Show HN: Jottings; Anti-social microblog for your thoughts

Posted by vishalvshekkar 3 days ago

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 feed trying to decide what matters.

What Jottings is - A microblogging platform that builds fully static microblog sites - A free subdomain (you.jottings.me) or connect your own domain on PRO plans - Markdown, tags, RSS feed, links with preview, and image uploads - An optional AI writing helper when you are stuck or lazy to fix grammar - Optimized for SEO and AI search friendly - Analytics for your sites

What it is not - Not a social network - Not an engagement funnel - Not trying to keep you on the site - Not a replacement for long-form blogging, though you can use it that way

How it works Each Jot publish triggers a static site rebuild. The site is stored in Cloudflare R2 and served directly at the edge. Custom domains go through Cloudflare SSL for SaaS. I built it to be boring, reliable (barring Cloudflare's latest issues), and cheap to run.

Pricing Free tier for a subdomain, text posts, and a lot more. USD5 per month for custom domains, images, full Markdown, and the writing helper. I priced it to be an easy yes.

Limitations - No comments (on purpose) - No native apps yet (iOS is coming) - The writing helper is helpful but not magic - I am a solo founder, so features move at human speed

I use Jottings regularly to document what I build. It has been the lowest-friction way I have found to publish anything publicly.

Demo of Jottings site for product updates: https://jottings.jottings.me/ Demo of my personal Jottings site: https://jottings.vishalvshekkar.com (with custom subdomain)

I would love feedback from this community. What would make this better or more useful for you?

Check it out here: https://jottings.me (2 min set up) Feel free to write to me at vishal@vishalvshekkar.com

— Vishal

Comments

Comment by blargwill 3 days ago

Feels very similar to Digital Gardens - something I've been doing to hit all the same points! (Shameless plug to mine as an example https://launchbowl.com)

This product does provide a bit more of a structured approach without any of the self-hosting/coding difficulty which I think would have a wider market appeal.

Comment by vishalvshekkar 3 days ago

Ha! Very cool! I did not know about the community/idea of Digital Gardens! From my quick glance, it seems close to a lot of my thoughts. I like what you have done with Launchbowl! The part about linking multiple posts together is something I swear by for personal writing & note-taking on Anytype. Graph is a very efficient way to process a lot of connected information!

Thank you! Yes, Jottings was built for anyone, even with no tech experience, to set up and have a site where they may post their thoughts to the world.

Comment by bastulos 3 days ago

Given you are already offering the product for free it would be cool to have a self hosted option.

Typically I'm not the one to suggest this on hobby projects being made into a product bc you gotta make money somehow to support this and I respect that to some appreciable degree.

Comment by vishalvshekkar 3 days ago

I hear you. I actually am quite open to making Jottings self-host-able. I might want to slice the multi-tenant layer out before I do that, only because that is complicated and not needed for someone to host and manage multiple sites, and is the part that primarily makes this a product. I'll give it a think.

I also hear you about the making money part, and I largely agree.

Comment by jimmydoe 3 days ago

If I were to self host, a Mastodon/Pleroma/Misskey with federation turned off seems better choice?

Comment by iamnothere 3 days ago

Honk may be a better choice for something like this if you want to use a Fedi base: https://humungus.tedunangst.com/r/honk

It’s already fairly antisocial by design, but if you disable fetching replies it can be a lightweight standalone microblog.

Demo: https://honk.tedunangst.com/

Comment by uniqueuid 3 days ago

It's always nice to see products that cater to the best users can be instead of the worst.

Personally, AI for writing is in the same corner as the other pathologies you've listed (popularity counts etc), so it's not for me. But some folks will see that differently.

Comment by vishalvshekkar 3 days ago

Thank you!

I hear you, and I share a big part of that opinion on AI writing. From the feedback I got from some folks before, it seemed to be something many were interested in, which is why I designed it to be very aid-like, and less to generate content fully from scratch and post automatically: essentially spamming.

I am not very sold on the AI tool and am very open to removing it with more such opinions!

Comment by nwhnwh 2 days ago

Don't make links color the same on dark mode.

Other than that, I really like it. I hope this becomes a trend, and stays this way.

Comment by bhu1st 1 day ago

I bought jotnus.com for similar idea but it never saw a light of the day.

Comment by linhns 3 days ago

Not sure if you accounted for tablets but it just looks far too packed. Concept is great though.

Comment by vishalvshekkar 2 days ago

Oh, is it? I did brief tests on my iPad and didn't find any glaring issues.

Could you help me with what device and screen size you find it cluttered? Which of these do you find cluttered on your tablet? - Landing page: https://jottings.me - Dashboard: https://dashboard.jottings.me - A Jottings Site: Example: https://jottingsjottings.me

Comment by gradientsrneat 3 days ago

Is there a way to permalink to a specific microblog post?

Comment by vishalvshekkar 3 days ago

Currently, only the perma-part of permalink is possible per post (or jot). Something like this: https://jottings.vishalvshekkar.com/jots/19620509 always links to that specific jot. Where `19620509` is the permanently assigned ID to that specific jot.

It is not human-readable and not extracted from the post (jot) itself because the post may be edited and over time, may go out of sync.

But, I am open to allowing this setting to be adjusted per site, where the site owner may choose to go with a human-readable ID that is extracted from the jot content.

Is your need more the stable permanent link to a jot, or a human readable permanent one, @gradientsrneat?

Comment by pentaphobe 3 days ago

Big fan of this trend, well done!

Personally this kind of thing is just always gonna be self hosted or local only, but I see the appeal for folks who don't have that option

Brief off-topic greybeard cloud yell: I hate that we've all adopted the colloquial use of "algorithm".

Although it's interesting to imagine whether software is even possible with "no algorithm" :)

Comment by vishalvshekkar 3 days ago

Thank you very much! Yeah, I agree. In fact, even Jottings started as something I built for my own use as a stand-alone site that I used to host. Made it into a production for others to use only after someone of my friends asked me for a similar site. I used to feed my post (or Jots) data to my build system through a json file that I updated to add new jots.

I hope that the appeal is real for a good bunch of folks.

Haha! You gave me a chuckle! And a totally fair yell! :) Valid CS philosophical musings aside, may be I should be a bit more specific to something like "personalized feed ranking".