Thousands of Niche Open Web Apps
Manton Reece published this thought the other day... All bloggers eventually want to build their own blog software. All feed reader developers want their own sync platform. All blog hosts want a feed…
https://jimmitchell.org/2026/04/29/thousands-of-niche-open-web-apps/
@jimmitchell I don’t really disagree with anything in your post either. My perspective on people deciding to self-host and then coming back to platforms like Micro.blog goes back years, not even a new trend, but vibe-coding will accelerate it. What I think about is what is the role of “generic” software when almost anyone can have a personalized interface. (We’re not there yet.)
This may turn out to be a ridiculous claim, but I think blogging “platforms” are about to get gut punched by AT Protocol. What I’m seeing happening with long form and other app views in the PDS sphere should be enough to give anyone in this business pause. And me, as a non technical person, was able to vibe code a personal website with Sveltekit that uses standard.site lexicons, posting to my own PDS, from a free Cloudflare worker. There is a sea change happening right now, whether you’re paying attention or not.
@jimmitchell PS, check out EmDash for Astro by Cloudflare. I don’t know how to code at all and just wrote a plugin for it with ChatGPT to post to your own PDS with standard.site lexicons. My pull request was merged two days ago.
@manton I got my first sub-domain back in 1994, with a whole 5MB of web space. I went on to get my own domains, and set up several blogs over the years.
I’ve come to your platform, for two reasons. 1. Cross posting is made easy. 2. I can blog without having to bother with any coding at all. I can build a website, but I can’t be bothered anymore.
It’s a bit like hardware. I used to build PCs when tower systems were the thing. These days, I run Apple hardware. It just works.
I guess I just want to be a consumer now, plug-and-play if you like. I’m tired of hacking and cracking.