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Show HN: Git Hooting (git.ht)
124 points by fullmeta on May 7, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 35 comments
00's called, they want their RSS feeds back.

I was looking at my growing Github gist collection when a sudden urge to blog and make a name for myself "by not programming" struck. Part way into implementing my oh so special static website generator it occurred to me that, quite frankly, Github gists is a pretty decent publishing platform. I mean, it gives you reasonably extended markdown with previews, heck I could even write in org-mode, has comments, follower - followee relationship, extended search with filters, check out locally and push your edits. Did someone say "edit button"?

Thus the idea behind https://git.ht was born: collect gists into RSS feeds and force everyone, kicking and screaming, into the good old days when Google Reader was king. Well, it's a bit more than that now. But basically, you create a gist or grab an old one, name its main file `hoot.md` or `hoot.org` if org-mode is your poison, make it public and voila. These "hoots" make it into your RSS feed and will get permalinks with social graph metatags, so you get nice previews when you share them on Twitter and such.

To take it for a spin: - pick a subdomain e.g. foo.git.ht, - navigate you browser there, - login with Github.

I still consider it alpha, but it should work. Report any issues as you would normally on Github https://github.com/fullmeta-dev/githoot-public.

Thank you




1. There is no demo site with any reasonable content. hq.git.ht is blank, and has an invalid RSS feed. The videos show vlad.git.ht, which does seem to have some test post on /latest, but…

2. The (strangely written IMO) website copy claims there are comments, but I can’t see them on https://vlad.git.ht/2bbf002723aeec77713a8692db2198d3 . Do I need to click through onto GitHub somehow?

3. How do I publish multiple posts? How can I get an index of posts (in a web browser, not in a RSS reader)? I can see multiple posts in the RSS feed https://vlad.git.ht/feed/rss , but those are not discoverable by humans. The single post page has no link (<link> nor <a>) to the RSS feed.

4. The RSS feeds seem to contain raw HTML from the Gist embedding service, including an advertisement for GitHub and some SVG embedded in EVERY post.

4. Going to https://vlad.git.ht/ gets you a very confusing “Are you vlad? | Then you know what to do | Login →” page. Why is this page targeted at vlad but not vlad’s readers? What should vlad’s readers do when they remove the commit hash from the URL and get to the main page?

5. Why would I pay $4/month for this if I can do it for free with any static site generator and GitHub Pages, and it would have much better quality than this?


> Why would I pay $4/month

This was my biggest question. And changed my mind from “kind of neat hack” to “wtf, is the point to just trick people into doing things an expensive way.”

I can’t help but be happy that we didn’t have the 4 Hour Workweek way back when or wget’s author would be trying to charge $7.22/month or $62/year for the amazing capability to scrape web sites. Or every gnu util author would be trying to get $4/month (ie, we’d never have gnu utils).


I love the idea itself, but as a paid service... it feels like it's on the worst intersection of "people who know how to deal with GitHub" and "people who can't be bothered to run pelican/hugo/whatever and do it + page layout for free". Maybe there are some though... so good luck.


Ya… my web knowledge asymptotically approaches zero with each passing day, but I run my site on Hugo + netlify for $0

For comments/ forums I use giscuss. Also $0.


Hugo + netlify also here. It's been working so well that when I had a random idea for a vanity website, it took me longer to buy the domain than set up the pipeline.

As a devops engineer, I find netlify amazing for how little effort anything takes and how well things work within seconds. In my opinion they're a good example of what systems can do when talented engineering keeps users in mind throughout the entire process (and not just to deliver feature X or function Y).


Yes, and it seems targeted at people in that intersection who already have a large number of pre-existing gists that are publication quality.

If you're writing new gists for this thing, you're effectively using a traditional blogging tool with a weird submission interface.

I have no doubt this tool is probably very useful for Vlad, I just wonder how many Vlads there are.


Author here. Since the "try for free" came up in a few comments and this really ought to be made more prominent but I haven't had the time.

You can try it for free by simply going though with the first step: login with Github and give app necessary permissions. Everything will just work after that. You'll have a few days until the subdomain gets reclaimed into the available pool.

If you pay for subscription even once, even if subsequently you decide to cancel it, subdomain remains yours, links won't break, RSS feed will continue to be served but new hoots won't be fetched until you subscribe again.

Thank you for trying it and git hooting


I like git, I like RSS, I like only having to do markdown. I don't like paying for something that I'll have to keep paying for (mysubdomain.git.ht) if i want to keep my presence (like on a domain I already own but migrated to something else after i get sick of markdown in a couple of years).

Another thing:

> This application will be able to read and write your public and *secret* gists.


Author here. This needs to be prominent. Paying for subscription at least once prevents subdomain from ever being put back in the available pool. If you subscribe but then cancel your subscription on Stripe portal, it'll run until the end of current subscription period. After that, the system will stop fetching new hoots, but it'll continue to serve the last state of RSS feed and the subdomain will remain in your possession. I'm not evil and not about to break the links for everyone :) Yeah, this really needs to be put somewhere prominent.

App has no need of seeing your secret gists, but sadly Github oauth app scopes aren't granular enough. I'll only be too happy to not take on any more responsibility than I have to.


What if you go out of business? Or I really want to move my blog to another platform? The captive ecosystem aspect is a little "evil".


To read public gists, do you even need oauth? Why not just pull all the public gists using your own GitHub api key? You don’t need the author to login at all with a GitHub scope.


The ongoing blurring of lines between what is “Git”, a piece of open software, and what is “Github”, a closed commercial Microsoft-run platform that is in many ways antithetical to the nature of Git, is slightly alarming.


Microsoft is super happy about it tho


Make me laugh. Being looked down historically at for being a C#/VS/SQL Server person, as in "sorry we can't hire you too much microsoft", but now most will be a VS Code/Github/Open AI person.


I suspect there might be a few tweaks on the way from remarkably put-together MVP to major traction, but I love the vibe.

When you slim down the grammar of the input just enough but not too much (which the Markdown community and GitHub have already done), syndication and presentation and maybe even monetization as concerns gain tons of degrees of freedom.

As someone who routinely tries to squeeze long-form content into something social-media sized, who prefers hacker authoring tools, and is mostly at home in a revision-controlled text workflow? I’d probably have a blog if there was something lower-effort than Jekyll but with more cachet than Substack. And if this exists (which it might) it hasn’t been marketed to me.

RSS is okay enough as a syndication format, but it’s been a long time since it was front-and-center for readers. There is a bunch of interesting stuff going on around Mastodon and Bluesky and stuff, maybe there’s a clever (ab)use of some modern distribution protocol.


Maybe what you're looking for blogging is Ghost.

https://ghost.org/


This is neat, but since GitHub pages generate an rss feed too, isn’t it easier to just blog there for free?


You might get more traction if you:

1. have a free tier, completely free if you hoot once a month or something like that, otherwise your subdomain deletes itself.

2. change the pricing from $3 per month or whatever, to like $19.95 per year. I’m not sure if other people feel this way, but in 2023 I’m feeling pretty hostile to subscriptions that want to charge me a few dollars per month (and hike their prices randomly after I’ve bought-in) and prefer to outright purchase things

3. make it better than a static site generator by adding extra features ie optionally let people login with GitHub or Google or whatever and comment on posts

4. connect to own custom domain, pretty straightforward why people might want this, especially if you can get it to automatically renew let’s encrypt https and stuff like that


I agree that it would probably work better as freemium, although then the balance act becomes more challenging (since free plans might eat a lot of resources). As good as the copy might be, it's not clear how valuable such a service would actually be to me. Even just a fee trial could persuade me to give it a go, but at the moment the only thing it has done is making me curious about free alternatives.


> since free plans might eat a lot of resources

Will they though? It seems like all this runs through some free level GitHub actions.


It might be more like 29.99, tbh. "Pay yearly and get two months off".


It’s just that social media is usually free so I’m not sure I’d pay like 30 bucks for this


Yeah, we should have never went the free route with social media, but that’s a whole different conversation…


Thanks for the idea of gists-as-a-blog. I think it is cool and reduces the friction. It also means you are less likely to get start-again-itis or perfectionism!

You gave me an idea I might build in a hour (or you can)

In vanilla JS write code that fetches and reasonable formats gists. Then sitename.com/githubuser generates a SPA blog client side based on that user. Can be hosted on netlify with no maintenance forever.

An example of something like this is my HN Badges which has been hosted for almost 2 years with zero thought from me! E.g. https://hnbadges.netlify.app/?user=quickthrower2


I think I made a prototype of this 11 years ago https://github.com/khebbie/GistBlog


That's a neat idea and execution.

That said, I always found Gists a weird fit for blogging.

- no way to recover them if you accidentally deleted one

- subpar Git experience compared to plain git. (Yes, gists are git repos so you can clone them, but still there's no web ui for them and you don't have write access to those repos)

- an unnecessary extra layer with it's own quirks and limitations. Why not use plain git/GitHub instead?

- no way to use organize hierarchically

- GitHub deciding to change something (e.g. they are now auto-expire after 1 year) and your blog is broken

- (probably more?)

The only things I can come up with for them is that (a) it's GitHub, (b) they're free and zero-maintenance and (c) they come with a UI.

I see the appeal of using them as a platform for a blog, and the idea is neat, but if you really do care about your blog I can't imagine relying on them for it. It feels like using the wrong tool for the job.


I just want to say, whoever made the site did a really good job.


I don't understand how this relates to git.


I love the idea. I went a similar route with GitHub pages. But I won’t fault you for trying to monetize this. 3.99/month is super reasonable. Granted, I too, run mine for basically just the cost of the domain it’s still a really neat idea and value add: comments and rss for basically free? Nice.


Hmm, https://hq.git.ht returns an error.


Author here. Let me address some of the questions that came up. I'm thankful and glad that most comments were well meaning and thoughtful. I'll opt to interpret charitably the ones that were snarky, bitter, hostile and answer what constructive essence I could extract from them.

Firstly, some context. I consider git.ht alpha, which I candidly stated above. Naturally some features and niceties are missing. I opted to get the meat of it out to seek feedback and there's only so many hours a parent of 3 can devote to hacking while running a Clojure consultancy with deadlines lurking, contracts needing attention, payroll, etc. Please keep that lack of time in mind, when asking "why isn't there ..." and "I would've expected ...". Good chance I would've expected the same thing you would and the thing you miss is a TODO somewhere in the code :) Great place to report these: https://github.com/fullmeta-dev/githoot-public/issues

Secondly, my intention is not to get as many eyeballs as I can to my platform and website by re-creating feeds, following, timelines, comments, editing, etc badly. Haven't we enough of these already? Once you claim your git.ht subdomain and subscribe, there should be little reason for you to go back there. Instead I want to leverage what good Github platform gives us already. Everyone here uses it every day anyway. I haven't the time of day to learn your new social whatever, so I wouldn't put you through the pain I'd never choose to endure. Good example is the "feed" or "timeline". Sure, I can add one to your foo.git.ht, but why though? GitHub Gist search works really well. Here's the query to get your hoot feed: "user:foo filename:hoot". It just works. In fact, if you claim a subdomain and then go to your foo.git.ht "dashboard", the last item is "Search your feed". All it does is redirect you to that search with the exact query string I mentioned earlier.

To sum up. Some features are coming and some niceties are missing, I explicitly solicit feedback and discussion in the Github issues mentioned above. Github platform is good enough and if it has something already, I'd rather not roll out my own and add to the noise.

With that, now that the kids are finally asleep, let's see about those questions.

1. Where are comments?

   Github Gists offer great comment section. I say we use it.
2. Some central, easily identifiable or demo account would be nice. I can see vlad.git.ht in the video and the website mentions hq.git.ht

   Would this really be useful? git.ht is meant to be minimal and trivial to use. Your RSS feed is available under /feed/rss and you need to know how to map a gist to where its hosted by your git.ht. /latest is a convenient way to quickly grab and share the hoot you just authored and want to share. We could ofcourse allow query parameters to /latest. Given that it is your subdomain and therefore only limited to your hoots, a better idea would be to use a monotonically increasing enumeration scheme as well as gist's hash, your hoots will then be under /1 /2 /3 ... Very easy to keep in your head if you want to share your old hoot on a whim without searching or checking.

   Perhaps a HOWTO hoot or a video tutorial might be useful even if just me using it for 5 minutes.

   Re mentioned accounts. I shouldn't be using my own vlad.git.ht for testing. Spring cleaning incoming. I kind of question the usefulness of posting announcements on hq.git.ht now so it remains empty.
3. Wait, how do I see all of my hoots? Where's the timeline.

   RSS feed is the timeline, but also the above mentioned Github Gists search works very well. Search with the necessary query pre-populated is linked from your "dashboard". git.ht is not another social network, it is an overlay that lets you go back to the roots of the Web.
4. It would be nice to have my foo.git.ht contain something meaningful for visitors other than myself.

   Maybe. What would that be? Let's discuss https://github.com/fullmeta-dev/githoot-public/issues One thing that I just noticed is that the <HEAD> in foo.git.ht isn't serving link to RSS feed e.g. for browsers that are cognisant of RSS. Just created an issue for that - code got lost at some point.
5. Why would I pay this much for so little?

   If you ask yourself that, you almost certainly shouldn't and you probably haven't, am I right?
6. Wait, what happens if I stop paying for my subscription? Will all of my links break?

   No. If paid even for just one month, the subdomain is considered claimed and will remain yours forever. If you cancel subscription, it'll run till the end of the current billing period. After that RSS feed will remain unchanged, new hoots will not be fetched. That's about it.
7. I'd rather pay less for a whole year.

   Sure, I don't really mind and it isn't difficult to arrange at all. While git.ht is taking off, I'd rather keep the financial arrangement trivial, where only one billing cycle worth is at risk. I'd like to run it for a couple of months before complicating financial matters. Might offer an annual promotion to existing subscribers at this point, too. I seriously doubt it'll be a decisive factor in the tally of subscribers.
8. Can I use a custom domain?

   I hope to give you one better but no promises. Whole thing was conceived and executed with eventual self-hosting in mind. So, you're looking at SQLite replicated to S3; regular AWS ALB to front; Tailscale network (any overlay network will do, I guess) that ties on-prem GNU Guix servers to AWS VPC. Not self-hosted yet, cause it really changes one's threat model and I have another important announcement and feature coming soon. Let's not go there quite so soon, ok, but I hear ya.
9. My hoot at foo.git.ht/gist-id-here is just gist content. What's up with that?

   What would you like to see there? Its sole purpose in life is sharing that accommodates social networks we all use allowing for nice previews. While this part of the code is commented out atm, originally it even auto redirected to the original gist after 2 or 3 seconds. Another reason for this indirection is to (at some point) give you some insight into how many people navigate to your posts e.g. when you share on Twitter. Github won't give you that statistics.
-----------

Coda

I am wiped y'all. If you've tried git.ht I thank you. If you want to but worry about the fee, just login with Github and use it for a couple of days without paying then decide - system will let you. Do please report any problems. Ditto if you feel strongly about a feature you miss.

Another bank holiday here in the UK tomorrow. I hate holidays. Must. Survive. The. Kids.

Thanks


Maybe I'm just dirty minded, but "hooting" immediately made me think of "Hooters", the American restaurant of controversial repute. May wish to think about branding mismatch for American audiences mate.

Speaking of which, I can't place the accent of the speaker. Sometimes the R's are rhotic ("load balancer"), most of the time not. Very confusing.


Sounds like (well-hidden) continental European ESL to me (e.g. German/Czech/Romanian) - learn from American TV & BBC world service or studying in the UK or whatever, and why would you learn a particular rhoticity? Especially if unimportant or not prominent in first language.


Russian, it appears. Well hidden indeed! I was thinking the likes of Danish.


In this context of (micro)blogging, my mind jumped to Hootsuite.




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