I think the main contribution of Bear at first was centralizing and codifying a certain visual style: minimalistic, with a single narrow column. It's basically "the Medium layout, but indie". And the thing is, that style in itself is not copyrightable. To achieve it, you don't need to use bearblog. You just need a few tens of lines of CSS, which you can very easily write yourself.

Today there's another thing going for Bear: the discovery page. It's gradually becoming a driver of visibility, attracting more authors to Bear to get readers who are there. But I'm wary of these "flywheel" kind of things, even if they have an indie look. To me it still feels better to have my own website, and participate only in those discovery systems that support it, like Reddit or HN.

I missed the "discover" before. What a great idea. I've been reading through various blogs this morning, feeling like the internet is small again.

As in https://github.com/knhash/jekyllBear

You can also participate in openring to provide that type of small-web discoverability to other authors you like: https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/openring.