Preposter.us was born out of pain, spite and anger.
The pain was the loss of a useful tool to the mindless eating machine of "startup culture". The precursor event was the purchase of Posterous by Twitter in 2012. By 2013 they were shutting down, leaving everyone who had invested their time and content in the platform out on the street.
I won't spend too much time trying to explain why Posterous was great. I'll just say that for a large number of us, it was an amazingly low-friction way to get your writing out into the world, and keep an audience engaged across many platforms.
I looked long and hard for a replacement, but nothing came close. So one December night in 2013 I decided to create one, in the simplest form imaginable. The result was Preposter.us, and the initial version was 63 lines of Python.
My only ambition for Preposter.us was for my own personal use, and I continued to refine it with that in mind. At one point it became "good enough" for me and I switched from developer to user, slowing fixing bugs and adding features only after I had a genuine need as a user to do so.
During this time I assumed that I was the only person who thought publishing a blog via email made sense and didn't make an effort to turn anyone else on to the project. However I had a number conversations that made me think there might be a wider audience, so I spent a little time cleaning up the code and setting up a somewhat public instance of the server.
For whatever reason this didn't really take off, but I did get a little traction in the form of interest from the small/embedded computer crowd as the hardware requirements for a Preposter.us server are miniscule.
I continued to refine Preposter.us and setup a public server hosting the blogs under a series of domains, settling on Preposter.us. A talented designer even lent a hand to designing a logo/icon and I was content to simply operate the site with a "wait and see" attitude.
I didn't have any great aspirations for Preposter.us. I was of the 1000 True Fans mindset, and imagined a scenario where a simple subscription model could cover hosting and further development costs at a modest scale. Perhaps this could have happened if I decided to make it happen, but I didn't want to force or trick anyone into using Preposter.us, I wanted people who got it to use it, and I wanted to keep working on it to make those people happy.
Another year went by and I considered abandoning the project, but instead I made one more claim that I was going to develop the project as a product and find the audience. This enthusiasm didn't last long and little came of it. Furthermore changes to the mail clients I use introduced new, hard-to-fix bugs that prevented even me from using Preposter.us on a regular basis. This, coupled with dwindling interest and excitement from anyone other than myself left me without the gumption to continue on.
Since then I've relocated the site, and made a couple of half-hearted attempts to re-use the code for other efforts, but in the end I realized that developing Preposter.us was killing the exact reason I wanted to have it: I wanted the lowest-friction method possible for publishing my writing and reaching my audience.
Perhaps there is an audience for Preposter.us, but at this point I'm not excited by the idea of hunting them down. I don't plan to retire the server yet (it's essentially zero-cost and zero-maintenance in it's current form) but unless something changes I don't plan to spend much more time on the codebase.
I have a few ideas for audiences that would be well-served by Preposter.us. In particular, there are a lot of people around the world who don't have reliable Internet access or modern computers/smartphones, but they do have basic email and simple web browsers on inexpensive "feature phones". Preposter.us could be a great way to publish and consume content on these devices, and coupled with something like an Outernet receiver, could enable remote/disconnected communities to have locally-published content distributed to their community.
If I were to pursue this, I'd probably re-write the entire codebase to avoid some of the nasty encoding/decoding problems that have plagued Preposer.us since the beginning. For now, I plan to leave everything on autopilot until someone comes along with enough excitement about the project to spur me back into action.