word article being 1.2mb of data to download (according to that talk, dunno of latest numbers).

[1]: http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

I was thinking, why not make an absolute minimalistic platform to host content.

The idea is as follows:

0. It's straightforward to use. You pay me a small fee (e.g. $5 a month, to say something), you get access to an online text editor to edit your content. When you post your content it's automatically part of an RSS feed, an archive of your posts, searchable content, etc.
1. It's not social. You're not meant to go around exploring content. This is a tool for people to post their stuff, not to join a network of content. That effectively means no "recommended posts" and so on, just the blog you're reading.
2. Automated feeds. RSS feeds, readers can subscribe to be notified by email (my personal preference), etc.
3. There are comments. Users _can_ interact with your content.
4. Absolutely no branding from me. You have your posts, your about page (if you want), and that's it. Maybe I give a discount on the fee if you allow me to put at the bottom "powered by xxx" or something.
5. Light af. Little to no JS, certainly no analytics tracking from me to track user behaviour (there would be analytics for security and so on). Simple CSS to make it readable and that's it. Plus content of course.

What do you guys think of that idea? Would you pay for it? If yes, how much would you think is OK?

I'm probably going to develop it anyway, cause I'd love to use it myself, but if you guys are interested then I can keep you up to date and you can provide feedback on iterations and so on.

0. That already exists, it's called WordPress.
1. That already exists, it's called WordPress.
2. That already exists, it's called WordPress.
3. That already exists, it's called WordPress.
4. That already exists, it's called WordPress.
5. That already exists, it's called WordPress (with a couple of selected functions.php tweaks).

I'm pretty sure WordPress has many more features lol

You can even change your theme!

I'm not sure you have access to the functions.php with WordPress.com. Also I'm pretty sure they give you no choice, you have to promote WP.

The email support I can only imagine is a plugin (i.e., you have to work for it).

If you pay a small fee, you can have someone to host a WordPress for you - including your own functions.php.

In my opinion there's a reason why people like to use platforms such as medium and it's exactly because they are more like "social networks".
Maybe you want to emphasize on shifting away from the "social selling index" and more on quality content. However, the type of persons that post this content already have minimal blogs on their own servers or someone else's (like Github pages or others).

So in sum, the people you are targeting already have their own platforms. You'll need to offer something extra, maybe linking the platforms that already exist together (Something with RSS).
That's one thing I've noticed over the forums years, most will prefer posting on their own blogs instead of posting on the forums if there's no incentive to post on the forums other than discussion. What you post on something you own links back to you which is not something that isn't always existent on platforms that don't fall within the super heavy social kinds like facebook/medium/dev.to/etc.. Maybe an ability to easily export the content you've created with the comments to it would make a change.

If you want we can continue brainstorming more opinions in this thread about what could possibly be done. I'm also open to ideas for changes on nixers and link with other communities.

So actually the use case I have is for myself.

I like how nice things look on Medium or dev.to. I don't like how much bandwidth those websites require for such basic things. And I don't like the analytics tracking.

I personally would like a website where I just pay some fee, write blogs and post them and I do not need to do anything else to have the features I want (light, comments, email/RSS, blog-like, no analytics).

> If you pay a small fee, you can have someone to host a WordPress for you - including your own functions.php.

Yeah but see, I have to work for it. I can't just have it.

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I'll try to think of what can make it unique. For me I just noticed there is this tiny niche of people that don't want to worry about anything but don't want to have bloated blogs.