​Papyrs is deprecated 👀

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
​Hi 👋,
​After careful consideration, I have decided to deprecate Papyrs.
Although the platform is still available for use, new user sign-ups have been disabled and it is no longer being actively developed or maintained. The following factors contributed to my decision:

Insufficient user-generated content

​Although 800 unique blogspaces were created with Papyrs, the platform failed to attract a significant audience of active users.
While there may be various reasons for this, I was unable to convert the audience into becoming more active and regularly sharing blog posts.
Some UI, UX, or features may have been lacking to improve user activity on the platform, I believe that the main reason for its failure was my lack of investment in growing the amount of shared content, both technically and non-technically.
My lack of motivation and time were probably the two biggest factors contributing to this.

Limitations of technical decisions made

Although I thought that splitting users' content into two separate canister smart contracts - one for the data and one for the content - was a good idea at the time, in retrospect, I realize that it was a poor decision.
An architecture where each user has a single canister smart contract would have been more maintainable and could have significantly improved the performance of the user experience.​
While it's not an insurmountable problem, migrating to a new architecture would require a significant investment of time and effort that I am not currently interested in making.
Additionally, I originally wrote the canister code in Motoko, but Rust has since become my preferred language, so maintaining the code base has become more challenging.

​Concern about cost-effectiveness

While there is no urgent financial pressure, the combination of the lack of audience engagement and the technical choices I made have led me to question whether investing further resources into acquiring new users for Papyrs is worthwhile.
Ultimately, I feel that the returns on these investments may not justify the costs, and I am also being mindful of my spending 😉.

E​valuation of product potential

​Despite my belief that Papyrs has potential as one of the few truly open-source Web3 blogging platforms, I also acknowledge its limitations. There are numerous existing platforms, and even within the IC ecosystem, other great solutions exist such as Nuance and Mora.
​On the other hand, I'm extremely passionate about my new project, Juno. It's a blockchainless platform that makes it incredibly easy for frontend web developers to build decentralized applications. I truly believe that Juno is a game changer with enormous potential. That's why I would like to invest the time I have, next to my contracting activities, in this project.
Perhaps someday I'll rebuild Papyrs using Juno, which would be quite straightforward! 😁
At this point, I'm unsure about the exact timeline for sunsetting Papyrs, but I'll be sure to keep you updated. In the meantime, for those of you who were active users, I recommend gradually migrating to another platform.
I hope my reasons for deprecating Papyrs make sense to you. Thank you for being a part of the journey 🙏.
​To infinity and beyond
David

👋

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