Herman

In this case it's kind of unbelievable how quickly the flip happened. Their 'manifesto'[0] was published only at the start of the year, where they vowed to be an incorruptible bastion of stability in a selfish society focused on short-term thinking. They want Bear to be around in 50 years.

Then in the last couple weeks or so[1] it seems they saw a bit of a spike, and immediately pulled up the ladder.

They even criticised this sort of behaviour in their manifesto:

>We've seen our fair share of open-source projects become sour (see the recent Wordpress drama) or abandoned entirely. We've seen OpenAI become ClosedAI. There's a common thread here. Trust isn't just a legal structure, but a social contract.

I am actually totally in favor of source available licenses, but in this case it seems counter to all the boasts the developer has made about their platform.[2]

[0]: https://herman.bearblog.dev/manifesto/ [1]: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=bear%20blog&hl=en [2]: https://herman.bearblog.dev/building-software-to-last-forever/

Has the maintainer looked at fair source? [0] I believe it's superior to source-available (and open core), because it eventually becomes fully open source under DOSP [1], which is great for free and paid users, especially for a blog platform like Bear. There's an FCL [2] fair source license, which aligns pretty well with their current Bear Blog License (namely the non-compete and license key bits from the ELv2). All in all, the term "source-available" is pretty meaningless, because there are too many variables. Fair source tries to tighten that up.

It also aligns quite well with Bear's manifesto [3]. Even if Bear PTY LTD ceases to exist, Bear won't. This can be codified under DOSP.

Disclaimer: I'm involved with fair source and helped write the FCL.

[0]: https://fair.io

[1]: https://opensource.org/dosp

[2]: https://fcl.dev

[3]: https://herman.bearblog.dev/manifesto/

> there is zero discoverability, you can’t even encounter people through conversations.

based on the spam and harassment on most social sites, I'd call this a feature.

If you read something interesting you can email the person with your thoughts , and if they find it interesting they'll follow you. If you are a troll, they'll delete your message and they don't need to use their platform to support your comments. If everyone used this system, trolls wouldn't have a platform anymore.

Here is a great example of discoverability without comments : https://herman.bearblog.dev/misc-updates/

Herman from bear blog posted about a topic, a bunch of people emailed him their thoughts, and he created a follow up post with the best of those thoughts listed out.

This system definitely won't work for people that have FOMO, or need validation through votes on their comments.

While CDNs are useful, you really shouldn't need them to handle HN traffic.

Someone posted what the otherside of a hug looks like[0], and it's somewhere around a unique visitor every 1-2 seconds, which really shouldn't be too much of a problem for... well anyone. The poster themselves got through it with a $7/month heroku server (albeit not without some manual intervention).

And, y'know, if sometimes a hobby project gets taken down, that's fair. You could end up getting 100 requests in a single second on a server you strung together off blog posts as a learning exercise over a weekend. But any time any professional organization gets taken down by the amount of traffic HN generates, I'm always a little embarrassed for them.

[0] https://herman.bearblog.dev/the-hacker-news-hug/

The following is the best I could collect quickly to provide backup to the statement. Unfortunally it's not the high quality first instance of raw statistics I would have liked.

But from what I have read time to time the crawler acted magnitudes outside of what could have been accepted as just badly configured.

https://herman.bearblog.dev/the-great-scrape/

https://drewdevault.com/2025/03/17/2025-03-17-Stop-externalizing-your-costs-on-me.html

https://lwn.net/Articles/1008897/

https://tecnobits.com/en/AI-crawlers-on-Wikipedia-platform-danger/

https://boston.conman.org/2025/08/21.1

My Gmail turned into the place where just goes to die long ago. Inspired by a blog post from Herman[0], I decided to try and take back control. As I looked around I stumbled across this feature before I saw it in the news anywhere, though just after I got an email from Proton announcing they have the same thing. What an amazing change. A few short minutes later I was done. I then spent the next several days wondering if I broke my account, as I get very few emails now and it has been very easy to maintain.

[0] https://herman.bearblog.dev/digital-hygiene-emails/