Folks looking for a Medium alternative, please checkout https://diff.blog. It's an aggregator of developer and engineering blogs I built an year back. It has been growing steadily since. The reason why I built this was to solve the problem of disoveralibilty of self hosted blogs. It's hard for bloggers with self hosted blogs to reach a big audience. So a lot of them end up moving to a platform like Medium which gives them the audience. But they in turn give up their identity and content. diff.blog aims to fix that by solving the discoverabilty problem of self hosted blogs. Though dif.blog is not anywhere near in terms of the audience size of Medium at the moment. But hopefully it will come close one day.
Thanks for sharing, that's a nice project with a good user experience. That reminds me of the concept of blog "planet" that was somewhat popular in the Linux world a decade ago. Basically an aggregate of blog feeds loosely related to a given topic, you can follow it and have the feeling that you're following a community, without the drama that you have on social media. It's a great concept IMHO, and stupidly simple technically speaking.
Thanks! Yeah. Blog planets are awesome. They defintely played a big role in me coming up with diff.blog. https://rubyland.news/ in particular, which I came across while I was trying to learn Rails. Though diff.blog is built using Django and not Ruby on Rails :)
Is there plan for non-English blog posts? Dev community is mostly in English, but many blog posts around the world are in native language. Some blogs write in English and non-English and it's very hard for me to find content in my language.
This also prevents me from registering my blog on diff.blog as my blog contains English and non-English content.
Thank you!. At the moment diff.blog only parses English blogs from the feed. So If your blog has mixed content you can still submit the blog.
I have plan for supporting other langauges as well in future. Creating subdomains like de.diff.blog, ml.diff.blog, etc which only contains the blog posts in the respective languages should probably be good enough. The main difficulty is finding the initial set of blogs that are popular in languages which I don't understand and creating an initial user base. Maybe not be probably as hard as I make it sound.
Hey, I blog in German for many years now and have my blog in a different open source planet. If you want some input about that language, shoot me a mail (it's in my HN profile).
Looking at your site I'm noticing there seems to be no RSS feed? I think that would make a good addition. You could have one personalized feed and one global one, like Reddit does it.
I'd also like to note that I was surprised about the github login. My blog has no connection to Github at all, most blogs won't, so I'm not seeing how that could work for others when people suggest their blogs?
> Hey, I blog in German for many years now and have my blog in a different open source planet. If you want some input about that language, shoot me a mail (it's in my HN profile).
Thanks! Will reach out to you once I start on this.
> Looking at your site I'm noticing there seems to be no RSS feed? I think that would make a good addition. You could have one personalized feed and one global one, like Reddit does it.
That sounds like a cool feature to have. I will add it to my todo list.
> I'd also like to note that I was surprised about the github login. My blog has no connection to Github at all, most blogs won't, so I'm not seeing how that could work for others when people suggest their blogs?
Yeah. I added GitHub login mainly to get the list of followers and organizations you follow on GitHub. Your account follows them automatically when you sign up on diff.blog. It also give me some idea on what kind of languages you use which I use a bit for showing user recommendations.
As others have said, this is great! A simple but very useful idea and a great execution. Thank you for not making it an amalgamation of heavy javascript frameworks.
Thank you. I wanted to mainly use Python for the backend, since that's the language I am most comfortable in. And Django was good enough for 90% of the use case. For the frontend stuff like Newsfeed, Comments, Upvotes etc which involved user interaction I used Javascript/handlebars/jQuery.
React or any frontend frameworks would have probably been an overkill (honestly, even jQuery was) in the case of diff.blog, since Django did most of the Job. If the frontend codebase becomes larger, I would probably rewrite them to make use of native Web Components. I still have not yet experimented with web components though.
Thank you for going “old school”. We need more stuff like this. All these frontend monstrosities are getting out of hand lately. Lots of overhead for very little value.
