Author here. Let me address some of the questions that came up. I'm thankful and glad that most comments were well meaning and thoughtful. I'll opt to interpret charitably the ones that were snarky, bitter, hostile and answer what constructive essence I could extract from them.

Firstly, some context. I consider git.ht alpha, which I candidly stated above. Naturally some features and niceties are missing. I opted to get the meat of it out to seek feedback and there's only so many hours a parent of 3 can devote to hacking while running a Clojure consultancy with deadlines lurking, contracts needing attention, payroll, etc. Please keep that lack of time in mind, when asking "why isn't there ..." and "I would've expected ...". Good chance I would've expected the same thing you would and the thing you miss is a TODO somewhere in the code :) Great place to report these: https://github.com/fullmeta-dev/githoot-public/issues

Secondly, my intention is not to get as many eyeballs as I can to my platform and website by re-creating feeds, following, timelines, comments, editing, etc badly. Haven't we enough of these already? Once you claim your git.ht subdomain and subscribe, there should be little reason for you to go back there. Instead I want to leverage what good Github platform gives us already. Everyone here uses it every day anyway. I haven't the time of day to learn your new social whatever, so I wouldn't put you through the pain I'd never choose to endure. Good example is the "feed" or "timeline". Sure, I can add one to your foo.git.ht, but why though? GitHub Gist search works really well. Here's the query to get your hoot feed: "user:foo filename:hoot". It just works. In fact, if you claim a subdomain and then go to your foo.git.ht "dashboard", the last item is "Search your feed". All it does is redirect you to that search with the exact query string I mentioned earlier.

To sum up. Some features are coming and some niceties are missing, I explicitly solicit feedback and discussion in the Github issues mentioned above. Github platform is good enough and if it has something already, I'd rather not roll out my own and add to the noise.

With that, now that the kids are finally asleep, let's see about those questions.

1. Where are comments?

Github Gists offer great comment section. I say we use it.

2. Some central, easily identifiable or demo account would be nice. I can see vlad.git.ht in the video and the website mentions hq.git.ht

Would this really be useful? git.ht is meant to be minimal and trivial to use. Your RSS feed is available under /feed/rss and you need to know how to map a gist to where its hosted by your git.ht. /latest is a convenient way to quickly grab and share the hoot you just authored and want to share. We could ofcourse allow query parameters to /latest. Given that it is your subdomain and therefore only limited to your hoots, a better idea would be to use a monotonically increasing enumeration scheme as well as gist's hash, your hoots will then be under /1 /2 /3 ... Very easy to keep in your head if you want to share your old hoot on a whim without searching or checking.

Perhaps a HOWTO hoot or a video tutorial might be useful even if just me using it for 5 minutes.

Re mentioned accounts. I shouldn't be using my own vlad.git.ht for testing. Spring cleaning incoming. I kind of question the usefulness of posting announcements on hq.git.ht now so it remains empty.

3. Wait, how do I see all of my hoots? Where's the timeline.

RSS feed is the timeline, but also the above mentioned Github Gists search works very well. Search with the necessary query pre-populated is linked from your "dashboard". git.ht is not another social network, it is an overlay that lets you go back to the roots of the Web.

4. It would be nice to have my foo.git.ht contain something meaningful for visitors other than myself.

Maybe. What would that be? Let's discuss https://github.com/fullmeta-dev/githoot-public/issues One thing that I just noticed is that the <HEAD> in foo.git.ht isn't serving link to RSS feed e.g. for browsers that are cognisant of RSS. Just created an issue for that - code got lost at some point.

5. Why would I pay this much for so little?

If you ask yourself that, you almost certainly shouldn't and you probably haven't, am I right?

6. Wait, what happens if I stop paying for my subscription? Will all of my links break?

No. If paid even for just one month, the subdomain is considered claimed and will remain yours forever. If you cancel subscription, it'll run till the end of the current billing period. After that RSS feed will remain unchanged, new hoots will not be fetched. That's about it.

7. I'd rather pay less for a whole year.

Sure, I don't really mind and it isn't difficult to arrange at all. While git.ht is taking off, I'd rather keep the financial arrangement trivial, where only one billing cycle worth is at risk. I'd like to run it for a couple of months before complicating financial matters. Might offer an annual promotion to existing subscribers at this point, too. I seriously doubt it'll be a decisive factor in the tally of subscribers.

8. Can I use a custom domain?

I hope to give you one better but no promises. Whole thing was conceived and executed with eventual self-hosting in mind. So, you're looking at SQLite replicated to S3; regular AWS ALB to front; Tailscale network (any overlay network will do, I guess) that ties on-prem GNU Guix servers to AWS VPC. Not self-hosted yet, cause it really changes one's threat model and I have another important announcement and feature coming soon. Let's not go there quite so soon, ok, but I hear ya.

9. My hoot at foo.git.ht/gist-id-here is just gist content. What's up with that?

What would you like to see there? Its sole purpose in life is sharing that accommodates social networks we all use allowing for nice previews. While this part of the code is commented out atm, originally it even auto redirected to the original gist after 2 or 3 seconds. Another reason for this indirection is to (at some point) give you some insight into how many people navigate to your posts e.g. when you share on Twitter. Github won't give you that statistics.

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Coda

I am wiped y'all. If you've tried git.ht I thank you. If you want to but worry about the fee, just login with Github and use it for a couple of days without paying then decide - system will let you. Do please report any problems. Ditto if you feel strongly about a feature you miss.

Another bank holiday here in the UK tomorrow. I hate holidays. Must. Survive. The. Kids.

Thanks