Some days, it pains me that we've built such a useful service, and so few people get to even give it a chance π
I've done everything I possibly could (incuding, more than halving the monthly subscription price), but product marketing is something I personally suck at.
So, I am begging you, the community, to help us out. If you know anyone who would benefit from our social media news and stories aggregator, share this post with them.
@jhall@murmel_social I see. I think, it's a little naive on our side to think that we'll stop people from scrolling around. More so, we'd want to give certain target groups a little more focus on things that are important in their circels. Think, journalists, reearches, busy business people, etc. Our initial goal was to give them a daily digest to start the day with a few very targeted points.
@ahmetasabanci yep, Nuzzel was the inspiration. Happy to see someone else who used it and liked it. Give Murmel a try for sure, Iβd love to hear your feedback.
@Gargron allow me to also shamelessly plug @murmel_social in here. Itβs where busy people get the breaking news on their personal Mastodon timelines.
Dailyight Computer came out of nowhere recently, to much fanfare from the tech community: https://daylightcomputer.com/
I am a little skeptical for one reason alone. I've listened to a few interviews with the founder, and I am getting a lot of the painkiller-induced, crypto-bro, everything-sucks-let-me-fix-it narrative, which I don't think I enjoy.
Daylight is like what the reMarakable would have looked like, if it were funded solely on Bitcoin.
I've recently realized that gamebooks might have been a rare 90s phenomenon in Bulgaria only. While I was growing up, those kept my imagination and passion for writing.
However, based on my discussions, gamebooks don't seem to have been that popular globally.
Thus, my question. Have you ever seen or played gamebooks?
𧡠The other day, someone asked me if we make enough money with @murmel_social to keep it alive. The short answer is, yes - Murmel makes enough money to cover its server costs, and some of the time we spend working on it.
Of course, the full answer is a little more complex. As a team, we are far from relying on its profits to pay salaries. Like most teams, we bridge the gap with project work. This gets reflected in the overall time we allow ourselves to spend on Murmel each month. 1/2
@murmel_social We were smart enough not to go the fancy cloud way from the start, so we can afford Murmel to scale, without its infrastructure costs overblowing exponentially.
However, that still does not solve the time and attention factor. The only way we can get to work on new features is to keep getting long-lasting subscribers. But it's not like people on Mastoodn are really eager to pay for anything even if it's a valuable service costing them a couple of bucks each month.
The best use case for AI would be a Mastodon plugin I could enable to filter doomscrolling posts without the need to filter specific keywords, mute users , etc. (only if said AI was actually βsmartβ enough to consistently & accurately identify doomscrolling posts without false positives).
@sezduck weβve sort of built that with @murmel_social. It should save you the doomscrolling part, as the focus is on the stories that people you follow collectively talked about. I almost donβt scroll Mastodon anymore as all the stories come to me instead :)
Pre-ordered Bigme B251, the standalone monitor! As someone who spends a lot of hours in front of a screen, moving to eink on my smartphone and now my desk - connected to my laptop - Iβm really excited to use it!
@denzilferreira That's nice - I need a big e-ink in my daily work, too. However, the video was extremely uncomfortable to watch - as if it were by onw of those uncanny AI generators.
Blog Update: I have successfully migrated email sending away from ButtonDown Email to a self-hosted Ghost instance. Nothing bad with ButtonDown - simply, Ghost has by far a better editing and publishing experience (and can be self-hosted, of course).
Speaking of newsletters, one reason to migrate was because I want to explore email communication a bit further. So, if newsletters are your thing, be my guest and add your email here: https://preslav.me/subscribe/#via-email I won't spam!
@anze3db That's not good, however, the standard Ghost confirmation email is not something I can control without some tweaking. Thanks for the feedback, I'll look into it.