Thu Oct 1 12:48:27 PM EDT 2026
I looked into bearblog but idk what i think about it so far. i thought it may be a good mirror to this site but there’s no way to automate pushing updates to it from my central pile of markdown. that seems a lot like friction and lockin. The source-available part makes me wonder about their longevity as well. funnily enough i just looked it up and neocities is opensource https://github.com/neocities/neocities/blob/master/LICENSE.txt.
The web site for Neocities! It’s open source. Want a feature on the site? Send a pull request!
big respect for neocities. i do respect the bearblog guy too. he does stuff. i just dont agree with him on everything and that’s fine.
heres my thoughts on it being source available
i may flesh this out more later but why does it matter if any weirdo with a claude trial can make their own clone site? are you afraid of the product competing with a similar product? theres a million other products out there. your product isnt really what youre selling here, its the brand and service. that weirdo with his own microblogging site - freeriding or not - isnt advertising or maintaining anything. hes not going to last very long. you use bearblog because its going to last forever. you pay for bearblog. you can email the bearblog guy. none of that applies to the random guy standing up a clone site.
in order to actually compete and replace bearblog you need an actual stable, mature sustained effort outside the product itself. you have to keep up with software updates both of the website and the infra and meta infra and customer support and reputation and all these things you can’t get from git cloning a fully open bearblog. any organization that can get those other things arent going to be helped or hurt by replacing the part in the middle.
the only instance where thats makes sense to happen is when the upstream product is enshittified to the point where one of these lesser projects becomes a better value. nobody moved off github until microsoft tanked their reliability and started hiking prices and even then people are still on github. nobody forked puppet until private equity bought it and they enshittified it. lots of organizations set up their own internal gitlabs, many offlined for security, but gitlab doesnt compete with gitlab clones, they compete with codeberg and github. nobody clones a project to compete with it unless the upstream has essentially died.
lets consider a scenario where bearblog is fully open and some organization “free rides” and tries to compete. any value they add by modifying it can be put back into the original. as mentioned before if its just a single guy he’ll give up when he gets bored unless theres a very good reason. if its a company they all run on debt so even if they offer all the premium features for free and do their own dev work theyll run out of money and enshittify within 6 months. then theyll die out since the original bearblog remains superior. then the original dev is fully within their rights to pick over the dead project to improve their own for free. everybody wins.
the only way source available makes sense is if youre planning to enshittify yourself, but then youll fall behind and die out too.