Ok, thoughts. 🧵

Building products is really fucking hard. read.cv is impressive by itself. Add sites, posts, jobs, etc. and it's godly. @mehdi @shen @andy deserve every ounce of respect on their names, no matter how sad we are.

Recreating even a fraction of this is not a weekend project. Enthusiasm + talent go far, and we are HOT right now... But infra is $$$$. Time is irreplaceable. And this idea has been tried by many great *great* people. This is the best iteration so far, and it's going away.

I've spent the past few hours burning my knuckles considering "what if we just could keep posts". I've written authentication, user accounts, and now started working on an importer for the read.cv exports (thanks @andy for the idea!)

I'd be very happy to build this with anyone, if we can find an answer to that question. (For the record, there are things on read.cv I personally would have paid more for, if they were available, like a public API for my profile content)

There's a "public" API you can access at sites.read.cv/api/user/[user… As the URL suggests, it's used for Sites, but it has all the profile content. I discovered it a few months ago while poking around Sites lol

😩

One thing that strikes me about your list - four exceptionally well-designed sites/products. Which is natural to build a design-focused community. But maybe make something scrappier, requiring less ongoing effort to keep alive, making it more sustainable.

Designer News and Good News were both scrappy side projects, they died not necessarily because of lack of funding (Designer News especially was just the LayerVault news room initially), but due to how hard moderation and maintenance is.

This is and will be a diaspora to many places, but I think Bluesky is actually the winner so far. Design Twitter → Posts → Design Sky