Ask HN: What are you working on (August 2024)?

I have this creative writing website where writing friends can write branching fiction novels together. Sorta like choose-your-own-adventure, but more literary - third person past tense, actual characters and narrative arcs. Configurable number of choices at the bottom of every chapter, and as you're reading, if the choice label doesn't link to a chapter yet, you can write it. It's been floating around since 1996 or so, so my big project lately has been upgrading it. v1 was perl and gdmb files. v2 was php and codeigniter, and it's been limping along there for several years. When ChatGPT came out, I rewrote the whole thing for scala/play and that was super fun. Moved from ubuntu14 to ubuntu20, mysql5.5 to 8.0, etc. I'm done with the rewrite now but am still messing around with launching it, upgrading to ubuntu22 (done today), figuring out if I want to update jvm/scala/play before launching, etc. All this for only a group of six writers (so far)! But collectively we've written more than 425 chapters across a handful of stories, 450,000 words, and had a lot of laughs. I even wrote a snazzy graph visualization thing that animates the structure of the story maps. After I finish launching the thing on hardware/software that actually isn't EOL, I might open up membership to others.

super cool!!

You may be afraid to launch such a long labor of love to the rest of the world and that may be keeping your learning and progress down.

Love this! Please release it, perfect is the enemy of good

This sounds fun! Every now and then I re-start a similar project, but where you just write 3 words at a time in a story :)

Funny story, I had it released in the mid-90s. There are versions of it still on the wayback machine. You younger folks might not realize this but there was a time where there were a lot of fun internet happenings, and there was no spam. People hadn't figured out how to spam yet. There were also no T&C's or laws governing membership accounts. The first version of my site had no membership accounts. People would just create a chapter and assign a password for that chapter so no one else could edit it. And it was on GDBM, which could only handle one simultaneous connection.

Eventually, two things happened: the site got busy enough that people started experiencing errors when trying to submit/edit to the same story at the same time, and, spammers started realizing they could write chapters about certain erectile dysfunction medications. :) They also guessed some chapter passwords and overwrote them.

I didn't have a quick fix for this, plus I had ignored the site for a while, so by the time I realized, the site was overrun with spam and all my authors (who I had no way of contacting, remember: no user accounts) had disappeared.

So I took it offline for twenty years. I had copious backups, and over time I would reconstruct the story history. I had learned php by then from my career, and so I started rewriting the whole thing, which was honestly a huge project, especially because now every chapter has revision history. I had tried relaunching the site a couple of times without attracting any writers.

Then Covid happened and I was able to relaunch it and find writers. It's been fun since then. I have approximately zero commercial intent for this; I can't bear to turn on ads in the middle of an immersive reading/writing experience. Maybe someday paid accounts for extra features or a share of the copyright. My most fun idea for any sort of revenue is printed books for completed stories, or a mobile app "reader" with more features than ebook software. I think a wide release could be counterproductive since all the members currently kind of know each other, chat on Discord, and have writing nights. So it'll probably be a slow invite sort of thing.

I like this too! Kind of like those picture drawing games we used to play as kids, someone draws the head and neck and folds it over, someone else continues the lines... it always ends up in something crazy but entertaining.