
Taaalk [Update: site now back up] - FailMore
https://taaalk.co/#vn
======
ALittleLight
I picked a conversation at random

[https://taaalk.co/t/bitcoin-maxima-other-crypto-
things](https://taaalk.co/t/bitcoin-maxima-other-crypto-things)

This started off with a question about a background image, and the answer had
a lot of detail opening up many threads of possible conversations. This seems
like something that happens pretty regularly, but also something that the
format of linear text isn't well suited for. This is a problem for both essays
and conversations.

There's a moment with a dozen possible interesting branches and the author or
authors choose one direction to pursue. The other directions may be addressed
later or may be forgotten and not picked up again.

I'm trying to imagine some branching structure, and how it might look in a UI
that would "open" multiple threads and let readers and writers move through
the text in their own direction.

Does that sound meaningful or possible to anyone else?

~~~
djsavvy
Sounds like Reddit or HN comment sections. Both form trees of comments, some
of which end up becoming long chains.

~~~
ALittleLight
The problem with comment chains is that they aren't focused on a specific
point. Like essays or conversations they just cover many points in the order
the authors want them to.

There is also not a way to pursue a single idea down a comment chain. The idea
is merged in with everything else the comment is about and not really followed
consistently.

Suppose I write an interesting essay about five central ideas. What I'm
looking for a way to separate those ideas and allow the user to follow any one
of them to some conclusion without having to read the explanations for all
five.

Or, alternatively, if an idea gets lost or we simply don't want to discuss it,
we could flag this idea as something that needs further work by other
community members, who could come along and improve it.

------
wffurr
A better link that explains what this actually is: [https://taaalk.co/t/what-
i-m-building-at-taaalk-monologue](https://taaalk.co/t/what-i-m-building-at-
taaalk-monologue)

------
AndrewKemendo
Looks cool. Suggestion: Require people to request discussions from others to
sign up/comment/participate. You could gain big traction by getting big names
to do conversations and likely monetize by having sponsored conversations.

Major thing to avoid would be what happened to Quora where all the comments
were gamed by people trying to resume pad.

"Thank you for your question, the history of privacy goes back millennia to
Cleopatra's Royal guards... In summary, duckduckgo is a search engine focused
on privacy"

~~~
joepour
I love this idea.

Allow people to generate a share link or add an email address and Taaalk can
email and email inviting them to join the discussion.

------
JadeNB
FailMore in another thread:

> Taaalk ([https://taaalk.co/](https://taaalk.co/)) is less focused around
> debate, and more around exploring topics:

([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23742773](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23742773)).
From the site:

> The home of public conversations

> What's this Taaalk website about?

> It's a place where people have conversations

> And other people get to read them

------
sagark1992
Nice concept. I really liked your About in footer where you have thoughtfully
explained your vision of the product.

I also made a similar side project during quarantine:
[https://messagink.com/](https://messagink.com/)

I thought there should be a place to archive, discover create interesting
conversations or create fictional conversations (text stories) since most app
around this space don't let you and are too expensive.

~~~
FailMore
Hey, I came across yours. It's got a lot of features. How is traction going?

~~~
sagark1992
Thanks. I like the idea that you converse and archive conversations there
itself. Its great for real life conversations and maybe meaningful
conversations.

About the traction, getting users has been hard. I made some mistakes in the
beginning, I targeted the wrong audience. I got wrong feedback from family,
friends, co-workers etc. Then I started cold messaging readers and writers on
other writing platforms.

From the feedback I gathered 60% of the users asked for an app. They would
like to read on mobile. The website is mobile friendly but still they want an
app.

For writers mostly the feedback was that they don't want to create stories on
website which is not popular. There are plenty of other places where they
would write where they can get more visibility.

Its kind of chicken and egg problem. Still I cold messaged a lot of users
through social media and got some users and stories.

This is my first side project so I am learning and having fun. :)

~~~
FailMore
Want to have a Taaalk about running a side project? I have a few other side
project people interested in a Taaalk like that.

~~~
sagark1992
Sure. I would love to.

------
Alex3917
Out of curiosity, did you rebuild this from the ground up since the original
version? I remember it looking very different before. I'm assuming that 5
years ago you were just custom formatting each conversation to make it look
like a magazine article, and since then you got into web application
development and automated that process.

~~~
FailMore
Yep, there are some links to it on some of the earlier Taaalks. The first
version was a completely static site, which we had to manually update after
every message. I built this after learning to code at the end of last year

------
greatNespresso
Quite nice, would be cool to be able to search. But really cool concept

------
FailMore
THE SITE IS BACK UP! (I can't edit the title.)

Credit to the extremely kind Antoine Grondin @ Github for helping sort it out!
You can find him here:
[https://twitter.com/antoinegrondin?lang=en](https://twitter.com/antoinegrondin?lang=en)
to say thank you

Also thank you to everyone who reached out to try to help me with my server
issues :)

P.S. If a mod sees this and could edit the title that would be great.

------
satvikpendem
Ah, the ol' HN hug of death.

For future reference (and I haven't been able to access the site yet, so this
may or may not be relevant to Taaalk), if the site has a landing page, make it
with static files, and put it behind a CDN or just use a free service like
Netlify. Put the actual app behind a subdomain which you can then host however
you want.

This way, people who visit can still check out what the service does and check
it out later when not as many people are present on the server. This is a
concept known as graceful degradation, trying to make a service as accessible
as possible during most if not all conceivable situations.

~~~
FailMore
Hey, I tried to scale up my server mid hn ride and now I'm just getting a 404.
I'm not experienced with doing this, and I can log into the server and
everything seems to be working/up to date. So I don't understand why it's not
working. I'm using a Hetzner, and I'm bummed :(

~~~
SteveNuts
Make sure you remounted /var/www after your server rebooted.

~~~
FailMore
Hey, thanks for writing to me. I'm using Hetzner Cloud. They have a 'Rescale'
option which I used. To activate it I had to turn off my server. I did that.
Then rescaled and it went on again.

When I log into my server or run 'git push dokku master' everything seems the
same/is up to date. But getting a 404 for the entire app. Server logs seem to
be ok (found with dokku logs taaalk -t). So I'm just very confused and very
sad.

The server still has the same IP address.

It is also saying:

server.request_console taaalk taaalk Joshua Summers 8 minutes ago

server.request_console taaalk taaalk Joshua Summers 18 minutes ago

server.change_type taaalk taaalk Joshua Summers 37 minutes ago

server.stop taaalk taaalk Joshua Summers 39 minutes ago

server.request_console taaalk taaalk Joshua Summers 2 months ago

This server.request_console is new...

~~~
gtirloni
I have some hours before bed that I could use to take a look at this. Shoot me
an email with SSH credentials if you want some free help.

------
FailMore
Is the site very slow for everyone? Normally it's very fast for me but
suddenly it's slow.

~~~
FailMore
I tried to scale up my servers and I think I crashed everything... :( My
provider made it seem easier than it was. If anyone knows about scaling up
servers, please lmk.

~~~
NicoJuicy
How is it going? Which hosting provider?

~~~
FailMore
Hey, thanks for writing to me. I'm using Hetzner Cloud.

They have a 'Rescale' option which I used. To activate it I had to turn off my
server. I did that. Then rescaled and it went on again.

When I log into my server or run 'git push dokku master' everything seems the
same/is up to date. But getting a 404 for the entire app. Server logs seem to
be ok (found with dokku logs taaalk -t). So I'm just very confused and very
sad.

The server still has the same IP address.

It is also saying:

server.request_console taaalk taaalk Joshua Summers 8 minutes ago

server.request_console taaalk taaalk Joshua Summers 18 minutes ago

server.change_type taaalk taaalk Joshua Summers 37 minutes ago

server.stop taaalk taaalk Joshua Summers 39 minutes ago

server.request_console taaalk taaalk Joshua Summers 2 months ago

This server.request_console is new...

------
jtchang
I would post your nginx.conf

~~~
FailMore
Hey, thanks for writing to me. I'm using Hetzner Cloud. They have a 'Rescale'
option which I used. To activate it I had to turn off my server. I did that.
Then rescaled and it went on again.

When I log into my server or run 'git push dokku master' everything seems the
same/is up to date. But getting a 404 for the entire app. Server logs seem to
be ok (found with dokku logs taaalk -t). So I'm just very confused and very
sad.

The server still has the same IP address.

It is also saying:

server.request_console taaalk taaalk Joshua Summers 8 minutes ago

server.request_console taaalk taaalk Joshua Summers 18 minutes ago

server.change_type taaalk taaalk Joshua Summers 37 minutes ago

server.stop taaalk taaalk Joshua Summers 39 minutes ago

server.request_console taaalk taaalk Joshua Summers 2 months ago

This server.request_console is new...

~~~
KittyMagician
Hey FailMore. I've dropped you an email to provide some tips that may help.

~~~
FailMore
Thank you, I think I just got it. Useful for the future/my education!

~~~
KittyMagician
No Problem. Good luck!

