Hey everyone! Richie here, founder of Cap. After nearly a year of building Cap, we’re thrilled to unveil our latest relaunch.

Back in April, we introduced the first early version of Cap, and the response blew us away. We gained thousands of users, hit #1 on Hacker News (Show HN), and trended on GitHub with over 5k stars. Most importantly, we received incredible feedback that’s shaped the new direction we’re excited to share today.

The star of this release, v0.3.1, is our biggest feature yet: Cap Apps.

These are community-submitted apps that extend Cap’s functionality in exciting ways. The first app launching today is S3 Config, which lets you connect your own S3 bucket. With this, all new shareable links are stored and served directly from your bucket, giving you 100% ownership of your data.

One day!

thanks for this! agreed, will fix.

Definitely agree with what you're saying.

It's easier for us at the start to get some attention from Loom specific users by mentioning Loom directly, but it's not a sustainable strategy going forward.

Will update the marketing copy etc over the coming weeks/months to be more about the problem we're solving specifically.

Yeah. I get that. And I’m sure there’s some SEO-style positive feedback you get for it. But also being able to pitch it to me in a simple way and then using Loom as an example I think would be more helpful.

“Screen recording software that emphasizes simple sharing. An open source alternative to Loom”. Still super simple but is more useful to people less exposed to your world.

ah sorry to hear that! where would you prefer it?

Matrix for IM, discourse for longer discussions, …

Plenty of open source alternatives. Can even bridge between matrix channels and discord

I wish an open standard won, but the reality is that in 2024 even in open source, it’s going to be easier to grow a Discord community than a Matrix one because more people habitually use Discord.

Matrix lost, or never even won, outside some unusually neckbeard-y communities. I gotta admit I kinda enjoyed watching someone try to make normies use it. Impossible. To be fair, discord is hard. But Matrix was really impossible.

Matrix is a protocol, not an app, and it's still evolving rapidly.

Meanwhile, Element as an app is also evolving rapidly too. Totally agreed that the onboarding has been awful in the past, but we're plugging away improving it and trying to make it more glossy and less neckbeardy, as per https://element.io/labs/element-x etc.

The fact is that Discord has raised $1B+ to run a centralised unencrypted comms platform; meanwhile Element is doing something ~10x harder (decentralised & E2EE) with a tiny fraction of the $. It takes longer, but the difference is that Matrix should last indefinitely, whereas Discord will get Eloned sooner or later.

I wouldn't say we've lost yet, but ymmv. I do wish we'd progressed faster though.

> Matrix is a protocol, not an app, and it's still evolving rapidly.

If your argument is at all trying to be even in the ballpark of “Matrix is accessible to normal folks” then you’ve immediately failed with this sentence alone.

And at the end of the day, that is what the comment you were replying to was saying, that Matrix will never win outside of niche spaces. And as long as it’s not as simple as a single app with a single brand for people to remember, it’s not going to succeed.

Matrix literally aims to be the missing communication layer of the Web.

Just as the Web won without a single app with a single brand for people to remember, Matrix will eventually succeed too.

The web was not competing with literally hundreds of other services with tighter branding and the weight of multi-billion dollar megacorporations pushing for their success. They have far more resources available to push their own services and have absolutely no incentive to integrate with any other service or protocol.

I wish you luck, but optimism and blind faith isn’t going to magically make WhatsApp et al go away.

Nice! Some good insights thank you.

Good point. Will definitely take another look at the copy! I'm referring to it being a small bundle size to download :)

Note that hackernews is notoriously anti “marketing speech”. I don’t think there’s anything bad with elaborating but lightweight/snappy/slim is pretty much what’s important, given that there’s so much slow bloatware out there. Not all users are technical, and eg throwing out benchmarks on the front page would be complete mumbo jumbo to many users.

That said, I also think the best way to communicate the intended vibe is also through screenshots (which you already have) and design. Looks awesome.

Lightweight is a great adjective when comparing with existing "heavyweight" software - most people would understand what it means if you say "Numbers is a lightweight Excel-like spreadsheet"; "Zoom is a lightweight Go-to-meeting".

As a stand-alone adjective it's not as useful.

In that case I'd go straight to "responsive" or "fast" or something. The vast bulk of users literally don't understand what we mean by lightweight; ask around as to which is larger, a kilobyte or a gigabyte, with your non-technical friends and I bet you find even the ones who get it right do a lot more fumbling than you expect.

Yes, I like responsive too, although it’s borderline industry jargon. I still think snappy is perhaps a bit more down to earth but I don’t know how common it is outside of American English, which could be a problem with an international audience.. words are hard.

I think the important thing to get across isn’t binary size or even RAM usage per se, but rather that it’s the opposite of bloated. Regular non-techies are tortured every day with really slow and unnecessarily networked applications. There was a thread like a month ago about the 400+ MB LinkedIn iPhone app.

thank you Steve, appreciate that!

Thank you so much!

100%, this is a priority. Should have it done soon, as well as a "startover" button.

Heck make it even better by making that an option, so the user can set the countdown to their preference.

Good point! Will work on this.

After you stop recording you are instantly redirected to your shareable Cap.link.

Working on some new points to the landing page now :)

I have no idea what loom is, so describing Cap as an open-source loom tells me nothing. There’s likely dozens of people like me, haha.

Yeah that's a good point. It's a good way for us to get started with people familiar of Loom, but it's not future proof for sure.