Thirty users keep it alive
Extracting his highlights from the just-finished Frankl book, Juan revives Koby, the open-source Kobo-highlights tool he'd left half-broken. The reason he bothers is a number: about thirty users a month, from Belgium to Colombia to Singapore, still quietly use it. So he ships what they asked for, local on-device processing so nothing reaches the cloud (cheaper too), privacy controls to hide or exclude books, comments, account deletion, and CSV/Anki export. The principle: a small tool with thirty real monthly users is alive, and a living tool is worth maintaining, 'si la gente lo está usando, yo te lo mejoro'.
// trace: where this idea came from
- ↳ video diary @ 1:02:17 (treinta usuarios al mes lo mantienen vivo)
- ↳ video diary @ 59:01 (procesamiento local, la privacidad que pidieron)
Finishing Frankl’s book (entry 226-4) leaves Juan with a pile of highlights to extract, which sends him back to Koby, the open-source tool he built to pull annotations off a Kobo e-reader and had left half-broken ▸ 51:50. It had been updated once during the Claude Code credit spree and abandoned when the fixes looked too fiddly ▸ 1:01:07. The reason he picks it up again is a metric: it has around thirty users a month ▸ 1:02:17, real people from Belgium, Colombia, the United States, Canada, Italy, New Zealand, Singapore ▸ 1:03:18. It is, quietly, alive.
So he ships what those users asked for, and the headline feature is privacy by architecture: process the file locally, on the reader’s own machine, so the highlights never reach the cloud, which is both what the paranoid asked for and cheaper on compute ▸ 59:00. Around it: a public/private toggle, the ability to hide or exclude particular books, comments on quotes, account and data deletion, and export to CSV, Anki, or Quizlet ▸ 1:00:52. The demand was concrete, people who wouldn’t use it because they didn’t want a mother seeing what they read ▸ 1:00:00.
treinta usuarios al mes es que está vivo →
The principle is a stance toward the long tail of side projects: most of what you build goes quiet, but a tool with thirty monthly users across seven countries is not dead, it’s small, and small-but-used is the threshold that earns maintenance. “Si la gente lo está usando, pues toma, yo te lo mejoro” ▸ 1:02:32. Someone even forked it, which means the open-source part worked as intended ▸ 1:02:42. The measure of whether a project deserves another evening isn’t its ambition; it’s whether anyone, anywhere, opened it this month…