I've built side projects for years. My most recent one (also Markdown related [1]) is my first open source one and I've found it to be the most rewarding experience by far. So far I have 54 stars on GitHub and have had people emailing me mainly to thank me for the service, but some to ask for feature requests. Although I haven't had many ask for features / fixes, I find the "pushy-ness" of my users very useful as it helps me know what to implement next. This is doubly true as the cost of implementing is economically and cognitively lower than it was before AI was around. I'm pretty happy to build the features my users want, and it's great to see that some proportion of people exposed to the tool use it on a weekly/daily basis [2].
[1] https://sdocs.dev, discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777633
I took a look at it and am considering copying some of the features I like to implement into Nonograph.
Funnily enough, I was sitting about 30 meters up in an old church bell tower late at night and wanted something that made the "Have Idea > Write Idea > Publish Idea" workflow super simple but also better than a pastebin and I've always hated how underscores in markdown result in italicized text, not underscored text. Yes every social media platform solves the workflow problems, but I don't want everything I write tied to a central identity; I want to be able to share single thoughts as links with people.
Nonograph doesn't have any tracking. Everything coming into the host is through two hops of reverse proxies or Tor before the request reaches me. That's also why its 300ms to load a plain html page until I find a better solution to hide the server location. The most tracking I'm doing is looking at `top` to make sure the resource usage is low. Avg. 3% CPU, 210mb MEM.