Show HN: Kraa – Writing App for Everything
18 comments
·December 4, 2025steego
After watching a bunch of people use the live chat, I am not discouraged by live chat anymore.
I actually think one can make it work, one simply needs to account for moderation and flooding upfront.
The first feature you need is a way to instantly ignore people who are ruining the collective experience. I would think when a person is ignored by a certain threshold of people, their content should automatically be moderated.
The second feature that’s needed is some sort of flood protection or detection. If a user is pasting or trying to flood the chat with characters, they should be instantly hidden and their content be subject to moderation. Being able to distinguish between copying and pasting on occasion and flooding goes a long way.
embedding-shape
> The first feature you need is a way to instantly ignore people who are ruining the collective experience. I
Yeah, and we all know you're talking about Anon Pond Heron, lets be honest.
ramon156
Without sounding negative, i see a lot of bells and whistles
For UX it seems better to only show features when you need it. You're up against a physical notepad.
Maybe I'm not the target audience
dmje
Intriguing.
But - the first thing I want to know it "how much" and then shortly after that I want to know "can I run it myself".
tigroferoce
This should be the first and most important question anyone asks when trying a new product/service. If I don't understant the business model and how much I could be locked-in, I don't even bother wasting 1 minute on the product (I might tray that to get inspiration, but I probably wouldn't use that for anything serious).
levmiseri
What you see now will always be free. In 2026 we will introduce a 'pro' tier that will increase storage space for media/images and additional advanced features.
No self-hosting planned for now.
null
embedding-shape
- Click "Start Writing"
- Start typing, nothing happens
- Editor apparently didn't focus, I try clicking anywhere on the page to give text editor focus
- Editor doesn't focus when you click on it?
For being an experience "all about writing", I sure don't understand how to get started? I click in the middle of the page, but nothing is focusing? Using Firefox 145.0.1.
imcritic
This is damn awesome!
Edit: at first I thought it was too damn awesome, but then I noticed that my phone is overheating after just a few minutes watching the live chat.
levmiseri
Example of the real-real-time chat: https://kraa.io/hackernews
heliumtera
I couldn't see the value of this application until I went on this link and saw the euphoria. Whatever this means, there's certainly a place for unfiltered, unmoderated "anonymous" chat. This is promising, but I still don't understand why it always had to end in penis.
Anyway, I liked this. Consider making sent messages as immutable, it's very distracting people editing old messages.
kylecazar
This went to hell fairly quickly
embedding-shape
Everyone learns some important lessons the first time they allow user-generated content on the public internet, particularly if you're brave enough to allow so without any login :) It's a rite of passage at this point I think, lucky OP :)
input_sh
Really? IMO it went about as well as I expected given the audience.
heliumtera
Congrats! This was something I have not seen before. People loved it, apparently. Real time chat makes it so even with few users, there is so much happening. Unfortunately moderation could be a problem. Good luck with it. Gos bless you, my morning is a little bit happier now
dwa3592
Beautiful. Is it E2E encrypted?
levmiseri
No, it is not. But that's high on the list of things we're focusing on.
ksterne
[dead]
Hello HN! We're a team of three building a new kind of web-based markdown editor.
There are many editors out there, so one is spoiled for choice, but Kraa's approach is a little different. It's trying to be both a minimal and distraction-free experience while being feature-rich and allowing for tons of use cases.
What Kraa's good for:
- Distraction-free writing & reading (minimal UI, performant, styling logic completely separated from the editing experience)
- Quick sharing of any written text – compared to many other writing tools, your content can be easily shared just by posting a link and giving 'read' or 'edit' access (we also have password-protection)
- Real-time chat / communities – Kraa has some unique features around real-time editing and our Chat widget allows for a frictionless chat experience. No send button.
- Kraa works well on mobile (though dedicated apps are planned)
---
Demo examples (all live, no login needed):
Blog article: https://kraa.io/kraa/examples/echolibrary
Long-form story: https://kraa.io/kraa/examples/insidekick
Magazine: https://kraa.io/weeklyinspiration
Kraa is built on top of ProseMirror (and TipTap) and Svelte.
You don’t need an account to try Kraa. We’d really appreciate your thoughts and feedback!