Alternatives
Products that do what Jottings; Anti-social microblog for your thoughts does
I built Jottings because I was tired of my own thoughts getting trapped inside algorithmic feeds where I had to perform. There was a huge mental load before posting something on X or Instagram. Every time I wanted to share something small or unfinished, I opened Twitter and lost 20 minutes to the timeline. Writing a blog post felt too heavy for those smaller, quick thoughts. I just wanted a place to write something down quickly and hit publish. Jottings is that place. It gives you a clean microblog on a domain you own. Posts show up in simple chronological order. No likes. No followers. No…
- 1IB
With social media and now AI, its important to keep the indie web alive. There are many people who write frequently. Blogosphere tries to highlight them by fetching the recent posts from personal blogs across many categories. There are two versions: Minimal (HN-inspired, fast, static): https://text.blogosphere.app/ Non-minimal: https://blogosphere.app/ If you don't find your blog (or your favorite ones), please add them. I will review and approve it.
Apr 2026 · text.blogosphere.app
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The quieter social microblogging platform.
Aug 2026 · textlog.cc
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- 5DT
Inspired by the "Ask HN: Share your personal site" last week, I finally came around and built a thing I wanted for a long time: a simple website to randomly explore all the awesome personal blogs without having to subscribe to them all. So this is what I built over the weekend. You click a button and indieblog.page will redirect you to a random page from a personal page... I'm happy to answer any questions you might have.
2022 · indieblog.page
- 6JF
On iOS, I've flip-flopped back and forth between a bunch of note-taking and journaling apps. None would stick. My initial attempts at building such an app faded just the same, until I realized I wanted the same level of low-friction posting and browsing offered by social media apps, but for my quick notes. Not social, just easy posting, search, and a familiar feed. This is how Journelly came to be. I like to describe it as: tweeting, but for your eyes only (fully offline and in plain text). If you’re an Org markup user, you’ll be delighted to know it’s powered by unicorns under the hood. If…
2025 · xenodium.com
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Greetings, creator here! I've been working on a new blogging platform specifically for lists on and off for a few months now and I'm excited to officially announce its launch. After seeing https://charm.sh a few months ago, I've been enamored by the idea of SSH apps. I decided that a blogging platform focused on developers could be the perfect use case for an SSH app. Also, I love writing lists. I think restricting writing to a set of lists can really help improve clarity in thought. The goal of this blogging platform is to make it simple to use the tools you love to write and…
2022 · lists.sh
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Hi, I'm Will. I'm 24, autistic, and have OCD tendencies. I'm learning to code and this is my first public project. I’d really appreciate your feedback and encouragement! This project lets me solve some of my OCD problems online. There are a couple of parts of the forums that I visit – Space Battles, Sufficient Velocity, and Questionable Questing – that I want to remove. Specifically, I hate seeing indicators of how much is left in a forum thread, because I keep thinking about how much content is left. It stops me from immersing myself in the story. It stressed me out. Before I learned to…
2024 · github.com
- 15DC
Built this to microblog everything I am learning as a dev. It's an MVP, lots to improve on! Would love some feedback. (: Also am looking for a job (preferably remote since I'm in SG), 1.5 years in as a Jr Dev at a local startup, self-taught by building stuff. I'll be on Twitter if you're interested! @raymondmoay
2023 · dweets.com
- 16JP
Aaron Swartz and I built Jottit in 2007 as a really simple way for anyone to make a page on the web in seconds. You just typed something, clicked a button, and you got a page on a secret URL. It went offline years ago. I've now rebuilt it from scratch. It's basically the same idea, but even simpler. Go to jottit.org, write markdown, and you have a published page. Claim it, pick an address, and you now have a feed of your pages at yourname.jottit.org. There's no signup to start writing. And no JS on public pages. You can export your writing when you want. Jottit is free and open source. It's…
Mar 2026 · jottit.org
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Hey there, First time posting on Hacker News in about 2 years! The reason I’m posting is that I thought I’d write about the product I’ve been building, in hopes it resonates with people. Why build yet another social app? Because I deleted almost all social media around 3/4 years ago as it was just net negative on my life. There was very little that was truly interesting, I didn’t care about looking good to other people and because of the ‘media’ and ads, the apps were all designed to make me spend too much time for what I was getting. I hated it and what it meant for people’s behaviour,…
2022 · oncircles.com
- 181A
Hi HN! This is a personal project I finally got round to completing and shipping. It’s a simple feed of articles written by real people with interesting things to say. I wanted to explore some new technologies I haven't had a chance to try before, mostly rust and LLMs. As I browse HN each day I find myself most drawn to the content on personal blogs: people who have interesting things to say, from their own point-of-view, on a whole range of topics. Rather than being interested in particular topics, I’m more interested in reading from interesting people. This isn't a particularly new idea,…
2024 · 100kb.danhill.is
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Hey HN! For a while I’ve been trying (unsuccessfully) to find a community for tech bloggers to get together and share what they’re working on, so here’s my attempt at making my own. It’s a completely free website and designed to be super straightforward to use. Functionality wise it’s pretty minimalist right now, with just the ability to register accounts, post drafts, and comment on other user’s posts. Support for more features like tagging post topics, user profiles and more are coming soon! Thanks for checking it out, and I’d love to hear any thoughts from the community. P.S. if you don’t…
2024 · review.caleb.software
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2022 · blarb.co
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A year and a half after I published https://HackYourNews.com, I've rewritten it to be neater and added support for more news sources. HackYourNews.com v1 had a great response on HN [1] and consistently sees ~2k weekly unique visitors. There were many long-standing requests that I wanted to fulfill (thanks for your patience!): a proper dark mode, correct rendering on mobile devices, and more cogent summaries. This rewrite is the result. gpt-4o-mini reduces the cost of summarization to an absurd degree, so it's now sustainable to keep this free service going! Someday, I hope to use…
2025
- 22FC
I've been working on creating threaded blog posts using RSS feeds. Something similar to Twitter but kind of worse and better in its own way. I had an idea that if users are allowed to embed the threads to their posts, it acts like a simple comment section. Try it out, no accounts required.
2024 · blog.bhread.com
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PG has posted about improving social networks using something like an "intellectual CAPTCHA" many times [1][2][3][4] - "Make users pass a test on basic concepts like the distinction between necessary and sufficient conditions before they can tweet." I felt the same way. So I built one using a mix of simple math, logic, and Twitter/X Community Noted posts. Try sample questions here - https://mentwire.com/sample - without signing up. - Invites are temporarily open to HN users. - Onboarding test + one daily question before accessing feed, post or reply. - Posts authors are…
Apr 2026 · mentwire.com
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