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.