💬 Re: I wish there were a better story around replying to blogs

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In reply to: Re: I wish there were a better story around replying to blogs

I agree that this is a massive pain point and it’s something I’ve talked about a lot on this blog.

At present, I use a combination of 1 (via isso) and 4 (via webmention.io + webmention.js). The integration on 4 is also helped by using Bridgy and Bridgy Fed to receive webmentions from Mastodon and many of the silos, which strikes an okay balance for me, although it’s far from perfect.

One of the biggest problems with webmention, IMO, is that it doesn’t provide a good story for protected/private responses to protected/private entries. Ticket Auth might eventually provide that, but adoption of that protocol has been slow-going, to say the least, and there’s still open questions about how to actually manage the credentials in an unsupervised flow (especially when using a third-party webmention endpoint). An older WIP called AutoAuth had a much better story for that use case but the protocol was incredibly complicated and implementations never progressed beyond the proof-of-concept stage.

For me, isso as my primary comment system remains the least-bad option of a lot of bad options.

❝ Don’t personally guarantee your startup

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Quoted: Don’t personally guarantee your startup

Based on their literature, Paintbrush provides a $50,000 loan with a very low-friction application and a fast decision. But the total repayment amount can be as much as $75,000, tied to a personal founder guarantee. That means that if your startup doesn’t work, you as a founder are required to pay that amount back at an amount pegged at 15% of your pre-tax income. For example, if your total income was $150,000, you would pay back $22,500 a year. That amounts to around 22% of what your post-tax takehome pay would be before payments like health insurance and rent.

So basically this is all of the downsides of traditional VC with none of the upsides. Yeesh.

In traditional VC, it’s the investors who are taking the risk of funding the company. This scheme is doing none of that and is instead what amounts to a payday loan.