I selected username www and it told me I would find my blog at https://www.prose.sh. Yet, I went to that URL, and found some other random persons content. Please remove that other persons content so I can display mine.
Can confirm they started our as an intern, I had to fix the internal tools that broke.
The main issue was that at this point in time, we were relying on people’s Unix names to directly to setup the person’s dev box. Obviously, <unixname>.dev.facebook.com with the unixname of www was going to lead to issues. It just broke things internally and was fixed pretty quickly.
If by any chance that led to the push for 'real name' and thereby Facebook realizing it to be the cash cow; Then that person has single handedly broke more than just software.
Not to scare you, but I’m building the same thing in telnet rather than ssh. It won’t be slowed down by all that encryption and secured authentication.
A lot if you're posting from your Apple ][. Users should really be signing their posts themselves anyway, not relying on authentication and vouching from a third party. Session authentication is kind of silly for blog posting IMO. The problem is that message authentication still isn't common so people just use session authentication since it's easy and it's what we have.
I am loving this. Just created my first blog post.
1) Lists and Prose seem identical. Is there an actual difference?
2) Is there a way to actually just paste in pastes.sh? Like, without having to create a local file. I guess I can do a FIFO or something but I hate having to google bash jujutsu commands
1) Lists uses a plain text specification for creating lists. We could have built it using markdown but we wanted something extremely simple but readable as plain text. So there are subtle differences. Otherwise, the underlying tech is the same.
2) There is no way to just paste in pastes.sh. The idea behind it is you don't need to leave the terminal to generate a paste to share. There are alternative pastebins that do something similar but they require memorizing curl with authentication tokens and such.
First, congratulations, this seems really cool. :)
My question is, how are you going to deal with spam and, y'know, bad stuff? Related to that, how do you contact users without an email address? (I know it's possible, like you could send a custom banner, I'm curious about how you do it.)
Spam and bad stuff: we are seeing if it’ll ever get to the scale that it’ll be an issue. Our hunch is since you have to use terminal tools to publish that it’ll weed out a lot of nefarious activity.
Contacting users: this is a very interesting limitation that we want to see how far we can take it. Right now we have no way of contacting users and see that as a feature.
Having said that we have an official blog (https://hey.prose.sh) with an RSS feed to notify users of updates.
That’s great. Why not combine the three services into one? I’d like to sometimes post lists and pastebins on my blog? It’d be easier to login to one ssh and have a central website.
Thanks for engaging! Right now we are experimenting with different services and seeing what sticks. We have lofty ideas of combining everything into one service or at least a service that aggregates them. We will chat about this idea in #pico.sh on libera so feel free to join the convo!
Well even it's not bad and I like it, but it's not new at all
I'm already tired of seeing projects that copy old ideas to make them work over SSH.
But I tested it and it works, the cool thing is that I can edit my paste and the changes are visible as soon as I upload the file to the server.
https://modinfo.pastes.sh/test.js
The only pity is that the title changes to capital letters and does not respect the original file title.
It is nothing inoffensive, but respects for the creation.
I like it but I don't know if I will use it, because you can have the same thing on a real SSH server for free, such as view-source:https://hashbang.sh/.
Only on hashbang.sh you have to set up nginx yourself and watch to see if your ssl certificate expires.
So, I don't know if it makes sense to create such sites, if you have hashbang.sh?
But, don't get me wrong, I checked it out and I like the service, you just don't have to worry about anything, just create content.
Which is for lazy users than for "hackers".
I've checked this out with genuine interest because I've been looking for pure text file, Markdown-based blogging platform for a while.
I built Madblog some months ago (https://git.platypush.tech/blacklight/madblog) to fill that gap. Madblog has a lot of the features I wanted (including RSS feeds, git versioning for the static files, a good looking index and LaTeX support), all while being purely staticly served with zero JavaScript. But now I feel the need for some more meaningful user interactions - adding comments on articles, preferably through Fediverse/OpenID login instead of using Disqus or other bloated stuff. But I don't feel like going down that rabbit hole implementation.
Is there any source code for prose.sh by the way? Can it be self-hosted?
Markdown is severely limiting for prose and blogging though and leads to unsemantic element abuse or having to do a lot of manual HTML markup (which with no controls over styles means you’re limited further). There aren’t good conventions for a lot of ‘normal’ concepts like admonitions, figures, definition lists, citing blockquotes, footnotes, table of contents, etc.
Another red flag to me is supporting GitHub-flavored Markdown over CommonMark which actually tries to follow good standards practice for everyone. Instead projects like Pandoc have to work hard on alternative parsers because GitHub does whatever it wants with little regard for CommonMark's RFC, and in some cases, even basic semantic HMTL.
There is no mention of “microblog” on the page. If you’re implying “a blog platform for hackers” means ‘hackers’ don’t need proper tools for providing a semantic blogging, then ‘hackers’ need to get better at communication because these sorts of features matter for accessibility and experience.
I think the 'hacker' aesthetic and mentality enforces limitations to keep things standard and quickly pareseable. Think man pages for people. Yet, the full power of html is there if you want it and don't mind doing the extra legwork. But such things are discouraged in favor of regularity and ease of production.
This is precisely what I expected when I first visited OP/TFA.
Then at that point, you might as well use Gemini or not render the document to HTML. I would expect to see more use of ASCII art and box model drawing from the Unicode blocks. The thing is this “hacker aesthetic” via Markdown from the GitHub RENDERME.md—because you can rarely read the plaintext anymore—is now percolating the use of the unsemantic elements to the general internet. I’m seeing misuse of blockquotes in the wild. I’m seeing manual table of content management in Markdown. The list continues. Because the context is HTML, one should probably try to follow the spec because this matters to screen readers and alternate browsers like the TUI as well as just general parsability for upstream and downstream tools.
this is a silly thing to over analyze. it's OK it you have a different definition /understanding. But I guess infinite pedantry is also part of the hacker aesthetic.
It doesn't need to be spelled out that it's a microblogging platform, it just needs to mention that one of the features is that you write your posts in markdown, and I guess the average person would reason that it's a blogging platform with limited functionally as a feature, aka microblog.
> Markdown is severely limiting for prose and blogging though and leads to unsemantic element abuse or having to do a lot of manual HTML markup (which with no controls over styles means you’re limited further). There aren’t good conventions for a lot of ‘normal’ concepts like admonitions, figures, definition lists, citing blockquotes, footnotes, table of contents, etc.
Really excellent point. Instead of markdown, what would you suggest?
You say that, but look what they are doing with admonitions right now (https://github.com/orgs/github-community/discussions/16925). Despite the RFC (https://talk.commonmark.org/t/generic-directives-plugins-syn...) which is used in a lot of implementations, GitHub decided to do their own thing with an unsemantic, buggy implementation by overloading blockquotes (meanwhile still not supporting admonition styling in reStructuredText or AsciiDoc despite their specs having the feature for years).
Yep you’re right! My example was done with a CNAME on a subdomain (replaced the domain for privacy), and most providers provide flattening so I didn’t even think about it! I’ll update the copy to mention that.
Even for a subdomain, having CNAME and TXT records on the same name isn't supposed to be okay; normally you'd work around it by reading the TXT record off an other unlikely-to-be-used subdomain of the name you're putting a CNAME on.
This also has the advantage that it doesn't boat the TXT response for the domain. Putting it at some thing like _prose.sub.domain allows just getting the relevant record.
more precisely a CNAME must be the only record type for a given label as it would be otherwise ambiguous to revolvers. that doesn't hold true for DNSSEC secured zones where the records for signatures are to be allowed, but also arent creating any ambiguity on how to resolve queries. the apex must have NS and SOA records for a minimum to work so that rules out any CNAME in addition to that. an apex without any other record but SOA and NS would work fine though. so saying it needs to be an A record implies the wrong thing.
It's strange they even put an example but it would never work. You could use cloudflare DNS to approximate a CNAME? Or prose has an A record that you could use? Not sure how this slipped by.
Fun fact: if you set a date: in the future (not sure how much but 2042-01-01 worked), neither the HTML index nor the SSH interface will list your post -- though it's definitely here and accessible using the filename.
That’s partially by design. The ssh app should show the post, that’s a bug. However posts in the future do not show up in the indexes so you can upload the post without it being publicly listed.
I just got something setup pretty simple with Hugo, Netlify, GoogleDrive and a simple action. It's still a little much to be super accessible especially since you need to fuss over markdown editor settings for pasting images and I only know of Typora that does this well, but it's pretty manageable.
That is my vision -- Something nice and simple to use like markdown in a Gdrive folder, flexibility and theme niceness of Hugo and full automation without ever needing to get into a terminal or repo unless you're coding.
Last time I tried to do this with org mode but since decided, while I learned a lot of takeaways and had a good experience, org mode isn't something I want to use every day, or even emacs for that matter.
This is a cool idea (I love seeing clever uses of SSH, and this is definitely one of them), but I wonder who the intended audience is: it’s not complete novices or the non-technical, and it’s presumably not people like me (who already use an SSG + rsync over SSH to accomplish the same thing on their own).
Sure, but there's something about just logging in via SSH to a server and sending your post in one command. GH pages is easy to set up, but it's not 'hey it's all done for me' easy.
No matter what you do, GH pages requires more complexity and setup. And that's not a bad thing in this case, it gives you flexibility, but I can see a lot of people preferring prose.sh simply because they don't care about making a website, they just want a blog.
Very neat, from a technical perspective. I hope you don't have business aspirations, since from a business point of view, key creation may throw off 99% of potential user volume, so this limits your audience and growth.
Out of curiosity, was this developed as an exercise in procrastination while preparing for a pharmacology exam?
I’m not the creator, so maybe this response was on the wrong comment?
(I don’t think key creation throws off adoption by developers, who are clearly the target audience. I just didn’t understand which subset of developers was being targeted.)
This looks great, a while ago I was thinking it would be great to have a blogging platform that would be easy to use, no tracking, no ads, and effectively anonymous. The anonymous part obviously depends on your secops but this ticks all the boxes.
As others have asked, I wonder about long term survival of the project so what are your monetization options? Since its no ads no tracking which is one of the best features it would have to be freemium model or even donation, and since one of the potential use cases is anonymous blogging it should have the option to pay with crypto (something like Monero).
You can always self-host but it's more burdensome, even if you know how to do it (most people using this service will know how to self-host a blog or would be able to figure it out), and if you want an anonymous blog and you self host you would have to figure out how to anonymously pay for your server.
I do have a Hugo blog hosted on Netlify for free and configured to my own domain but as a command line lover prose.sh looks great (mind you the workflow to edit and publish using a Hugo blog on Netlify or anywhere else is pretty much also command line centric).
It would be great to be able to also push your own themes on prose.sh to customize the look and feel of your blog though.
Slightly off topic, but the page says "we don't want your email" and I vaguely remember a site that was looking up public keys on GitHub and getting the email address from the GitHub account. Not sure if I got that right, or what the site name was, but it's definitely possible to get public keys from GitHub users like so: https://github.com/binwiederhier.keys
If you mine these, along with crawling GitHub for email addresses, you can map public keys to email addresses.
Best practice and what everyone should be doing is have different ssh key for every different server, that is, create a new ssh key for prose.sh with a custom file name.
Of course there will be many people reusing the same key for everything and I think it's obvious that doing that increases the risk exposure
Maybe this doesn't make any sense, but when I write a blog post, I don't necessarily want lots of people to read it. My blog is primarily for me, the public nature of it just forces me to think about what I'm writing a bit more, and try to articulate my thoughts better.
It seems that the main reason you'd post to a "blog platform" rather than just your own website or some GitHub pages thing is to get more people to read it, so I've never really been attracted to any of these things.
Don't have much to say about this other than that it's nice that it's just plain old HTML+CSS.
However, I get white flashes of content every three or four times I navigate this website despite the CSS being downloaded just fine. Anyone have an idea why my browser won't cache the CSS?
For something that seems to be lightweight and simple, I’d have liked to see it being file based or like a static site generator. The official documentation for self-hosting this refers to Postgres (and Docker, to make it easier). That seems heavy on resource requirements.
I also didn’t find any pricing information for the hosted version. I don’t think supporting custom domains and images (the latter said to be coming soon) can be effortless for the platform maintainers. Since that author is here responding to comments, I’d like to know more about plans for pricing.
> For something that seems to be lightweight and simple, I’d have liked to see it being file based or like a static site generator.
We're contemplating the idea of adding "Pages" to prose.sh.
> The official documentation for self-hosting this refers to Postgres (and Docker, to make it easier). That seems heavy on resource requirements.
Yeah I reached for postgres because that's what I'm comfortable with. I probably should have just went with sqlite but here we are.
> I also didn’t find any pricing information for the hosted version.
As of right now, it costs us $8.25/mo to host prose.sh. You can find transparency details here: https://prose.sh/transparency
We are definitely looking into a paid subscription service, especially if we add image hosting to the list. The goal would be to cover costs and ensure the service is up and running for years. We also plan to send "profits" to open source projects. The numbers will all be documented on the transparency page I linked above when it is official.
Q: I use GH pages for my simple site. Why would I use prose over GH pages with a simple action to turn markdown + template —> html and put it on a GH-pages branch for publish?
GitHub Pages (or many alternative static hosts) will be more rich experience as you can control the rendering pipeline and the presentation (CSS). This looks to take some of the concern away and focus on the content instead of presentation and build pipelines (which limits expression). Both options, the code isn't on your own server which could pose a 'freedom' risk depending on what you're saying as well as limited ability to modify the server (like adding Brotli compression (both only seem to provide GZip only) and adding security headers; see Prose.sh has an F score on Mozilla Observatory https://observatory.mozilla.org/analyze/prose.sh which will carry over to your blog). GitHub will mean you're on a proprietary, closed-source, Microsoft-owned platform top to bottom vs. Prose which is open source on SourceHut.
I created a key with `ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "your_email@example.com"` and then connected with `ssh new@prose.sh` how did it know to use the new key I just created?
What's the deal with copycats and similarities? This looks like a copy of bearblog.dev and one cannot tell who has copied whom. Is there anything on the Internet that is trustworthy anymore?
This looks dope. I live at the command line and ssh is secure and good. Question on pricing. Because if I invest time in this I’d like to know it will be around. Sure I’ll have the data and can push to anything else but it’s still nice to know that this will be paid and reasonably around for years to come.
We have heard this a couple of times and read you loud and clear. We would price the blog to pay for its costs. Join #pico.sh on libera or sub to https://hey.prose.sh to get updates
They have commented elsewhere that they are experimenting to see what "sticks", so definitely assume this may disappear soon. OTOH, code is open and easy to self host.
if you're worried about this going away, why not use something like hugo. It's markdown, and there are dozens of places that will host for free. I host on Netlify (free). If they go away or start charging, I have many more options, and as it's hugo/markdown, there's no lock-in.
You can do that on the command line (ultimately it's just a text editor and git).
Back in the 90s we considered the ability to "View Source" an indispensable tool not just for learning but also for keeping the spirit of the early web alive.
If your design is so precious to you, you can use flash or DRM or something similar so nobody can copy your design quite as easily, but this is a disappointing attitude to see.
Yes, how dare one site inspire another to make something similar. Not sure how that automatically makes it untrustworthy... would rather have more players in the minimal blog space than only one or two
A lot of people (especially software devs) seem to have zero ethical quandaries over completely ripping off other people's designs, mechanics or ideas without even so much as giving attribution to the original source that directly inspired them.
I feel like these are the same people that are absolutely losing their shit over something like github copilot though. Cognitive dissonance is fun.
Fortunately, prose is doing the right thing by giving credit where credit is due. Sadly this is typically the exception rather than the rule.
One of our sibling services (https://lists.sh) has support for Gemini. Because we are targeting people that would otherwise use something like Hugo, we wanted to offer rich markdown support.
Converting GitHub flavored markdown to Gemini is work and we aren’t sure if the juice is worth the squeeze. If enough people feel otherwise I’d be happy to add it to the roadmap.
I click on "discover some interesting posts" and none of them were interesting; same issue I have with most everything on reddit, all the posts are "I POSTED!"
The only reason I bring this up is because it is a "Platform for Hackers" but none of the posts really reflect anything like that. Just seems like another new site where people post the "I'm on this site now, and setup a default page" and then it never really goes beyond that.
There was some pub/bar themed Gemini site awhile back, and every new post was some variation of being in a virtual pub; again, nothing interesting and I moved on.
That's the majority of everyone's first blog posts ever though. It's nothing wrong with this platform, that's just what people's first blog posts look like.
Most people write 1 blog post, saying they have a blog, and then never write any more. That's fine.
Any new blogging platform is going to first attract users who are new to blogging: everyone who is not new to blogging already has their blog set up, so unless they're particularly unhappy with it there is no reason for them to use a new blogging platform.
It was mostly an "Old man yells at cloud" post. I'm always excited about small communities online, since in theory they aren't pandering to the lowest common denominator, so there is a chance they could have more specific and interesting content, like back in the day when magazines could target a specific group of people and have in depth articles on tech, instead of today where they have to write for the lowest common denominator to reach the most people for ads.
So there is a new content platform on hacker news almost weekly if not more. I doubt most people are going to sort through a ton of "my first posts" posts on each new platform to look for something interesting.
I have a .sh domain (https://ntfy.sh). Maybe I should rebrand and call it "push notifications for hackers" ;-) -- Maybe I'd get more traffic that way, hmm.
No but in all seriousness, there are a lot of "for hackers" sites out there it seems
