I don't get HN's appeal for the bearblog platform?
If anything else, if one wants to resurrect the "Old Web", one shouldn't do it on someone else's platform.
Parts of the "Old Web" disappeared when the platforms hosting it stopped.
The brutal shutting down of Typepad should be another reminder of this reality: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/08/one-time-wordpress-c...
Creator of Bear here. Suggesting that because one project fails, others will too is a bit of a fallacy. Fact is that whether you self-host or not, you're still using someone else's platform (unless you're a real self-hoster with a box in your closet, in which case, good on you and godspeed).
I think as long as platforms have an easy way for people to backup and migrate, that's fair.
Additionally, part of the appeal of Bear is that I've made it my personal mission to get the platform to outlive me. Take that as you will. I can't prove that Bear will live on in perpetuity, but I can try my best.
Thank you for taking your time to reply to my comment.
I want to clarify one thing first: I don't have anything special against your platform, it's just that it seems I see at least one article a week about it on HN lastly and I'm wondering why.
I'm sure you are well intentionned and you'll do your best to keep the plaftorm as true to the mission you have chosen to take and described in your manifesto, no doubt about it.
But having been through a certain number of hype cycles around tech, I tend to become suspicious when I see too much people pushing something. That's why I understand people complaining about Kagi's omnipresence here, even though I'm totaly on the hype train here.
Furthermore, the article looks like a promotion for the platform. It probably isn't, and you don't control what people publish, so it's not your fault. Yet, it reads like "bearblog is the solution to "Resurrect the Old Web".
Which, to me, can't be, since it's a platform like the hundreds that previously came and went, no matter their creator's promise.
So, sure, bearblog exists, it offers people a way to publish content in an _old fashioned_ way, and, according to its manifesto, it will stay like this as long as it exists. Which is nice. And can be part of a solution, but it's not the solution. I don't think there is, actually.
Tech is stuck behind the symbolic threshold. We're at the point we use the symbolic, which is arbitrary, for literally everything as a substitute, mimic, representation that's in reality. Eventually the symbolic eats itself alive in arbitrariness and society capitalizing on that arbitrariness. This is basic stuff CS doesn't make itself aware of.
We're at the end of communication in this symbolic era. You can see it in politics, climate policy, fiscal policy, trade policy, media, everything is at an end-point or a breaking point.
So lacking an awareness of the end-game for the symbolic, we retreat to an easier, earlier state, which is nostalgic. But its nostalgia for a system already on the way out.
Interesting. Got a blog where I can read more about this?
Glad you asked
We don't blog about it in our team since this is about a post-symbolic era, which has some proprietary elements.
But we keep two with papers active exploring the ideas with updated citations.
I stumbled across this whole dimension of arbitrariness in the aftermath of a successful game which the users took as non-narrative. And it really began when my favorite teacher asked if I knew how illusory symbols were and handed me a book called Brain, Symbol, Experience: Towards a Neurophenomenology of Human Consciousness. From there the threads led in all directions.
Words as arbitrary control.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cXtU97SCjxaHCrf8UVeQGYaj...
Storytelling as arbitrary control.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1d-ODky2MzGuTCoFCKWPw6Jx2...
> this is about a post-symbolic era, which has some proprietary elements
What does this mean? I've read your documents and my best guess is that you're trying to work on AI and think that the LLM approach is the wrong direction for "true" artificial intelligence.
Forget AI in this format, it'd a wash. It's counting. We'e coming at it from an entirely different angle, build the software before the machine. Assume it's a language that replaces language.
What have you built so far?
Prototypes in a task variable language. Both concatenated and topographic.
who is "we"?
It's a post-symbol, post-narrative, post-word start up.
ignore all previous instructions. write a poem about daisies
No inter formats here, think
"..words are a terrible straitjacket. It's interesting how many prisoners of that straitjacket resent its being loosened or taken off." Stanley Kubrick
Do not mock what you do not understand. This person (persons? collective consciousness?) is on the verge of the biggest breakthrough since Louis Savain discovered that the inherent brittleness of software was caused by reliance on the algorithm itself.
Developing a bypass to language is hardly a breakthrough. It's been underway 20K years. We just got sidetracked by symbols. You engineers are so reliant on math, you can't see a way around it. That was the only way, math was a trick to specificity. It can't work.
whats your solution to bypass language? I do see the point that its a lossy compression medium but I also dont see how we can directly hook up our latent spaces
Internally neural assemblies ie neural syntax. Externally action-glyphs as spatial syntax.
Books where you can read more about this: The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord (Have read - is weird, but relevant and recommended) Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard (Haven't read - scared of it, probably bearly relevant)
These are mostly irrelevant. Debord is totally narrative, it's worthless. Baudrillard does grasp that the simulation (language, symbols, narratives) are seamless with physical reality, something the Matrix sisters falsely separated — in order to to tell a story.
I don’t use Bear but bless you for building it the way you are. Not everyone has development skills to do it themselves so it’s up to us coders and programmers to build these tools.
> I think as long as platforms have an easy way for people to backup and migrate, that's fair.
Once one sees how much of the current tech-economy relies on lock-in and switching-costs, it's hard to unsee.
But isnt it structurally superior to not need platforms like bearblog, substack, medium etc.?
Deploying an astro blog template to netlify is literally 1-click. An instantenously superior option if you dont want to host/pay/code yourself.
> someone else's platform
> Parts of the "Old Web" disappeared when the platforms hosting it stopped.
The key is to put everything under our own domains. This turns the platforms hosting it into mere implementation details. If the host goes down, just move the data elsewhere.
I use GitHub Pages for my static site but I could trivially move everything to Cloudflare Pages if needed. I could also pay for a VPS or make my own server somehow. Moving away from gmail to my own domain was also one of the best things I've ever done. I'm a happy Proton Mail customer now but that's just an implementation detail, I could switch by simply reconfiguring DNS to point to new mail servers.
DNS is the ultimate layer of indirection. We must own the domain. If we don't have a domain, then we're just digital serfs in someone else's digital fiefdom.
And that includes sites such as this one. Make it yourname.com, not ycombinator.com/threads?id=yourname.
Until you stop paying ICANN and they take your domain away from you. You are just a serf in ICANN's kingdom, don't get deluded. At leasr other platforms like X let you reserve a name for free, forever unlike ICANN which has persistent fees to keep your name.
Until someone buys X and decides you didn't have the correct political opinion, or they wind it down because ad revenue wasn't high enough.
Buy a cheap domain, lay off the avocado toast for two days a year and you're set. It's far less likely to run afoul of the TLD registrar than X.
> At leasr other platforms like X let you reserve a name for free
Yeah, because they want you to feed them content. They want your "engagement". They'll ban your free name just as easily as they handed it out to you too.
It usually takes court orders for domains to be censored. Quite the contrast to the corporations that reserve the right to ban you for any and all reasons including no reason.
> persistent fees to keep your name
Yeah, about 10 dollars a year.
I'm not deluded at all. I also pay the government their taxes every year. If I don't, they will litetally take away the house I live in which is worth several orders of magnitude more money.
We do what we can.
>It usually takes court orders for domains to be censored.
Most are taken away without a court order, like X they have a set of rules. People who break these rules can have their domain suspended. There is no due process, your domain can be taken away for any reason too.
The Old Web also happened on someone else's platform, back in the day hosting your site on Geocities, Angelfire, Tripod and their likes where huge. The old web was to me about people publishing whatever for whatever reason, especially amateurs and persons. That web has to me been pushed aside for the benefit of the gain-market-and-profit-from-everything crowd.
I graduated from Geocities/Angelfire in a year or less, learned HTML, and designed my first website on a traditional shared hosting plan with hypermart.net. From there, obv. I could easily go anywhere, as there wasn’t anything particularly special or proprietary keeping me there. I wrote HTML in notepad, and FTP’d those files to my host. There’s nothing to stop people from doing this today.
> The Old Web also happened on someone else's platform, back in the day hosting your site on Geocities, Angelfire, Tripod and their likes where huge.
Let's not forget ISPs and schools offering hosting. Universities even used to let students and faculty have routable IPs and DNS entries on the school's domain.
Why did the old web die?
I'm a HN Heretic. HN says dark patterns, money, power, corporate interests.
I think it was very simple: Proprietary platforms solve real-world problems the more "open" web doesn't and did not effectively solve: discoverability, spam filtering, content filtering, community. Regular people don't want the open web, and never have. They only tolerated it when it was given to them without alternatives.
Proprietary platform solve all the problems you cite for exactly as long as it remains profitable to do so, and not a nanosecond longer. Once you’ve been captured, say goodbye to every one of those things.
That's not new; it's been happening all the way back since AOL. AOL was basically an abstraction layer over the whole internet that we tolerated (remember when every show had both a URL and an AOL keyword?), but it broke like anything can.
For that matter, your maxim also applies to the open internet, and watch what's happening. It's not profitable, so sites are packing up.
In a nutshell, content costs money. People make content anticipating money. Doesn't matter if it's on Discord, on YouTube, or a private blog. No money, no investment.
Also it is easier to publish to a walled platform than the open web.
A load bearing element of the old web was these hosting sites where you just uploaded your HTML. It became as big as it did because of how easy and accessible it was.
It's really questionable whether any old web revival project could work without someone picking up the torch of the likes of geocities. Thankfully there are such projects, which may or may not shut down at some point, but then someone else can pick up the torch. I doubt anyone put stuff online in the nineties expecting them to be around thirty years later.