What if we could build in public on Indie Hackers itself?

Indie Hackers has always been an amazing, welcoming, open minded community. People here are genuine builders. When I post here it has a good chance of getting upvoted if it is any good. Technical topics on code and building a business are appreciated, even from first time posters.

Twitter on the other hand, is a void that you shout into. On Twitter we are slippery salmon smashing our bodies together to be the first to get upstream. If Jane Austen came to Twitter today and started dropping truth bombs about the human condition she would be completely ignored. The content that is rewarded is repetitive and often clichéd. The feeds are swamped with people saying the same thing over and over because that's the way to get heard. That makes it an inefficient and noisy place to post and and to find good content.

I build in public on Twitter, but it often feels like I am telling the wrong people about what I'm up to. It seems strange to broadcast technical updates to people I went to university with, ex co-workers, and that weirdo I met at an Autechre gig in 2013.

Instead I would like to tell my fellow indie hackers about the day to day challenges of what I am building. They care about this topic. I'd rather read about the process of building an engineering-as-marketing bot with node than a hot take about the top ten mistakes somebody made getting to $100M ARR.

Wouldn't it be great if Indie Hackers was the best place to build in public?

Maybe this could work like Twitter. It should be fast and easy to post, but right here on IH. A public diary of sorts. Here's a rough draft of what it could look like:

• Posting updates on your IH products should go into the normal feed of posts.
• Highlight product posts in the feed and on the front page - make them a first class citizen by changing the color or something. Or put the product's icon up now that other icons are gone.
• Fix the quirks with the product post editing box to make it work the same as regular posts. Those quirks always made it feel like posting in products was second class.
• I would also personally change "products" to "projects" as I think it is descriptive of a wider range of activities that IHers contribute to, including open source. A "project" is an ongoing thing, whereas a product with $0 revenue is a failure.

I think it would be great to read and write about what we are all up to on the day to day basis on our projects. To see those projects moving forwards and growing increment by increment.

Ok, that's enough feature requests now (sorry Courtland)!

All that said, this is not a complaint at all. Even without this change the site is tremendously useful and so many of us do appreciate it.

Thank you @csallen and the IH team for curating such a great community. 🙏