Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025)

Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025) by creakingstairs on Sunday May 25, 2025 @08:37PM (#44092740)

An open-source, self-hostable app for sending out newsletter to your friends and families. I'm mostly making it for myself because I want to share what I've been up to and family photos, without uploading it to Facebook or whatnot.

At the moment, the flow goes like this:

1. During the week, write posts for things that have happened.

2. Posts can be assigned to groups. (family, friends etc).

3. At the end of the week (or month), the app automatically creates a newsletter for each group by pulling posts assigned to each group. Add some final touches yourself and send it off!

4. Every newsletter will come with a link to download all images.

I'm trying to design it to be as old people friendly as possible which meant making the experience as simple as it can get. This made me settle on email newsletters. Emails are ubiquitous, have been around and will be around for a while. It's easy to sign up and things are just pushed to you instead of having to go to another app.

Another thing I want is multilingual support as my family is Korean my in-laws are not.

I'm hoping to get an MVP working this week and get some testing done with my own parents and in-laws.

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Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025) by matthewwolfe on Sunday May 25, 2025 @11:15PM (#44093643)

If already open sourced, would love a link!

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Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025) by creakingstairs on Sunday May 25, 2025 @11:32PM (#44093719)

Not yet sorry. I want to tidy up and test it out before making it public.

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Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025) by binarysneaker on Sunday May 25, 2025 @11:24PM (#44093688)

This!

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Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025) by pizzly on Sunday May 25, 2025 @10:39PM (#44093454)

This is a really exciting idea. I really like how it bypasses the algorithmic advertising from Facebook and Co and have more content that you actually want to see.

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Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025) by abhimanyue1998 on Sunday May 25, 2025 @10:16PM (#44093335)

this is quite interesting, could actually be an out of the box take towards fixing social media. good luck!

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Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025) by cornfieldlabs on Sunday May 25, 2025 @08:45PM (#44092780)

Are you self-hosting the email?

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Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025) by creakingstairs on Sunday May 25, 2025 @09:23PM (#44093022)

No, it will have to be a third-party provider. Currently using Amazon SES, but will be easy to replace with another email provider.

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Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025) by dowager_dan99 on Monday May 26, 2025 @12:33PM (#44098976)

I've had good luck with Zoho for sending transactional emails, pretty cheap and I have not had delivery issues (YMMV).

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Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025) by dzink on Monday May 26, 2025 @12:22AM (#44093949)

Your email deliverability will be key to survival and easily damaged. All it takes is a couple of spam reports from good or bad actors and you can get black listed. Your users may forget they ever subscribed. Think of some work around to prevent that. Some examples - for large mailings you are required to add a physical address to your emails and an unsubscribe link. Those are filtered by mail providers and automatically sent to spam a lot.

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Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025) by creakingstairs on Monday May 26, 2025 @01:05AM (#44094123)

I haven't really thought about deliverability problems because at the moment, I'm not planning to provide it as a SaaS but only as an self-hostable app. I'm hoping it will be a kind of thing a tech-savvy person with their own domain will host for their own family and friends.

EDIT: but thank you for your advice! If it were a business, I agree that deliverability would be an important thing to think about.

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Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025) by hunter2_ on Monday May 26, 2025 @12:43AM (#44094040)

Can a recipient be a member of multiple groups, for example, if I happen to be among coworkers and family (or whatever)? If so, hopefully I would get one newsletter containing all the posts tagged as any of my groups. But this means the potential number of different newsletters grows exponentially relative to the number of groups (although in practice, it would be extremely unlikely that a huge number of combinations actually exist) which might or might not matter, depending on whether each recipient already gets a bespoke copy (greeting them by name, click tracking, etc.) or if you're relying on listserv style distribution.

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Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025) by creakingstairs on Monday May 26, 2025 @01:10AM (#44094156)

I've been going back and forth on this. For the initial version, I'm making it that a person can only be a member of one group just to keep it simple.

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Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025) by sigkill on Monday May 26, 2025 @07:33AM (#44096385)

This sounds like Google+'s circles.

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Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025) by lylo on Monday May 26, 2025 @03:32AM (#44094926)

Once I add private blogs/post support to Pagecord, it will kinda do this automatically. Maybe. Sort of. https://pagecord.com.

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Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025) by creakingstairs on Monday May 26, 2025 @05:05AM (#44095459)

Pagecord looks really cool. I was once inspired by Bear blog and thought about building something similar but ended up not going forward with it as I didn't think I could guarantee to keep the service up. Best of luck to your endeavor!

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Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025) by lylo on Monday May 26, 2025 @06:43AM (#44096043)

Thanks, appreciate it. Big fan of Bearblog myself, but I wanted to scratch my own itch and make something a little different for non-techies. Blog by email was the biggest thing I wanted.

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Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025) by dowager_dan99 on Monday May 26, 2025 @12:31PM (#44098954)

This is a cool approach that really resonates with me. Workflows that extend email can be really powerful (at least for us dinosaurs).

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Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025) by maxibenner on Monday May 26, 2025 @08:40AM (#44096921)

Nice project, I'd totally set this up for myself as social media replacement. Please let me know once your MVP is ready. My main concern would be to overwhelm recipients if they'd ever get included in multiple people's newsletters.

I've been building on the opposite end of this. It's an open-source form submissions forwarder. I built it mostly because I wanted a service thats transparent, with usage based pricing that I could use economically for my low traffick sites.

Sometime this year I want to add docker-compose to make it easier to self host. Currently it's all manual. https://simplecontactform.org

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Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025) by eiffel31 on Wednesday May 28, 2025 @09:23AM (#44115785)

This reminds of some commercial products (Famileo comes to mind). I don't know of any open source or self-hostable version of this type of product.

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