
Show HN: Able – an alternative to Medium - new_here
https://able.bio/rhett/the-new-able-editor--596ha6x
======
joelrunyon
Just roll your own blog already. If there's one thing these services reinforce
over and over again - it's that they'll change their terms over time.

Own your site. Own your data. Put it all on your own terms.

If you need help setting one up (unlikely for this crowd), you can have one
made for you for free here.

[https://StartABlog.com/free-blog](https://StartABlog.com/free-blog)

~~~
zschuessler
This is great advice for those who don't want discoverability. However, for
everyone else, Medium going to the dark side was a huge pain because there was
no alternative. They had a monopoly on the "write articles and get discovered"
market.

Maybe some here don't care about discoverability, but most writers do.

To Able: thank you so much for trying to fill this void. I would recommend
that you not focus solely on developer content and hit the casual crowd. We
already have options for the tech savvy that work well, and none for casuals.
Medium was the only _good_ option for that. Features like the table of
contents are nice for technical content, but an eyesore for casual content.

~~~
whsheet
> hit the casual crowd

Forget the casual crowd. First reason: It’s always good to start with one
demography and fulfilling their requirements. Second and TBH, the casual crowd
sucks steel when creating short-form blog content.

Go to the Linkedin blogs, all non-tech Medium blogs, TED talks, Facebook: 99%
is useless, already seen, self-help-type advice covered with click-baity
titles.

Every Reddit post has more substance and authenticity than the mentioned
above.

 _Edit: To the pro downvoters, instead of downvoting just reply and link to
one eg. single useful non-tech Linkedin blog._

~~~
close04
> all non-tech Medium blogs

> link to one eg. single useful non-tech Linkedin blog

I agree with the first part of your comment. Narrowing the focus to a specific
demo makes it far easier to provide exactly what your target audience needs,
thus a higher quality product/service.

But I have doubts about the second part. You're classifying everything in 2
categories, "tech" and "non-tech" (I assume non-IT here) so _this particular
thing_ or _absolutely everything else all in one bag_. How qualified are you
to judge the dozens of non-tech fields out there, say psychology, economics,
marine biology, or agriculture? Is this a bit of (reverse?) Gell-Mann amnesia
effect where you can accurately judge a tech blog on LinkedIn as being good
but when it comes to something outside of your field of expertise you assume
low quality?

~~~
LordDragonfang
If we expand "tech" to mean "technical" rather than "technology", those
statements become much more likely to be true. People who have skills in some
sort of technical background seem much more likely to have interesting
insights than people who do not. HN loves to post Slate Star Codex, for
example, and I doubt most here have the skills in psych to effectively
evaluate his writings as correct.

~~~
close04
> much more likely

Maybe but when you go from a very low likelihood to begin with increasing it
even 10 fold might not make a practical difference.

The point was any one of us here can accurately judge content on a handful of
topics in our areas of expertise and to a lesser extent in connecting fields.
But we can say next to nothing outside of that. Let alone generalize to "all"
platforms and "99%" of content. It's not "tech"/"non-tech" but "what I
know"/"what I don't know".

> interesting insights

How would one even realize this if they're an expert web developer reading a
blog on astronomy? Every single article on a platform could be either gold or
shiny manure and most of us wouldn't really tell the difference unless they
solidly overlap with those topics mentioned above.

~~~
whsheet
You are def right that I should not pack everything in a non-tech cluster and
call it crap. However I'd still keep my initial statement, it's a simplicatiom
but it's true.

Of course there are and must be great blogs in non-tech areas but they are not
that many. Writing high quality blogs for free seems not be common in other
fields. Often people rather publish the findings in a protected space, call it
academic paper and I can read just a lousy abstract. Actually most academic
non-tech fields fall in this category.

------
Kovah
> Firefox gets first-class support and is the primary browser we test in.

Wow. I would not have believed to ever read something like this for any
service, ever again.

~~~
eitland
When I do frontend work I always work in Firefox [0]. I think once we caught
something that didn’t work in other browsers.

That happens all the time it seems with those who work in a certain other
browser. Why? I can’t say for certain, I guess it is because that other
browser doesn’t care as muvh about web standards but there might also be some
part that has to do with most users of that other browser not caring too much
about the web ecosystem.

[0]: I always do that anyway hehe, it is my not-so-secret research tool ;-)

------
mxuribe
I'm always glad to see competition in any space - especially anything that can
keep the big boys (Medium!) in check. Kudos to you for giving this a shot!

Although, while i wish you plenty of luck, the only way you're going to get my
money is if/when you think about functions and features supporting things like
POSSE or even better yet ActivityPub. The last few years have taught me that
I'm not going to spend my money on organizations that don't align with my
values of wanting more decentralization. If organization X helps foster more
indie web concepts, then I'll happily pay. If you don't support
decentralization, then I'll pass, thank you very much.

By all means, please don't receive this as a slight to your service - i do
honestly wish you luck. Take this simply as a signal from a potential customer
clearly informing you of what services and features that i'm (gladly!) willing
to pay.

Again, best of luck with you venture!!

~~~
new_here
Thanks for the feedback! We're busy working on RSS imports right now and
should have something up in a day or two. We're open to ActivityPub too but
this might take a bit longer just because we're building Able in our spare
time.

Ultimately, we want to create a great place for developers and then charge
businesses to advertise their job vacancies to that community. Because we're
self-funded we don't have pressure to grow at all costs but we'll need the
support from the developer community if we want to turn this into a
sustainable business.

~~~
mxuribe
That's great to hear! And, acknowledged on the activitypub likely taking a bit
of time to roll out. That area is still new enough for many people. But again
good to hear you're heading in the right direction! Cheers!

------
Vinnl
RSS support is nice - even better would be if they were also exposed in the
metadata [1] so that my feed extension can autodetect it.

    
    
        <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="http://example.com/feed" />
    

[1] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Archive/RSS/Getting...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Archive/RSS/Getting_Started/Syndicating#Adding_the_.3Clink.3E)

~~~
new_here
Great tip, will definitely add that!

~~~
Vinnl
Thanks!

~~~
new_here
This has now been added to user profiles and posts.

------
whsheet
Able looks promising: Higher information density than Medium, syntax
highlighting in code blocks, no big-ass modal interrupting when I just want to
read a silly blog post.

Besides, Medium in its current state is one of the most annoying sites and I
don't get why it enjoys such a strong SERP ranking. I mean blog posts are a
commodity and Medium thinks they are Netflix showing the latest Disney
property.

If Google search devs read this: Demote all Medium results.

~~~
all2
High SERP ratings come from multiple things:

1\. If you use Google signed in, they know (I assume) you preference technical
material (which is the bucket Medium falls in)

2\. On-site links; one of the most powerful (and underutilized methods of SEO)
is interlinking pages on a site. I'm not sure why this is the case, but it can
be a determining factor in top-ranked sites (see Wikipedia as the canonical
example of onsite linking).

3\. Inbound links; lots of people link to Medium content. If Medium uses
Google's tracking tools, Google has a good idea of the inbound traffic and can
adjust based on the site's popularity.

None of this has to do with user experience. Unfortunately.

I'm sure there is more (like page load times, how information is organized in
the HTML, etc.) that factors in, but these are the ones that occurred to me.

~~~
jetrink
Page load time should include the time it takes to clear away the nag screen
before you can see the content. That is easily 2000ms for most people.

------
jakecodes
The oauth2 requirements for twitter signup are quite aggressive.

* See Tweets from your timeline (including protected Tweets) as well as your Lists and collections.

* See your Twitter profile information and account settings.

* See accounts you follow, mute, and block.

* Follow and unfollow accounts for you.

* Update your profile and account settings.

* Post and delete Tweets for you, and engage with Tweets posted by others (Like, un-Like, or reply to a Tweet, Retweet, etc.) for you.

* Create, manage, and delete Lists and collections for you.

* Mute, block, and report accounts for you.

* See your email address.

~~~
new_here
Apologies, we’ll tighten that up. We only want social auth to streamline
onboarding.

~~~
jakecodes
Cool. I assumed it was unintentional. Once you do that I'm in.

~~~
new_here
Give us 24 hours. Will reply once it’s sorted.

------
Porthos9K
What functionality does Able provide for technical bloggers who want to do
POSSE? Can users import draft articles from their site's RSS feed, for
example?

Also, have you given any thought to integrating with the Fediverse by
implementing ActivityPub?

~~~
new_here
We're definitely keen to do both of these things when our time/resources
permit. What would be the first step you'd like to see here?

~~~
Porthos9K
Doing RSS Import first might be easier than ActivityPub and help writers get
content onto the site faster.

~~~
new_here
Cool, we're busy working on RSS importing now. Should be up in a day or two.

------
georgeoliver
It's always seemed odd to me that there isn't a hosted service with a headless
web/mobile CMS, compiling to a static site, that saves to a few common
backends (s3, etc.), with reasonable pricing (i.e. not $10+/mo). Let the user
pay for their own storage.

~~~
1337shadow
Gitlab does that for free, with free storage. Just fork any of the existing
example projects: [https://gitlab.com/pages](https://gitlab.com/pages)

~~~
georgeoliver
Whenever I've looked at Gitlab/GH pages, Netlify, etcetera in the past I
haven't found a good web/mobile CMS to use with them. Most pro options are too
expensive for a personal blog. However ellinokon's suggestion for Siteleaf
looks promising.

~~~
1337shadow
Are you saying that you didn't find one example out of the 20 examples they
provide on the link i posted (octopress, nanoc, pelican, hyde, hexo, hugo,
jekyll, metalsmith, vuepress, plain-html ...) that supports mobile, nor has a
mobile compatible theme available ? The gitlab pages option is free even with
a custom domain and https.

~~~
georgeoliver
I don't mean a mobile compatible theme, but a CMS mobile app to edit and
create content. So something like Netlify CMS and Siteleaf.

------
wingtales
Fantastic to see Medium competition. I've been so frustrated with "let's make
it official"-esque messages. Best of luck - I will be using you!

~~~
new_here
Thanks so much for your support. We hope it becomes a useful place for the
community. Always keen to hear feedback.

------
alexmingoia
If you don’t feel comfortable with the reliability of “free” business models,
check out [https://etch.blog](https://etch.blog) which is only $11/year for an
awesome, no-nonsense blog (and newsletter). We’re committed to providing the
best blogging experience at the best price, forever. We’re also committed to
the open web with RSS support and Webmention comments in the pipeline.

------
Tinfoilhat666
Some pages have horizontal scrollbar on my mobile firefox, such as this
[https://able.bio/DavidLandup/password-encoding-with-
spring-s...](https://able.bio/DavidLandup/password-encoding-with-spring-
security--90gkzie)

Also, why .bio? Sounds like biotech web site.

~~~
stekern
I assume it's bio as in short for biography, which can be fitting in the
context of a blogging platform. This was at least my first thought upon seeing
the domain, and I didn't make any association with biology, biotech, etc.
until I saw your comment.

------
throwyourboat
Cool, just the other day I was looking for a place to quickly paste the
longish top comment from the "who wants to get fired" thread [1] in order to
be able to read it reasonably formatted. I've published the story here and
given the original author control:

[https://able.bio/throwthrowthrowyourboat/my-grand-ulcer-
name...](https://able.bio/throwthrowthrowyourboat/my-grand-ulcer-named-ralph--
52gs1cy)

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21141785](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21141785)

~~~
new_here
OMG, I feel an ulcer developing just from reading that story. Thanks for
posting!

Reminds me of that 2 million LOC monstrosity someone once commented on an ASK
HN about the worst codebase they’ve ever seen.

Btw, there are some duplicate paragraphs in the article that are probably
worth trimming out. Search for “Contract arrives, I sit down with COO and CFO
and explain that we have been duped.“

~~~
throwyourboat
mh sorry, that may have been my mistake… I edited it on my phone

------
Minenash
Since, you can sign in with GitHub, it would be cool if it could sync/backup
posts to a repo. Since in the end, the posts are mostly markdown, each post
could be a .md file in the repo, with the title, subtitles, img header, and
tags, in either <> or a code block. Or as plain text and a horizonal divider (
__*).

~~~
new_here
That’s an awesome idea! Would need to request write permissions though and
most users are wary of this. Thoughts?

~~~
Minenash
Can you have different permissions from different users? If so it could be a
setting to "backup to github", and then request that permission then.

Is there a place I can put suggestions/requests? Because I have some for the
editor.

------
PatrolX
The very best alternative to Medium is self-hosted Ghost.

[https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost](https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost)

And if a person can't figure self-hosting out then the paid version of Ghost
is the best option.

[https://ghost.org/](https://ghost.org/)

Ghost is an amazing platform and it's the only blogging solution that I know
of that gets a perfect Google lighthouse
[https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/](https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/)
score right out of the box.

If Ghost made switching from WordPress easy they would totally take over the
blogging space.

I don't know what's up at their HQ but if I were them I'd be making a
"switching from WordPress" tool my #1 priority.

------
sdan
Although this seems great, use Ghost. The editing interface is unreal and the
SEO/RSS/integrations are plentiful. You can customize it however you like, but
there's some nice templates they have for free as well. I use it on Docker and
port it around servers all the time (had some server problems here and there
and it's super easy to port it using docker to different servers).

The best part is you don't have to worry if Able.bio goes away one day. Self-
host will only go away on your account.

Actually running [https://sdan.xyz/blog](https://sdan.xyz/blog) on it. (I
personally love how the design and fonts come together... I created this
design and it's available on Github)

------
bhl
Is it me, or have there been an uptick in new writing platforms? Two that I
can think of are substack and reading.supply.

It'd be interesting to see an open source competitor to Medium; developments
in and usage of markdown editors is an added bonus!

------
jangliss
Great work - there needs to be a good place to write for free without the site
then trying to sell the writing on. I've signed up to your newsletter but it
took me a little scrabbling about to figure out how.

~~~
new_here
We'll charge businesses to advertise their vacancies, so we don't have to get
in the way of developers/users.

It should ask you what notifications you'd like to receive during the
onboarding process and you can just check the 'Digest' box. Did that not show
up for you?

~~~
jangliss
It didn't, but I ended up finding it in the settings. Cheers!

------
jhatemyjob
Providing one point of data for you.

I am bookmarking your site because I will be using the jobs board.

As far as the blogging part is concerned, I would rather use Medium because it
has a bigger network and, more importantly, I do not trust your platform.

I don't think "we don't take VC money" and "no ads" will help you build trust.
It's good that you don't do those things, but that's just avoiding bad stuff.
As far as building trust goes, I think you have to actively do good stuff too.
In my eyes the jobs board helps with that.

Just my 2¢. Best of luck.

------
nexuist
100 on Lighthouse is something to be very proud of. I love this service.

~~~
sdan
Did you get 100 on lighthouse? For some reason I'm getting 59 on performance
on this post itself and 93 on the post he indicated (although everything is
around 100 as well).

Regardless, it's a great feat.

------
jjjbokma
I decided to roll my own blog [0] instead of using medium. Moreover, I wrote
the static blog generator myself (2 versions, a Python and a Perl version
[1]). I have been blogging daily for over 190 days now, and it feels good.

[0] [http://plurrrr.com/](http://plurrrr.com/)

[1] [https://github.com/john-bokma/tumblelog](https://github.com/john-
bokma/tumblelog)

------
vsr_pg
This is awesome! Especially for data science, Medium has a stranglehold on
reliable articles. Excited to see an alternative, and one that actually seems
to work better.

------
jariz
Yes, and in five years they'll start showing blocking modals too, after
realising this isn't monetizable.

And the never ending circle continues... Just self-host.

------
gnicholas
I think folks might be more comfortable switching to this if they understood
the business model (or philanthropic finding source). This platform will only
have value if it scales (and therefore has substantial costs). How will those
costs be covered? What about paying you for your time you spend building and
maintaining it?

Looking forward to learning more about your plans, and having an alternative
to the existing ecosystem.

~~~
bdcravens
Here's the link you're looking for: [https://able.bio/about#business-
model](https://able.bio/about#business-model)

------
sandGorgon
three things:

1\. its hard to search for you guys. your name is hard to SEO on. for example
"medium kafka" gets you relevant search results. "able blog" doesnt even
feature you in the first page. Could you consider changing it ?

2\. your tld is nice for branding, but im not sure if you know that these kind
of tld have resolution issues in Asia. it would be nice if you were on a .com
(even ablebio.com).
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15663988](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15663988)
and
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20981212](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20981212)

3\. the .bio domain is dangerous.
[https://icannwiki.org/.bio](https://icannwiki.org/.bio) > _Thus, to respect
the European Union 's standards for 'bio' /organic food, this open TLD will
have regulations in place for registrants intending to use it as a space for
organic food products. The rest of the non-organic related TLD will not be
regulated. The French warning notes the wide range of international standards
on agricultural products and organic food, and consequently believes that the
TLD can not be implemented unless it is not at all used to denote material
related to organic agriculture. It warns of consumer harm or confusion if the
TLD were to be implemented_.

Since this is a blog service, you would have to strongly regulate this -
otherwise other blogs would go down if the EU screws you because of some
agricultural/organic food blog someone writes.

in fact you can read lots of similar posts here -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20981212](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20981212)
,
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15663988](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15663988)

~~~
new_here
Thanks for the feedback, we're still quite a small site so our authority still
needs to grow. Google has said that TLD's shouldn't affect ranking.

I didn't know there about the issues in Asia, thanks for mentioning this.

We've looked into the use of bio and there was a case where they considered it
to be appriopriate for biographical purposes.

Ultimately though, we do want to get a better tld. I just can't afford it on
my current salary :) - suggestions are welcome.

~~~
tzs
If your TLD will be used for email addresses, I'd recommend sticking to .com,
.org, or .net.

A lot of spammers are sending a lot of spam using addresses in the newer TLDs.
There is so little legitimate mail from them compared to the spam that it can
make sense to treat the whole TLD as a spam source and whitelist any
legitimate correspondents you have there.

As far as I know, the new TLDs are fine for websites. Maybe do something like
able.bio for your site, but also get something like able-bio.com [1], and use
that for mail from the site.

[1] I am just assuming that able.{com,net,org} are already taken.

------
somebodythere
The main reason I don't use Medium is due to its restrictiveness on layout. I
often include JavaScript snippets that are connected throughout the webpage to
showcase concepts, or like to include table of contents for navigation, which
you just can't do on Medium.

------
lnsp
I like it, it's clean, simple and puts content first.

------
0xcaff
I love the cause. Is there a way to donate?

~~~
new_here
Thank you! There isn't, but if you just use the site and spread the word about
what we're trying to do that is more than enough :)

------
krashidov
Any plans to support custom domains?

~~~
new_here
Yes.

------
0-_-0
How about math formula support?

~~~
new_here
Yes, we want to support this too and will be looking into it.

~~~
Minenash
Maybe blocks that can render LaTeX?

~~~
bhl
+1 I would recommend using KaTeX for this. Another thing would be to embed
CodeMirror within ProseMirror
([https://prosemirror.net/examples/codemirror/](https://prosemirror.net/examples/codemirror/))
instead of just using monospace font. The additional benefit of that is free
syntax-highlighting.

I've played with ProseMirror and math support before, so this is what it about
looks like. [1] [https://imgur.com/a/rV2AATD](https://imgur.com/a/rV2AATD)

------
thedudeabides5
Great. When medium started throwing up paywalls we stopped using it.

Anyone want to guess when these guys put up their first paywall? I'll go with
January 2021.

~~~
dfhfkslhhj
It's becoming impossible to "pardon the interruption" with Medium when it
happens multiple times a day. For me it's a reflexive response at this point,
I don't even remember what they're asking for, my hand just moves to close the
thing.

~~~
logifail
> For me it's a reflexive response at this point [...]

Q: Why would one not install NoScript and get rid of these "interruptions"
forever?

~~~
oefrha
Because images on Medium wouldn’t load without JS.

~~~
logifail
I've just loaded a random Medium link in FF with NoScript enabled and the
inline images look just fine.

Q: Am I missing something?

------
fractalf
The editor looks awesome! Great work :) ..any chanse on open sourcing the
editor?

~~~
new_here
Check out ProseMirror.

~~~
Minenash
Two small suggestions, there's a "placeholder" text for the new post title,
but not the content. You also can't hit the enter key to start writing, so at
first I couldn't figure out how to write.

The other one is to make the inside is your favicon white instead of
transparent. It looks good on light themes, but the A is almost invisible on
my dark theme.

------
cezarfloroiu
Congrats for shipping! :) How's this different from Dev.to ?

------
zokier
Why this feels Medium just all over again?

~~~
new_here
It’s not. We don’t have to grow at all costs for investors. You can read our
manifesto here: [https://able.bio/about](https://able.bio/about)

------
moreorless
Is there an RSS feed or am I just blind?

~~~
new_here
Just for individual users at the moment. You can find them on user profiles or
at the bottom of articles.

When we launch support for publications you'll be able to follow the
publication feed too.

Would you want a feed for all articles?

~~~
moreorless
Yes, that would be good.

