I know some prominent HN users work for fly.io, and they seem to be doing some interesting work, but the absolutely glowing response that every blog post gets here on HN seems a bit nepotistic.
I would hope people like the blog posts that we tend to "chart" with on HN, because we write them deliberately for HN and not to check marketing checkboxes. This post is not that; it's a straight-up feature announcement. You'll see me elsewhere on the thread, and many of us on Twitter, remarking that we weren't in a rush to see this on the front page.
We're painfully aware that we get a limited number of bites at the HN apple, and we try to spend those on things like Litestream.io, which is an open source project that benefits people who won't ever use Fly.io. Several of our last few blog posts were about stuff we've done "wrong"; so, we've also got no qualms about charting on HN with a post about how much trouble we've had with Raft, or user-mode WireGuard.
Dan Gackle has said a bunch of times that he wishes more companies got the lovey-dovey reaction we seem to get from HN. I've got the cheat codes, if you want them: write posts for the HN audience, and throw your marketing goals out the window. I'm not going to bullshit you and say that we don't benefit from those kinds of posts too, but I hope it's at least clearer why they're received more warmly than a lot of tech company product announcements: we don't write them to be product announcements. (Unlike this post!)
If there was a "No HN" meta tag we could set on our posts, this post would have had it.
Ordinarily I'd be squeamish about dragging us into metacommentary like this on one of our stories, because I'd rather argue about whether you can scale a modern full stack app entirely on SQLite than about our marketing. But, like I said, we've got no skin in how this post ranks here.
