27 ms·

Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

820 points by blakewatson 3y ago

Ikatza 3y ago
Just joined using your referral code. Thanks Blake!
cianmm 3y ago
I've been using Omg.lol for around a year now (Cian.lol) and am really enjoying it. It's just so simple - it feels like travelling back in time to when we wrote blog posts and made websites to share with our friends, not to Create Content.
- lannisterstark 3y ago
  I skimmed OPs post, and then read yours, and I'm still a bit confused as to how it's different than just hosting a mishmash of different but related services yourself. If you could not, yes that's fine. But if you could, what really are the advantages?
  - tw04 3y ago
    Presumably the mastadon integration. Think twitter with your profile directly tied to your personal site - except not twitter.
    - cianmm 3y ago
      I actually don't really use the social stuff all that much. I already have a mastodon account on a country-specific server, and I'm not much of an IRC/Discord user
  - alexeldeib 3y ago
    This is the classic Dropbox criticism, no? Moreover, the pleasure has nothing to do with self hosting or not, it’s just a pleasant and whimsical UX while being technically solid.
  - graypegg 3y ago
    I think you kind of answered your question, no? Setting up web things, especially when they have a chance to get quite bursty hug-of-death traffic, is hard for most people. I'd prefer to set things up myself but I know that places me in a verrrrry small minority of folks.
  - cianmm 3y ago
    I argue with computers for my day job, I don’t want to do that after work hours too. I’m happy to pay somebody else (especially Adam who is just so active with the community) a fairly paltry sum to do it for me.
    - lannisterstark 3y ago
      To be entirely fair (in my situation), what I do at work and what I find fun to do with computers are two different things :P
      - bruh2 3y ago
        So true. I reached a point where the tools I fiddle with at home have such an overlap with the ones I use at work, with Python and Ansible being the uncanny leaders. I feared – in vain – losing the ability to enjoy hacking as a hobby. They just don't feel the same, y'know?
  - rsynnott 3y ago
    Hosting all of this stuff on your own would be a lot of fuss which most people wouldn’t want to bother with.
  - soulofmischief 3y ago
    Just because I can manage a service doesn't mean I want to all the time. I'm a busy guy and already have client infrastructure to manage. At a point in my life where I'm trying to cut down on things I have to tend to.
  - stjohnswarts 3y ago
    I suspect that it's simply ease of use. Sure you can use a mish mash of self hosting, online dedicated services, etc, but this looks more simple and cohesive and for $20 a year you don't have to worry about the overhead of all those other things, you just add the content you want and don't worry about the details.
- tambourine_man 3y ago
  That internet is not dead, you know? It’s just the the other part grew so massively. There are still people writing blog posts and websites that don’t require you to dismiss 5 popups before you can interact with it. It can be done.
  - lacrimacida 3y ago
    It’s just hard to find. Google returns trash
    - larrysalibra 3y ago
      Try out kagi...they have a filter for "smallweb" posts: https://kagi.com/smallweb https://kagi.com/smallweb The list of sites is on github: https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb
    - rtpg 3y ago
      It's wild to think about how anybody found info back in the day. Forums were probably the big one I guess? There was always something magical about being linked to forum and finding a wealth of info there, and entire domains of knowledge. FWIW stuff linked from HN & friends is not always the best, but I am pretty agressive about sticking RSS feeds from blogs that get linked here. That gives an inflow of interesting stuff people find. It's not a thing you can do in one go, but after a while you have a lot of neat stuff from people who cared enough to post it.
      - monkeywork 3y ago
        webrings, IRC, forums and mailing lists, etc.
      - 8372049 3y ago
        Back in the day you got actually useful results from search engines.
      - joquarky 3y ago
        Yahoo was originally a text file small enough to fit on a 1.44 floppy disk
- cwoolfe 3y ago
  How did you get cian.lol? Why isn't it cian.omg.lol?
  - Tomte 3y ago
    You can register domains yourself and set them up, under "Switchboard" --> "External Domain Routes"
tonymet 3y ago
goes to show there's still lot of creativity left in the web. web pages, DNS, email forwarding, vanity domains -- i'm glad to see hackers tinkering and exploring what the next gen web looks like. Otherwise we'll lose it to commercialism and walled gardens.
kibwen 3y ago
This is exactly what I've been thinking about making recently as a response to the enshittification of the web: a single site that just collects a small number of useful, simple web apps that I could share with other people who are tired of being perversely monetized by ads and VCs. Utterly brilliant, thanks for sharing!
- lopis 3y ago
  Do it. The more the merrier.
- lannisterstark 3y ago
  I just self host stuff on my domain and link them to a Flame dashboard for family and friends. https://github.com/pawelmalak/flame https://github.com/pawelmalak/flame Dashboard is only accessible by my wireguard network, Which they can turn the LAN mode on on, so it doesn't route all their traffic, just to the local domain.
- unshavedyak 3y ago
  You’ve got me thinking the same thing. Omg.lol seems as interesting as it is enticing me to build a similar thing for fun.
- ghewgill 3y ago
  There are various similar communities, which don't have to compete with one another because the internet is a big place. Two that jump to mind are https://tildeverse.org https://tildeverse.org and https://disroot.org https://disroot.org.
shermantanktop 3y ago
“omg.lol is unabashedly built with PHP” PHP is on my mental list of forever-security-challenged tech, but it got on that list a long time ago. It’s 2023, is that still a reasonable concern?
- mattl 3y ago
  No, modern PHP frameworks have come a long way.
- Retr0id 3y ago
  Speaking as someone who has pentested a few PHP codebases over the years, rather than as a developer, It's a bit like C. That is, it's an absolute footgun in the wrong hands, and a lesser footgun in experienced hands. For experienced devs following best practices and using modern frameworks it's "mostly fine", and that's the side of things that's been improved over the years, but most of the old rakes are still there to be stood on.
  - wvenable 3y ago
    > but most of the old rakes are still there to be stood on. I don't think that's necessarily true -- a lot of features have been deprecated and removed.
    - kemayo 3y ago
      Most notably, in 5.4.0 (in 2012!) they removed register_globals and magic_quotes. (Which had both been deprecated and off-by-default for a while before, I believe.) The former was notoriously insecure, as what it did was promote anything passed in as a cookie, GET, or POST variable into a global-scoped variable inside your script. Since PHP didn't require any sort of declaring-your-variables-before-using-them, it was pretty easy to wind up with scripts written in a way that would allow this an unwise amount of access to the script's internals. The latter automatically escaped special characters with backslashes in all the aforementioned user-provided variables so you could pass them straight into mysql queries. It was, however, optional and so caused errors because code got written relying on it and then ran on servers with it disabled, allowing SQL injection attacks... or double-escaping things in code written the other way around. But these days are long behind us!
dankwizard 3y ago
[flagged]
- unshavedyak 3y ago
  Well assuming for the sake of discussion that this isn’t a paid advertisement, it’s still clearly a glowing endorsement of the service, no? Is a glowing endorsement not allowed?
  - dankwizard 3y ago
    Is an endorsement just running the homepage through ChatGPT and wording everything slightly differently?
    - unshavedyak 3y ago
      If it's your motivation to endorse and you choose to use GPT to do so, i'd think so? Though i'm not clear how the quality of the writing is relevant to whether or not this is sincere.
      - floren 3y ago
        If you can prompt GPT to write a blog post and you feel the results adequately represent your views, why not just post the prompt? "paste this into chatgpt 4 for the expanded version"
        unshavedyak 3y ago
        No idea, when i started this discussion i didn't come prepared to defend/discuss GPT lol. Don't really have an opinion on GPT.
    - graypegg 3y ago
      The post contains some context about why they were looking for something like the service, gives a short review of why they like it, what they get for the cost, and the lists alternatives at the bottom. It seems quite human to me. Humans tend to talk about things they like. Just shouting "chatGPT wrote this!" isn't really a comment on anything. It's just provocative enough to feel like it's a criticism while also being both totally unrefutable and unprovable.
graypegg 3y ago
Hey this is great! While I don't know if it's for me, I know tons of folks that will love this. Good find! The only thing that I think is missing is a onboarding tool to create an account from another existing mastodon instance rather than by buying a domain and getting a new masto account via that process, call it forklift.omg.lol or something. :)
toomuchtodo 3y ago
Very nice, purchased a handle to support. And passkey support is chef kiss.
bovermyer 3y ago
I checked out Omg.lol when it first got popular on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34269772 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34269772). At the time, I thought it was an amalgamation of things I already did on my own or otherwise had a community for (e.g., Neocities, Tilde Town). Now, though, I think I get it. There's something to be said for sustained energy.
- bovermyer 3y ago
  OK, I bit. Here's my spot: https://dungeonhack.omg.lol/ https://dungeonhack.omg.lol/ I look forward to meeting you!
  - blakewatson 3y ago
    OP here, just wanted to say your tabletop links page is chef's kiss.
- jadbox 3y ago
  > Now, though, I think I get it. What do you get now?
  - bovermyer 3y ago
    The community vibe. The energy. The reason for something technologically commonplace to be exceptional and worth interest.
- rambambram 3y ago
  Nice blog you have there! My RSS reader finds a feed on your website, but has problems showing it. It seems to validate as a valid Atom feed, so I was wondering if you ever heard before of external sites not being able to load it?
  - bovermyer 3y ago
    If you're talking about my personal site https://benovermyer.com https://benovermyer.com, no, I have not heard of problems rendering the RSS for it. If you are having issues I would like as much detail as you can provide.
PenguinRevolver 3y ago
It's nice, the only problem I got with omg.lol is that Wayback Machine archives are unavailable for all domains. I'm concerned that this part of the internet won't be saved for others to see in the future.
- yellow_lead 3y ago
  Is there a reason for that or they just haven't been archived yet?
  - Ringz 3y ago
    Unlikely. Some people archive every page they visit.
- blakewatson 3y ago
  Oh wow, you’re right. I wonder what’s up with that.
- politelemon 3y ago
  Just tried and I see someone else also tried after seeing your comment. > The same snapshot had been made 25 minutes ago. You can make new capture of this URL after 1 hour. But yeah it's strange, nothing appears in the archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://bw.omg.lol/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://bw.omg.l...
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    It’s possible the site owner has asked the Archive to dark site specific captures. Capture jobs will still run, but they won’t be available publicly (until some future date). You can always run your own crawls with grab site: https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/grab-site https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/grab-site
- contrarian1234 3y ago
  I think that's great.. archiving should be opt-in not opt-out You can read and access my work/words as I want. And once I don't or change my mind you can't. Once someone posts something, you don't have a right to it in perpetuity .. That's how things should work - but that's just my opinion
nicbou 3y ago
If omg.lol is an oasis, this post was a stranger offering you a sip. What a refreshingly nice and personal post!
- NanoYohaneTSU 3y ago
  It's an ad bro
  - footlose_3815 3y ago
    It certainly feels like it.
  - beardicus 3y ago
    are you saying the author was paid for this post? seems like an enthusiastic user to me. do you know what an advertisement is?
1B05H1N 3y ago
Sorry, why would I pay 20/year bucks for this when I have my own website/infra?
- james_pm 3y ago
  I happily pay $20/year so I don't need to worry about it. Not everyone can or wants to run their own infra.
- airstrike 3y ago
  So that you don't have to worry about outages, updates, bugfixes, certs, permissions, vulnerabilities, ... like you do on your own website/infra?
  - akho 3y ago
    It's the same infrastructure, with the same outages. The other points are something for the developers of your software distribution to worry about, same as if you buy a packaged service.
- erxam 3y ago
  Even without taking into account the time investment in maintaining your own infra, it compares favorably with everything else. Even the most dirt-cheap VPS is a few bucks more expensive on a yearly basis by itself, and you still have to buy domains and similar. Running your own infra only really works out if you either have access to great hardware for super-cheap or WANT the experience from setting everything up.
  - cipheredStones 3y ago
    It consistently surprises me how much software engineers devalue the effort of software engineering when it comes to their personal lives. If you're a SWE in an English-speaking country, you almost certainly make $20 post-tax for at most one hour of work - 30m at SV salaries, as little as 15m if you're at a FAANG-ish company. Is it conceivable that you would spend less than an hour a year maintaining something like this if you were to do it yourself? I don't think so. Most people can't earn money in increments of one additional hour, of course, but it still sounds strange to hear people say "why should I spend [the amount of money I earn in half an hour] per year when I could just do it myself [with an amount of professional effort I would expect to be paid 20x as much for]?"
umairj 3y ago
Thank you. Just bought it as it looks one and partially because my initials were available. Kind of a sign :D. Otherwise it will be one of many domains I’ll have to manage for a year ;)
camdenlock 3y ago
> I don’t know why; probably a curious desire to see how bad Elon Musk would screw it up It’s been interesting to watch people go from nerd-crushing on Elon (omg rockets! omg electric vehicles yay climate!) to loathing him in the blink of an eye. Goes to show what’s really important to some people…
- AlexAffe 3y ago
  Elon bashing is 99% some companies campaign. There is an amount of money involved beyond our wildest imagination. World economy kind of money. You don't read Elon and Tesla content on reddit frontpage with 30k ups on average almost 24/7 without there being companies involved spending heavily.
  - meepmorp 3y ago
    Instead of a conspiracy or coordinated campaign against Elon Musk, what if a lot of people have come to think that he's a douchebag and upvote links about him saying/doing what they see as douchey things? Maybe he's actually done some stuff over the last few years that's made him genuinely unpopular with a lot of people; maybe it's not because "They" are trying to destroy him, but because many people actually find his behavior off-putting.
  - jayveeone 3y ago
    Nah, he's just a deeply unlikeable jerk
    - AlexAffe 3y ago
      To you. That's your opinion. Maybe it's mine. But I will never go as far as to state something like my opinion as universially true. You do that. What makes you do that?
      - metabagel 3y ago
        Does everything have to end with “in my opinion”? Isn’t that implied?
tambourine_man 3y ago
“omg.lol is unabashedly built with PHP” I already like you
contrarian1234 3y ago
Seems a bit like Github pages but with more of a social angle to it. I kinda expected Github to go in this direction eventually - but keeping social elements out of Github might have been a smart move
bhasi 3y ago
The "web design in 4 min" linked to at the bottom of the page is very interesting.
- bbx 3y ago
  I didn’t realise it was linked to in this article. I built that on a whim several years ago. It’s more about what can be done in 4 min rather than what’s being done. But I’m glad it inspired people to try to style their own website themselves.
  - blakewatson 3y ago
    OP here. I love that little site and I link to it often!
- generic92034 3y ago
  From that page: "What is the first thing you need to work on?" I would say, a page that is usable without scripts. ;)
damiante 3y ago
I love the idea of such smaller communities and the "old web" style of interaction, but for me the issue is one of discoverability. How do I find and follow people? Does anyone still use RSS, or are we relying on Mastodon/ActivityPub? Bavk in the day this was the purpose of search engines, but it seems that now such small pages are scarcely even indexed...
- chongli 3y ago
  Discoverability and smallness are at odds. This problem isn’t specific to the internet. That quaint, beautiful postcard town does not remain so once it’s been discovered. Eternal September happens everywhere.
  - mmazing 3y ago
    > Discoverability and smallness are at odds. Is it really true on the internet though? omg.lol could presumably stay "small-appearing" and "quaint" and have millions of users. How could you really tell the difference? If it were all indexed you could drill down and find people who share your interests, that doesn't necessarily ruin the website, yeah?
    - OkayPhysicist 3y ago
      For published works (say, a blog), discoverability is probably a good thing. For communities, however, with many-to-many communication (forums, etc.), discoverability is an antifeature. Community building requires some degree of common ground, which obscurity naturally filters for. The other downside of mass-popularity is that above a certain scale, your community becomes a target. Both for individual bad actors (spammers, vandals, etc.) and for the apex predators of the small community world, commercial interests. Look at Maker Fair transitioning from a relatively niche convention of people showing off their cool stuff they made, and some miscellaneous sponsors and vendors looking to appeal to those people, to an over-commercialized affair with a thousand people trying to sell you a 3D printer, because that's the big moneymaker. Community norms are what makes spaces worth inhabiting, and they just don't scale well.
  - 3y ago
kvathupo 3y ago
I like this. That said, I doubt we'll ever escape towards subscription-based social media models due to the prohibitive costs of CDNs, bandwidth, and storage for video/images. But I suppose it's a question of ends: do we want everyone on social media?
- kibwen 3y ago
  If you can live without video and images, you could comfortably host even a very large forum (on the order of the top 10% of subreddits by volume) with only a $5/month VPS, as long as you made it serve static pages and were judicious with your tech stack. The cost of hosting text alone wasn't prohibitive 20 years ago, and it's even less so today.
  - lacrimacida 3y ago
    Video and images could he links too
  - rglullis 3y ago
    Media is (ought) to be stored in a shared, content addressable storage system like torrent magnet links and IPFS. Backed by something like Tahoe-LAFS.
    - rapnie 3y ago
      OT, but via the UI design thread on HN, I just bumped into noosphere protocol, which claims to be just like what you describe here. https://subconscious.substack.com/p/noosphere-a-protocol-for-thought https://subconscious.substack.com/p/noosphere-a-protocol-for...
benignobject 3y ago
Great to see a Mississippian on the top of HN
footlose_3815 3y ago
I don't really want to yuck the author's yum, because they're obviously in a period of exploration and having fun, but I don't think this is a good solution. I forget the name of the guy, or his project, but I recall some "Innovator" was criticized years ago when they tried doing their own "meta-ICANN" + Social network. They said it was going to be the next WWW, but what they were really doing was promising web 3.0 in a silo, at-a-cost... This was maybe 1-2 years before Zuckerberg's Metaverse concept failed. I thought the reasons were obvious that it, or metaverse never succeeded. For beginners, I don't see how this is immune to all the same things that are wrong with ICANN. Except, this $20 is more expensive than most ICANN TLDs. Similar to ICANN woes, what's stopping spammers and bots from buying space and presence there like anywhere else? What's stopping squatters from buying your name here and holding it up, or quickly propping-up a celebrity to launch a money scam? Do you think once a service like this gets popular, that it's much different than Myspace? Is it really appropriate to send someone $20/year for this kind of thing? You can get a Github Pages for free, use Jekyll on it to run a blogging app, and get a <5$ .info domain, and you already have more than half the features here. The rest of the feature list is all interchangeable with some open source solution out there. With the price barrier (Any price, really) you will get selective participation based on people who eager to spend money on these kinds of memberships. So I'd say that this community has one thing in common, they are (bots or) people, who are eager to give their money away for that kind of convenience. I hesitate if I would ever want to be a part of that community even for free. Basically a Twitter badge in the shape of a trendy subdomain and blogpage that someone sub-leased out to you. You join someone's social silo and get to feel like you're in an enlightened club. And what of longevity? I assume you lose your blog, your domain, and your and invested work if you don't pay the subscription? Call me closed-minded, but this has "Sell it at-scale, get as much money as you can, and shut it down in a few years once I buy that Condo in the hills" kind of energy to me. It's just someone else trying to make their own metaverse, and that failed with Zuckerberg's money. Why would this succeed? I can't help but see it's just a new clean slate, with the same problems of the old formula, just waiting to be enshittified.
horsefaceman 3y ago
I love this, such a throwback.
jongjong 3y ago
> In the fall of 2022, I started using Twitter more. I don’t know why; probably a curious desire to see how bad Elon Musk would screw it up. I stopped reading there. I'm not interested in using a product made by someone who regurgitates ESG nonsense without thinking. I want these people and these ideologies out of my life. They need to do some soul-searching. What is bad about Elon that you want him to fail? Anyone who thinks that free speech is dangerous or harmful in any way obviously knows nothing about history and has fallen prey to propaganda.
- monooso 3y ago
  > What is bad about Elon that you want him to fail? Read the text you quoted again. The author doesn't say anything about wanting Musk to fail. > I stopped reading there. That's a shame. You missed out on a fun blog post.
- rglullis 3y ago
  Put aside the personality of Musk: - jacking up the price of the API - Removing chronological timeline completely, to the point that one can not simply get a list of one's tweets by going to their profile - his vision of the "everything app". - the "pay to play" aspect of the blue check. Are more than enough reason for me to want Twitter to fail. I do not want a social media that favors those who are paying, and I do not want a company that started a simple communications platform to become even more of an ubiquitous device for Surveillance Capitalism.
  - jongjong 3y ago
    My experience is that before Musk, I felt like I was shadow-banned. No engagement. Also, as a consumer, the content was basically the same junk as all other media platforms. Now I feel like I'm getting all the latest news and things are actually happening. Small interactions between regular people are taking place again. It's not just some centralized mainstream broadcast platform as it used to be. It's way better.
    - rglullis 3y ago
rglullis 3y ago
I do not want to hijack the thread, but I can't help but look at this and think at how many things I seem to have gotten wrong with communick. Both of them seem to have a similar purpose: to be a place to offer a bunch of services that can work as alternatives to the Big platforms, and to charge a modest but fair price for it. Everything else, I seem to have gotten wrong. I was convinced that issues of network effects could be mitigated by offering group packages (so that you could come and bring your friends along). Turns out that thinking was from my time working at phone companies who offer "family and friends" plans, which is not something that people do online. People might be online friends, but seldom they will care about sharing a package group. I thought that the people who would be geeky enough to want their own DNS would already have had their own domain, so it never occurred to me to add subdomain spaces. I thought that having separate packages for each service would let people pick whatever they want, but in the end it seems that making a single plan with a single price makes for a much more compelling product. Seeing omg.lol at the top of HN is amazing validation of the business model that I think needs to grow to help us get rid of Big Tech, but holy shit do I need help with product and biz development.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  I think this stuff isn't the easiest discover. "Do your market research" excludes what people might buy if presented to them. Plus the see it 7 times to buy effect. I am tempted to buy this, partly having seen on HN before, and partly for one feature - the DNS. In my case it would stop me buying domain names for toy projects, just anotherllmthing.myname.omg.lol. The silly TLD is sort of a bonus, it forces me to show it as an MVP!. Although this scratch is somewhat itched for free by Netlify and Vercel, so...
Always_Anon 3y ago
[flagged]
- notRobot 3y ago
  Do you know of any websites with actual full free speech?
  - Always_Anon 3y ago
    4chan, 8chan, Kiwifarms, et al. are about as close to that as you can get. Probably full free speech on some boards of 4chan and 8chan.
- sunwukung 3y ago
  Do you equate freedom of speech with "abuse, harassment, and harm"? Were these activities you wanted to perform in order to sign up?
  - Always_Anon 3y ago
    >Do you equate freedom of speech with "abuse, harassment, and harm"? Almost anything in CURRENT_YEAR can be interpreted as "abuse, harassment, and harm" by someone. Is saying "fuck Christianity and fuck White men" abusive, harassing, or harmful? What if Christians and White men interpret that as harmful? Will they take that down? >Were these activities you wanted to perform in order to sign up? Again, something as benign as "men cannot get pregnant" was a non-issue fifteen years ago. Now, that makes you a transphobic neo-Nazi.
    - cuyg 3y ago
      That would probably more likely get you a polite correction on that type of forum. Partly because it's kind of a niche argument but mostly because it only invalidates the beliefs of the women who want to be men, who are often sidelined by their own ideological movement in favor of the men who want to be women. By contrast, if you wanted to express some other truths that pertain to the latter group, such as "'trans women' are not actually women, they are men who desire to be women" or "there are a significant number of 'trans women' who 'identify' as women because they are men with a sissy porn fetish", then all their fury will be unleashed upon you. Even if you back it up with evidence and solid argument.
shusaku 3y ago
That’s a fun set of features, but I don’t see the connection with the community. You can browse their mastodon feed and it’s just a bunch of vaguely liberal vaguely tech posts? I’d like to see which accounts are using the services for a better community
- Always_Anon 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - acdha 3y ago
    Where I grew up, that was called being polite and it didn’t automatically rule out anything other that liberalism. There’s a ton of room between disagreement and harassment.
    - Sophistifunk 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - suction 3y ago
        [dead]
    - Always_Anon 3y ago
      >Where I grew up, that was called being polite and it didn’t automatically rule out anything other that liberalism. Where I grew up, that was called being polite and it didn’t automatically rule out anything other that conservatism. >There’s a ton of room between disagreement and harassment. There was a time where that may have been true, but we're far away from those times.
      - Novosell 3y ago
        Mind you, he said liberalism and not liberal. Modern day conservatives tend to be very pro-capitalism, which liberalism loved. Not sure when things got all turned around in America. Liberalism = smaller government and a free market. Yet in the US a "liberal" dislikes capitalism and wants more government? It's odd.
rammy1234 3y ago
Is this different from neocities ?
fuckyah 3y ago
[dead]
101008 3y ago
So like Bravenet but in 2023?
httpsterio 3y ago
I just joined after reading the post. This wasn't the first time I've heard of Omg.lol but I wasn't entirely convinced earlier. For a long while, I've felt kinda lonely online as all of the communities and little corners online I've been part off have slowly died. I guess I've sort of been digitally homeless. I really enjoy the latest trends when it comes to indieweb and digital gardens, people creating their own space instead of living on closed platforms, so this definitely hit all the marks for me. I don't think I've bought anything online faster than just now haha. Blake just cost me twenty quid, but I'm happy to vote with my feet instead of selling my data and attention to big corporations.
- footlose_3815 3y ago
  > Section 6.3 We may share personal information in connection with a corporate transaction, like a merger or sale of our company, the sale of most of our assets, or a bankruptcy. >Section 6.5 Except where explicitly stated to the contrary in this Policy, in some cases, particularly given the limited amount and type of information and data collected through omg.lol, we have not restricted contractors’ own use or disclosure of that information or data. We are not responsible for the conduct or policies of Stripe, or other contractors. INAL but that seems pretty cookie-cutter "Company is not ruling-out selling your data to others". https://home.omg.lol/info/legal https://home.omg.lol/info/legal
  - Arch485 3y ago
    Also not a lawyer, but that sounds more like "if another company acquires us, we will give your info to them" and then separately "Stripe might sell your data; we're not responsible for them". Which is rotally reasonable/expected imho.
    - computerex 3y ago
      >... we have not restricted contractors’ own use or disclosure of that information or data. We are not responsible for the conduct or policies of Stripe, or other contractors. I mean this seems pretty suspect for anyone privacy focused.
redder23 3y ago
[flagged]
- moxvallix 3y ago
  You seem like an absolute joy to be around.
UberFly 3y ago
Does "small internet" have to actively keep themselves small? What if something is so attractive everyone moves there. All the problems of big town follow. Always the conundrum.
stevebmark 3y ago
It takes blog posts to discover these because Mastodon micro communities aren't discoverable and no one knows which ones to sign up for. Mastodon has no long term potential. We're still waiting for the Twitter replacement.
- hiidrew 3y ago
  https://www.farcaster.xyz/ https://www.farcaster.xyz/ is an interesting alternative that's not bluesky
- golem14 3y ago
  Maybe that's a feature. Early Gopher was similar, and people adapted by writing hubs/directories. Not everyone needs their content to reach record # of visitors.
- inamberclad 3y ago
  What is the long-term potential supposed to be? Is Mastodon supposed to replace Twitter, or is it supposed to enhance the lives of people? I'm a member of several small forums that just don't grow. It's the same people each day, and that's fine. It's much closer to how human interactions work in real life. You don't join an ever-expanding pool of people where you strive to maximize your connections (or at least, I don't). Instead, you probably have a relatively small group of people that you hang out with more often.
  - ClimaxGravely 3y ago
    Even then I have a small fraction of the followers from twitter than I do on mastadon and I still get way more engagement. Both in numbers and quality. It's not oldschool forums quality but it feels a lot closer.
  - p-e-w 3y ago
    Well said. It's astonishing how much the corporate/capitalist mantra "if you're not growing, you're dying" has taken hold in the world of open source and free culture. People not only fail to realize how unsustainable and destructive that idea is, many don't even seem to know that alternative community models exist, and have been practiced since forever.
maxlin 3y ago
When a blog post starts with saying "twitter is dead" it doesn't really make it worth reading further. "Twitter is dead" was said pretty much as numerously as "2 more weeks" but it's off better than ever, with Community Notes having proved themselves and X now having proved its capability to serve its main mission by working as the town square on issues related to OpenAI, Gaza, etc, etc. Eventually, with subscriptions paying most of the bills, I hope the API access per-client is brought back without extra costs too. But even without, X does have pretty much everything it needs, and will only grow with time. You can't put a price on Freedom of Speech.
- twelvedogs 3y ago
  subscriptions are most of their income, they don't pay the bills at all
  - maxlin 3y ago
    That is simply not true. Subscriptions are at best at ~20% but lookin up. And yes they do actually pay bills, no landlord would have had them pause that for this long lol
- VerminOctopus1 3y ago
  I thought community notes already existed as bird watch before the takeover?
  - patcon 3y ago
    Yeah, Elon just rebranded it, and pushed fwd its full deployment I was fully bought into the premise of birdwatch due to it being based on a great tool I've worked with for years (Pol.is), but Elon seemed to have loved it for all the wrong reasons, in a way that irked me. He seemingly just wanted to cut the trust & safety teams, and remove onus of creating policy :/
    - maxlin 3y ago
      "loved it for all the wrong reasons" What? It sounds like you don't actually support the basis of Community Notes and were looking for it to be used selectively. No. Power to the people. Not power to the the bloated team that was on rails to destroy Twitter. I fucking loved the "print your code from the last 30 days" imitative in its crude efficiency. With that team, Twitter/X wouldn't exist in any form anymore even without the takeover.
deleted 3y ago
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temgkuasyraff 3y ago
[flagged]
darig 3y ago
[dead]
tyiz 3y ago
[flagged]
gdsdfe 3y ago
Woah people really hate AI on that mastodon instance
smsm42 3y ago
Opened the front page of the "community of the nicest, most interesting people". Here's what I found, omitting some jokes, "dear diary", etc (profanity omitted, light rephrasing to keep it short): AI is taking our jobs Trump is a liar MAGA republicans are plotting against democracy and Trump is Putin's puppet Trump is bad AOC is cool, she's showing that evil GOP Twitter is dying Christians are hateful bigots Republicans are Nazis Republicans hate women and want them to die Ayn Rand is stupid and I already realized it as a kid Hunter Biden is an innocent victim of a vast right wing conspiracy Elon Musk is evil and stupid Trump is stupid, while Obama is smart I didn't search for that on purpose or anything, didn't time it, just opened the first page at the random moment and scrolled for a couple of screens. It's not 100% of content, but what I described is the majority of it. Maybe I got particularly unlucky. But if I haven't, I fail to recognize how it's different from 99% of reddit or anywhere else on the internet? Which is the part I am supposed to be impressed with, where was my nostalgia for the Internet of the olden days supposed to wake up (and yes, I was there, Gandalf)? I'm just not getting it. I mean, I have nothing against people getting together and having one more place out of millions to discuss all the ways Trump is stupid and evil, but I feel like that's not exactly what the description in the article promised me.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- elxx 3y ago
  Anyone can look at the live feed here and see that this is made up: https://social.lol/public/local https://social.lol/public/local I had to scroll through over 24 hours of posts before hitting anything political, an article about abortion in Texas. Definitely not the majority of the content and it took way more scrolling than a couple of screens. I still haven't seen anything else on your list yet.
  - coldpie 3y ago
    While that guy obviously has an axe to grind, if you visit the main page of that URL there's plenty of tiresome politics all over the place: https://social.lol/ https://social.lol/ It seems to be coming from different instances, though. I have no idea how Mastodon chooses what content to show on that page.
famahar 3y ago
Looks fun. I'm considering signing up but I think I'd just be more happy not having a heavy online presence. Twitter falling apart made me really enjoy being offline and connecting with friends and family. Small community is key I find. omg seems like the right direction in this regard.
DarnyEscoba 3y ago
[dead]
Tomte 3y ago
I signed up last year when it hit HN big. I didn't really found access to the community (which is my fault), but I love the feature set, and am debating with my self whether to extend the membership. 20 dollars is little to me, but it's another thing in the back of my mind where "I should do something with it". Mastodon totally doesn't interest me, it turned out, that was a big argument for joining omg.lol back then.
bandrami 3y ago
OK, just spent twenty bucks. Don't regret it.
bkeating 3y ago
Thought you were referring to https://o.mg.lol/ https://o.mg.lol/ lol
- kennedy 3y ago
  ohh this is cool
sproketboy 3y ago
[dead]
dataengineer56 3y ago
rdrama is the closest thing that I've found to recreating that "old web" feeling, but it comes with caveats and it's not for the faint of heart.
mortallywounded 3y ago
I'm holding out for omg.lawl
krick 3y ago
I never figured out how to use Mastodon and the likes. Can somebody explain? I mean, I would know how to use it if my goal was self-indulgent shitposting or very questionable marketing strategy, but these services are always mentioned as an alternative to Twitter, and Twitter is primarily a news-feed (which probably works because some other famous people are engaged in shitposting and marketing strategies, but this is none of my concern — for me it's just a news-feed).
riow 3y ago
omg.lol! Finally, a solution to... absolutely none of the problems we actually have. If your biggest issue was not having a quirky domain name to share memes, congratulations, your prayers have been answered! #FirstWorldSolutions
benjamim 3y ago
I love everything omg.lol offers. I've been a customer for more than a year now. And recently bought another two more years. After reading the comments. I think most of you have no idea what this service is. For example: If you want to know where the customers are you have a map for that: https://home.omg.lol/map https://home.omg.lol/map (is optionally appear on the map) This is my: - Twitter: https://benjamim.status.lol/ https://benjamim.status.lol/ (what I write here it's cross-post to mastodon) - Flickr: https://benjamim.some.pics/ https://benjamim.some.pics/ - Blog: https://benjamim.weblog.lol/ https://benjamim.weblog.lol/ This is just a glimpse from a super "happy client". And if you have any questions, I'm sure you just need to ask Prami (https://social.lol/@prami https://social.lol/@prami) and he'll answer them. Benjamim (https://benjamim.omg.lol https://benjamim.omg.lol)
- Ikatza 3y ago
  Do you have a referral code?
  - benjamim 3y ago
    Hum... I think everyone one have one, you can read more here: https://home.omg.lol/info/referrals https://home.omg.lol/info/referrals

820 points by blakewatson 3y ago

Just joined using your referral code. Thanks Blake!

I've been using Omg.lol for around a year now (Cian.lol) and am really enjoying it. It's just so simple - it feels like travelling back in time to when we wrote blog posts and made websites to share with our friends, not to Create Content.

lannisterstark 3y ago
I skimmed OPs post, and then read yours, and I'm still a bit confused as to how it's different than just hosting a mishmash of different but related services yourself. If you could not, yes that's fine. But if you could, what really are the advantages?
- tw04 3y ago
  Presumably the mastadon integration. Think twitter with your profile directly tied to your personal site - except not twitter.
  - cianmm 3y ago
    I actually don't really use the social stuff all that much. I already have a mastodon account on a country-specific server, and I'm not much of an IRC/Discord user
- alexeldeib 3y ago
  This is the classic Dropbox criticism, no? Moreover, the pleasure has nothing to do with self hosting or not, it’s just a pleasant and whimsical UX while being technically solid.
- graypegg 3y ago
  I think you kind of answered your question, no? Setting up web things, especially when they have a chance to get quite bursty hug-of-death traffic, is hard for most people. I'd prefer to set things up myself but I know that places me in a verrrrry small minority of folks.
- cianmm 3y ago
  I argue with computers for my day job, I don’t want to do that after work hours too. I’m happy to pay somebody else (especially Adam who is just so active with the community) a fairly paltry sum to do it for me.
  - lannisterstark 3y ago
    To be entirely fair (in my situation), what I do at work and what I find fun to do with computers are two different things :P
    - bruh2 3y ago
      So true. I reached a point where the tools I fiddle with at home have such an overlap with the ones I use at work, with Python and Ansible being the uncanny leaders. I feared – in vain – losing the ability to enjoy hacking as a hobby. They just don't feel the same, y'know?
- rsynnott 3y ago
  Hosting all of this stuff on your own would be a lot of fuss which most people wouldn’t want to bother with.
- soulofmischief 3y ago
  Just because I can manage a service doesn't mean I want to all the time. I'm a busy guy and already have client infrastructure to manage. At a point in my life where I'm trying to cut down on things I have to tend to.
- stjohnswarts 3y ago
  I suspect that it's simply ease of use. Sure you can use a mish mash of self hosting, online dedicated services, etc, but this looks more simple and cohesive and for $20 a year you don't have to worry about the overhead of all those other things, you just add the content you want and don't worry about the details.
tambourine_man 3y ago
That internet is not dead, you know? It’s just the the other part grew so massively. There are still people writing blog posts and websites that don’t require you to dismiss 5 popups before you can interact with it. It can be done.
- lacrimacida 3y ago
  It’s just hard to find. Google returns trash
  - larrysalibra 3y ago
    Try out kagi...they have a filter for "smallweb" posts: https://kagi.com/smallweb https://kagi.com/smallweb The list of sites is on github: https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb
  - rtpg 3y ago
    It's wild to think about how anybody found info back in the day. Forums were probably the big one I guess? There was always something magical about being linked to forum and finding a wealth of info there, and entire domains of knowledge. FWIW stuff linked from HN & friends is not always the best, but I am pretty agressive about sticking RSS feeds from blogs that get linked here. That gives an inflow of interesting stuff people find. It's not a thing you can do in one go, but after a while you have a lot of neat stuff from people who cared enough to post it.
    - monkeywork 3y ago
      webrings, IRC, forums and mailing lists, etc.
    - 8372049 3y ago
      Back in the day you got actually useful results from search engines.
    - joquarky 3y ago
      Yahoo was originally a text file small enough to fit on a 1.44 floppy disk
cwoolfe 3y ago
How did you get cian.lol? Why isn't it cian.omg.lol?
- Tomte 3y ago
  You can register domains yourself and set them up, under "Switchboard" --> "External Domain Routes"

tonymet 3y ago

goes to show there's still lot of creativity left in the web. web pages, DNS, email forwarding, vanity domains -- i'm glad to see hackers tinkering and exploring what the next gen web looks like. Otherwise we'll lose it to commercialism and walled gardens.

kibwen 3y ago

This is exactly what I've been thinking about making recently as a response to the enshittification of the web: a single site that just collects a small number of useful, simple web apps that I could share with other people who are tired of being perversely monetized by ads and VCs. Utterly brilliant, thanks for sharing!

lopis 3y ago
Do it. The more the merrier.
lannisterstark 3y ago
I just self host stuff on my domain and link them to a Flame dashboard for family and friends. https://github.com/pawelmalak/flame https://github.com/pawelmalak/flame Dashboard is only accessible by my wireguard network, Which they can turn the LAN mode on on, so it doesn't route all their traffic, just to the local domain.
unshavedyak 3y ago
You’ve got me thinking the same thing. Omg.lol seems as interesting as it is enticing me to build a similar thing for fun.
ghewgill 3y ago
There are various similar communities, which don't have to compete with one another because the internet is a big place. Two that jump to mind are https://tildeverse.org https://tildeverse.org and https://disroot.org https://disroot.org.

shermantanktop 3y ago

“omg.lol is unabashedly built with PHP” PHP is on my mental list of forever-security-challenged tech, but it got on that list a long time ago. It’s 2023, is that still a reasonable concern?

mattl 3y ago
No, modern PHP frameworks have come a long way.
Retr0id 3y ago
Speaking as someone who has pentested a few PHP codebases over the years, rather than as a developer, It's a bit like C. That is, it's an absolute footgun in the wrong hands, and a lesser footgun in experienced hands. For experienced devs following best practices and using modern frameworks it's "mostly fine", and that's the side of things that's been improved over the years, but most of the old rakes are still there to be stood on.
- wvenable 3y ago
  > but most of the old rakes are still there to be stood on. I don't think that's necessarily true -- a lot of features have been deprecated and removed.
  - kemayo 3y ago
    Most notably, in 5.4.0 (in 2012!) they removed register_globals and magic_quotes. (Which had both been deprecated and off-by-default for a while before, I believe.) The former was notoriously insecure, as what it did was promote anything passed in as a cookie, GET, or POST variable into a global-scoped variable inside your script. Since PHP didn't require any sort of declaring-your-variables-before-using-them, it was pretty easy to wind up with scripts written in a way that would allow this an unwise amount of access to the script's internals. The latter automatically escaped special characters with backslashes in all the aforementioned user-provided variables so you could pass them straight into mysql queries. It was, however, optional and so caused errors because code got written relying on it and then ran on servers with it disabled, allowing SQL injection attacks... or double-escaping things in code written the other way around. But these days are long behind us!

dankwizard 3y ago

[flagged]

unshavedyak 3y ago
Well assuming for the sake of discussion that this isn’t a paid advertisement, it’s still clearly a glowing endorsement of the service, no? Is a glowing endorsement not allowed?
- dankwizard 3y ago
  Is an endorsement just running the homepage through ChatGPT and wording everything slightly differently?
  - unshavedyak 3y ago
    If it's your motivation to endorse and you choose to use GPT to do so, i'd think so? Though i'm not clear how the quality of the writing is relevant to whether or not this is sincere.
    - floren 3y ago
      If you can prompt GPT to write a blog post and you feel the results adequately represent your views, why not just post the prompt? "paste this into chatgpt 4 for the expanded version"
      - unshavedyak 3y ago
        No idea, when i started this discussion i didn't come prepared to defend/discuss GPT lol. Don't really have an opinion on GPT.
  - graypegg 3y ago
    The post contains some context about why they were looking for something like the service, gives a short review of why they like it, what they get for the cost, and the lists alternatives at the bottom. It seems quite human to me. Humans tend to talk about things they like. Just shouting "chatGPT wrote this!" isn't really a comment on anything. It's just provocative enough to feel like it's a criticism while also being both totally unrefutable and unprovable.

graypegg 3y ago

Hey this is great! While I don't know if it's for me, I know tons of folks that will love this. Good find! The only thing that I think is missing is a onboarding tool to create an account from another existing mastodon instance rather than by buying a domain and getting a new masto account via that process, call it forklift.omg.lol or something. :)

toomuchtodo 3y ago

Very nice, purchased a handle to support. And passkey support is chef kiss.

bovermyer 3y ago

I checked out Omg.lol when it first got popular on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34269772 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34269772). At the time, I thought it was an amalgamation of things I already did on my own or otherwise had a community for (e.g., Neocities, Tilde Town). Now, though, I think I get it. There's something to be said for sustained energy.

bovermyer 3y ago
OK, I bit. Here's my spot: https://dungeonhack.omg.lol/ https://dungeonhack.omg.lol/ I look forward to meeting you!
- blakewatson 3y ago
  OP here, just wanted to say your tabletop links page is chef's kiss.
jadbox 3y ago
> Now, though, I think I get it. What do you get now?
- bovermyer 3y ago
  The community vibe. The energy. The reason for something technologically commonplace to be exceptional and worth interest.
rambambram 3y ago
Nice blog you have there! My RSS reader finds a feed on your website, but has problems showing it. It seems to validate as a valid Atom feed, so I was wondering if you ever heard before of external sites not being able to load it?
- bovermyer 3y ago
  If you're talking about my personal site https://benovermyer.com https://benovermyer.com, no, I have not heard of problems rendering the RSS for it. If you are having issues I would like as much detail as you can provide.

PenguinRevolver 3y ago

It's nice, the only problem I got with omg.lol is that Wayback Machine archives are unavailable for all domains. I'm concerned that this part of the internet won't be saved for others to see in the future.

yellow_lead 3y ago
Is there a reason for that or they just haven't been archived yet?
- Ringz 3y ago
  Unlikely. Some people archive every page they visit.
blakewatson 3y ago
Oh wow, you’re right. I wonder what’s up with that.
politelemon 3y ago
Just tried and I see someone else also tried after seeing your comment. > The same snapshot had been made 25 minutes ago. You can make new capture of this URL after 1 hour. But yeah it's strange, nothing appears in the archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://bw.omg.lol/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://bw.omg.l...
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  It’s possible the site owner has asked the Archive to dark site specific captures. Capture jobs will still run, but they won’t be available publicly (until some future date). You can always run your own crawls with grab site: https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/grab-site https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/grab-site
contrarian1234 3y ago
I think that's great.. archiving should be opt-in not opt-out You can read and access my work/words as I want. And once I don't or change my mind you can't. Once someone posts something, you don't have a right to it in perpetuity .. That's how things should work - but that's just my opinion

nicbou 3y ago

If omg.lol is an oasis, this post was a stranger offering you a sip. What a refreshingly nice and personal post!

NanoYohaneTSU 3y ago
It's an ad bro
- footlose_3815 3y ago
  It certainly feels like it.
- beardicus 3y ago
  are you saying the author was paid for this post? seems like an enthusiastic user to me. do you know what an advertisement is?

1B05H1N 3y ago

Sorry, why would I pay 20/year bucks for this when I have my own website/infra?

james_pm 3y ago
I happily pay $20/year so I don't need to worry about it. Not everyone can or wants to run their own infra.
airstrike 3y ago
So that you don't have to worry about outages, updates, bugfixes, certs, permissions, vulnerabilities, ... like you do on your own website/infra?
- akho 3y ago
  It's the same infrastructure, with the same outages. The other points are something for the developers of your software distribution to worry about, same as if you buy a packaged service.
erxam 3y ago
Even without taking into account the time investment in maintaining your own infra, it compares favorably with everything else. Even the most dirt-cheap VPS is a few bucks more expensive on a yearly basis by itself, and you still have to buy domains and similar. Running your own infra only really works out if you either have access to great hardware for super-cheap or WANT the experience from setting everything up.
- cipheredStones 3y ago
  It consistently surprises me how much software engineers devalue the effort of software engineering when it comes to their personal lives. If you're a SWE in an English-speaking country, you almost certainly make $20 post-tax for at most one hour of work - 30m at SV salaries, as little as 15m if you're at a FAANG-ish company. Is it conceivable that you would spend less than an hour a year maintaining something like this if you were to do it yourself? I don't think so. Most people can't earn money in increments of one additional hour, of course, but it still sounds strange to hear people say "why should I spend [the amount of money I earn in half an hour] per year when I could just do it myself [with an amount of professional effort I would expect to be paid 20x as much for]?"

umairj 3y ago

Thank you. Just bought it as it looks one and partially because my initials were available. Kind of a sign :D. Otherwise it will be one of many domains I’ll have to manage for a year ;)

camdenlock 3y ago

> I don’t know why; probably a curious desire to see how bad Elon Musk would screw it up It’s been interesting to watch people go from nerd-crushing on Elon (omg rockets! omg electric vehicles yay climate!) to loathing him in the blink of an eye. Goes to show what’s really important to some people…

AlexAffe 3y ago
Elon bashing is 99% some companies campaign. There is an amount of money involved beyond our wildest imagination. World economy kind of money. You don't read Elon and Tesla content on reddit frontpage with 30k ups on average almost 24/7 without there being companies involved spending heavily.
- meepmorp 3y ago
  Instead of a conspiracy or coordinated campaign against Elon Musk, what if a lot of people have come to think that he's a douchebag and upvote links about him saying/doing what they see as douchey things? Maybe he's actually done some stuff over the last few years that's made him genuinely unpopular with a lot of people; maybe it's not because "They" are trying to destroy him, but because many people actually find his behavior off-putting.
- jayveeone 3y ago
  Nah, he's just a deeply unlikeable jerk
  - AlexAffe 3y ago
    To you. That's your opinion. Maybe it's mine. But I will never go as far as to state something like my opinion as universially true. You do that. What makes you do that?
    - metabagel 3y ago
      Does everything have to end with “in my opinion”? Isn’t that implied?

tambourine_man 3y ago

“omg.lol is unabashedly built with PHP” I already like you

contrarian1234 3y ago

Seems a bit like Github pages but with more of a social angle to it. I kinda expected Github to go in this direction eventually - but keeping social elements out of Github might have been a smart move

bhasi 3y ago

The "web design in 4 min" linked to at the bottom of the page is very interesting.

bbx 3y ago
I didn’t realise it was linked to in this article. I built that on a whim several years ago. It’s more about what can be done in 4 min rather than what’s being done. But I’m glad it inspired people to try to style their own website themselves.
- blakewatson 3y ago
  OP here. I love that little site and I link to it often!
generic92034 3y ago
From that page: "What is the first thing you need to work on?" I would say, a page that is usable without scripts. ;)

damiante 3y ago

I love the idea of such smaller communities and the "old web" style of interaction, but for me the issue is one of discoverability. How do I find and follow people? Does anyone still use RSS, or are we relying on Mastodon/ActivityPub? Bavk in the day this was the purpose of search engines, but it seems that now such small pages are scarcely even indexed...

chongli 3y ago
Discoverability and smallness are at odds. This problem isn’t specific to the internet. That quaint, beautiful postcard town does not remain so once it’s been discovered. Eternal September happens everywhere.
- mmazing 3y ago
  > Discoverability and smallness are at odds. Is it really true on the internet though? omg.lol could presumably stay "small-appearing" and "quaint" and have millions of users. How could you really tell the difference? If it were all indexed you could drill down and find people who share your interests, that doesn't necessarily ruin the website, yeah?
  - OkayPhysicist 3y ago
    For published works (say, a blog), discoverability is probably a good thing. For communities, however, with many-to-many communication (forums, etc.), discoverability is an antifeature. Community building requires some degree of common ground, which obscurity naturally filters for. The other downside of mass-popularity is that above a certain scale, your community becomes a target. Both for individual bad actors (spammers, vandals, etc.) and for the apex predators of the small community world, commercial interests. Look at Maker Fair transitioning from a relatively niche convention of people showing off their cool stuff they made, and some miscellaneous sponsors and vendors looking to appeal to those people, to an over-commercialized affair with a thousand people trying to sell you a 3D printer, because that's the big moneymaker. Community norms are what makes spaces worth inhabiting, and they just don't scale well.
- 3y ago

kvathupo 3y ago

I like this. That said, I doubt we'll ever escape towards subscription-based social media models due to the prohibitive costs of CDNs, bandwidth, and storage for video/images. But I suppose it's a question of ends: do we want everyone on social media?

kibwen 3y ago
If you can live without video and images, you could comfortably host even a very large forum (on the order of the top 10% of subreddits by volume) with only a $5/month VPS, as long as you made it serve static pages and were judicious with your tech stack. The cost of hosting text alone wasn't prohibitive 20 years ago, and it's even less so today.
- lacrimacida 3y ago
  Video and images could he links too
- rglullis 3y ago
  Media is (ought) to be stored in a shared, content addressable storage system like torrent magnet links and IPFS. Backed by something like Tahoe-LAFS.
  - rapnie 3y ago
    OT, but via the UI design thread on HN, I just bumped into noosphere protocol, which claims to be just like what you describe here. https://subconscious.substack.com/p/noosphere-a-protocol-for-thought https://subconscious.substack.com/p/noosphere-a-protocol-for...

benignobject 3y ago

Great to see a Mississippian on the top of HN

footlose_3815 3y ago

I don't really want to yuck the author's yum, because they're obviously in a period of exploration and having fun, but I don't think this is a good solution. I forget the name of the guy, or his project, but I recall some "Innovator" was criticized years ago when they tried doing their own "meta-ICANN" + Social network. They said it was going to be the next WWW, but what they were really doing was promising web 3.0 in a silo, at-a-cost... This was maybe 1-2 years before Zuckerberg's Metaverse concept failed. I thought the reasons were obvious that it, or metaverse never succeeded. For beginners, I don't see how this is immune to all the same things that are wrong with ICANN. Except, this $20 is more expensive than most ICANN TLDs. Similar to ICANN woes, what's stopping spammers and bots from buying space and presence there like anywhere else? What's stopping squatters from buying your name here and holding it up, or quickly propping-up a celebrity to launch a money scam? Do you think once a service like this gets popular, that it's much different than Myspace? Is it really appropriate to send someone $20/year for this kind of thing? You can get a Github Pages for free, use Jekyll on it to run a blogging app, and get a <5$ .info domain, and you already have more than half the features here. The rest of the feature list is all interchangeable with some open source solution out there. With the price barrier (Any price, really) you will get selective participation based on people who eager to spend money on these kinds of memberships. So I'd say that this community has one thing in common, they are (bots or) people, who are eager to give their money away for that kind of convenience. I hesitate if I would ever want to be a part of that community even for free. Basically a Twitter badge in the shape of a trendy subdomain and blogpage that someone sub-leased out to you. You join someone's social silo and get to feel like you're in an enlightened club. And what of longevity? I assume you lose your blog, your domain, and your and invested work if you don't pay the subscription? Call me closed-minded, but this has "Sell it at-scale, get as much money as you can, and shut it down in a few years once I buy that Condo in the hills" kind of energy to me. It's just someone else trying to make their own metaverse, and that failed with Zuckerberg's money. Why would this succeed? I can't help but see it's just a new clean slate, with the same problems of the old formula, just waiting to be enshittified.

horsefaceman 3y ago

I love this, such a throwback.

jongjong 3y ago

> In the fall of 2022, I started using Twitter more. I don’t know why; probably a curious desire to see how bad Elon Musk would screw it up. I stopped reading there. I'm not interested in using a product made by someone who regurgitates ESG nonsense without thinking. I want these people and these ideologies out of my life. They need to do some soul-searching. What is bad about Elon that you want him to fail? Anyone who thinks that free speech is dangerous or harmful in any way obviously knows nothing about history and has fallen prey to propaganda.

monooso 3y ago
> What is bad about Elon that you want him to fail? Read the text you quoted again. The author doesn't say anything about wanting Musk to fail. > I stopped reading there. That's a shame. You missed out on a fun blog post.
rglullis 3y ago
Put aside the personality of Musk: - jacking up the price of the API - Removing chronological timeline completely, to the point that one can not simply get a list of one's tweets by going to their profile - his vision of the "everything app". - the "pay to play" aspect of the blue check. Are more than enough reason for me to want Twitter to fail. I do not want a social media that favors those who are paying, and I do not want a company that started a simple communications platform to become even more of an ubiquitous device for Surveillance Capitalism.
- jongjong 3y ago
  My experience is that before Musk, I felt like I was shadow-banned. No engagement. Also, as a consumer, the content was basically the same junk as all other media platforms. Now I feel like I'm getting all the latest news and things are actually happening. Small interactions between regular people are taking place again. It's not just some centralized mainstream broadcast platform as it used to be. It's way better.
  - rglullis 3y ago

rglullis 3y ago

I do not want to hijack the thread, but I can't help but look at this and think at how many things I seem to have gotten wrong with communick. Both of them seem to have a similar purpose: to be a place to offer a bunch of services that can work as alternatives to the Big platforms, and to charge a modest but fair price for it. Everything else, I seem to have gotten wrong. I was convinced that issues of network effects could be mitigated by offering group packages (so that you could come and bring your friends along). Turns out that thinking was from my time working at phone companies who offer "family and friends" plans, which is not something that people do online. People might be online friends, but seldom they will care about sharing a package group. I thought that the people who would be geeky enough to want their own DNS would already have had their own domain, so it never occurred to me to add subdomain spaces. I thought that having separate packages for each service would let people pick whatever they want, but in the end it seems that making a single plan with a single price makes for a much more compelling product. Seeing omg.lol at the top of HN is amazing validation of the business model that I think needs to grow to help us get rid of Big Tech, but holy shit do I need help with product and biz development.

quickthrower2 3y ago
I think this stuff isn't the easiest discover. "Do your market research" excludes what people might buy if presented to them. Plus the see it 7 times to buy effect. I am tempted to buy this, partly having seen on HN before, and partly for one feature - the DNS. In my case it would stop me buying domain names for toy projects, just anotherllmthing.myname.omg.lol. The silly TLD is sort of a bonus, it forces me to show it as an MVP!. Although this scratch is somewhat itched for free by Netlify and Vercel, so...

Always_Anon 3y ago

[flagged]

notRobot 3y ago
Do you know of any websites with actual full free speech?
- Always_Anon 3y ago
  4chan, 8chan, Kiwifarms, et al. are about as close to that as you can get. Probably full free speech on some boards of 4chan and 8chan.
sunwukung 3y ago
Do you equate freedom of speech with "abuse, harassment, and harm"? Were these activities you wanted to perform in order to sign up?
- Always_Anon 3y ago
  >Do you equate freedom of speech with "abuse, harassment, and harm"? Almost anything in CURRENT_YEAR can be interpreted as "abuse, harassment, and harm" by someone. Is saying "fuck Christianity and fuck White men" abusive, harassing, or harmful? What if Christians and White men interpret that as harmful? Will they take that down? >Were these activities you wanted to perform in order to sign up? Again, something as benign as "men cannot get pregnant" was a non-issue fifteen years ago. Now, that makes you a transphobic neo-Nazi.
  - cuyg 3y ago
    That would probably more likely get you a polite correction on that type of forum. Partly because it's kind of a niche argument but mostly because it only invalidates the beliefs of the women who want to be men, who are often sidelined by their own ideological movement in favor of the men who want to be women. By contrast, if you wanted to express some other truths that pertain to the latter group, such as "'trans women' are not actually women, they are men who desire to be women" or "there are a significant number of 'trans women' who 'identify' as women because they are men with a sissy porn fetish", then all their fury will be unleashed upon you. Even if you back it up with evidence and solid argument.

shusaku 3y ago

That’s a fun set of features, but I don’t see the connection with the community. You can browse their mastodon feed and it’s just a bunch of vaguely liberal vaguely tech posts? I’d like to see which accounts are using the services for a better community

Always_Anon 3y ago
[flagged]
- acdha 3y ago
  Where I grew up, that was called being polite and it didn’t automatically rule out anything other that liberalism. There’s a ton of room between disagreement and harassment.
  - Sophistifunk 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - suction 3y ago
      [dead]
  - Always_Anon 3y ago
    >Where I grew up, that was called being polite and it didn’t automatically rule out anything other that liberalism. Where I grew up, that was called being polite and it didn’t automatically rule out anything other that conservatism. >There’s a ton of room between disagreement and harassment. There was a time where that may have been true, but we're far away from those times.
    - Novosell 3y ago
      Mind you, he said liberalism and not liberal. Modern day conservatives tend to be very pro-capitalism, which liberalism loved. Not sure when things got all turned around in America. Liberalism = smaller government and a free market. Yet in the US a "liberal" dislikes capitalism and wants more government? It's odd.

rammy1234 3y ago

Is this different from neocities ?

fuckyah 3y ago

[dead]

101008 3y ago

So like Bravenet but in 2023?

httpsterio 3y ago

I just joined after reading the post. This wasn't the first time I've heard of Omg.lol but I wasn't entirely convinced earlier. For a long while, I've felt kinda lonely online as all of the communities and little corners online I've been part off have slowly died. I guess I've sort of been digitally homeless. I really enjoy the latest trends when it comes to indieweb and digital gardens, people creating their own space instead of living on closed platforms, so this definitely hit all the marks for me. I don't think I've bought anything online faster than just now haha. Blake just cost me twenty quid, but I'm happy to vote with my feet instead of selling my data and attention to big corporations.

footlose_3815 3y ago
> Section 6.3 We may share personal information in connection with a corporate transaction, like a merger or sale of our company, the sale of most of our assets, or a bankruptcy. >Section 6.5 Except where explicitly stated to the contrary in this Policy, in some cases, particularly given the limited amount and type of information and data collected through omg.lol, we have not restricted contractors’ own use or disclosure of that information or data. We are not responsible for the conduct or policies of Stripe, or other contractors. INAL but that seems pretty cookie-cutter "Company is not ruling-out selling your data to others". https://home.omg.lol/info/legal https://home.omg.lol/info/legal
- Arch485 3y ago
  Also not a lawyer, but that sounds more like "if another company acquires us, we will give your info to them" and then separately "Stripe might sell your data; we're not responsible for them". Which is rotally reasonable/expected imho.
  - computerex 3y ago
    >... we have not restricted contractors’ own use or disclosure of that information or data. We are not responsible for the conduct or policies of Stripe, or other contractors. I mean this seems pretty suspect for anyone privacy focused.

redder23 3y ago

[flagged]

moxvallix 3y ago
You seem like an absolute joy to be around.

UberFly 3y ago

Does "small internet" have to actively keep themselves small? What if something is so attractive everyone moves there. All the problems of big town follow. Always the conundrum.

stevebmark 3y ago

It takes blog posts to discover these because Mastodon micro communities aren't discoverable and no one knows which ones to sign up for. Mastodon has no long term potential. We're still waiting for the Twitter replacement.

hiidrew 3y ago
https://www.farcaster.xyz/ https://www.farcaster.xyz/ is an interesting alternative that's not bluesky
golem14 3y ago
Maybe that's a feature. Early Gopher was similar, and people adapted by writing hubs/directories. Not everyone needs their content to reach record # of visitors.
inamberclad 3y ago
What is the long-term potential supposed to be? Is Mastodon supposed to replace Twitter, or is it supposed to enhance the lives of people? I'm a member of several small forums that just don't grow. It's the same people each day, and that's fine. It's much closer to how human interactions work in real life. You don't join an ever-expanding pool of people where you strive to maximize your connections (or at least, I don't). Instead, you probably have a relatively small group of people that you hang out with more often.
- ClimaxGravely 3y ago
  Even then I have a small fraction of the followers from twitter than I do on mastadon and I still get way more engagement. Both in numbers and quality. It's not oldschool forums quality but it feels a lot closer.
- p-e-w 3y ago
  Well said. It's astonishing how much the corporate/capitalist mantra "if you're not growing, you're dying" has taken hold in the world of open source and free culture. People not only fail to realize how unsustainable and destructive that idea is, many don't even seem to know that alternative community models exist, and have been practiced since forever.

maxlin 3y ago

When a blog post starts with saying "twitter is dead" it doesn't really make it worth reading further. "Twitter is dead" was said pretty much as numerously as "2 more weeks" but it's off better than ever, with Community Notes having proved themselves and X now having proved its capability to serve its main mission by working as the town square on issues related to OpenAI, Gaza, etc, etc. Eventually, with subscriptions paying most of the bills, I hope the API access per-client is brought back without extra costs too. But even without, X does have pretty much everything it needs, and will only grow with time. You can't put a price on Freedom of Speech.

twelvedogs 3y ago
subscriptions are most of their income, they don't pay the bills at all
- maxlin 3y ago
  That is simply not true. Subscriptions are at best at ~20% but lookin up. And yes they do actually pay bills, no landlord would have had them pause that for this long lol
VerminOctopus1 3y ago
I thought community notes already existed as bird watch before the takeover?
- patcon 3y ago
  Yeah, Elon just rebranded it, and pushed fwd its full deployment I was fully bought into the premise of birdwatch due to it being based on a great tool I've worked with for years (Pol.is), but Elon seemed to have loved it for all the wrong reasons, in a way that irked me. He seemingly just wanted to cut the trust & safety teams, and remove onus of creating policy :/
  - maxlin 3y ago
    "loved it for all the wrong reasons" What? It sounds like you don't actually support the basis of Community Notes and were looking for it to be used selectively. No. Power to the people. Not power to the the bloated team that was on rails to destroy Twitter. I fucking loved the "print your code from the last 30 days" imitative in its crude efficiency. With that team, Twitter/X wouldn't exist in any form anymore even without the takeover.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

temgkuasyraff 3y ago

[flagged]

darig 3y ago

[dead]

tyiz 3y ago

[flagged]

gdsdfe 3y ago

Woah people really hate AI on that mastodon instance

smsm42 3y ago

Opened the front page of the "community of the nicest, most interesting people". Here's what I found, omitting some jokes, "dear diary", etc (profanity omitted, light rephrasing to keep it short): AI is taking our jobs Trump is a liar MAGA republicans are plotting against democracy and Trump is Putin's puppet Trump is bad AOC is cool, she's showing that evil GOP Twitter is dying Christians are hateful bigots Republicans are Nazis Republicans hate women and want them to die Ayn Rand is stupid and I already realized it as a kid Hunter Biden is an innocent victim of a vast right wing conspiracy Elon Musk is evil and stupid Trump is stupid, while Obama is smart I didn't search for that on purpose or anything, didn't time it, just opened the first page at the random moment and scrolled for a couple of screens. It's not 100% of content, but what I described is the majority of it. Maybe I got particularly unlucky. But if I haven't, I fail to recognize how it's different from 99% of reddit or anywhere else on the internet? Which is the part I am supposed to be impressed with, where was my nostalgia for the Internet of the olden days supposed to wake up (and yes, I was there, Gandalf)? I'm just not getting it. I mean, I have nothing against people getting together and having one more place out of millions to discuss all the ways Trump is stupid and evil, but I feel like that's not exactly what the description in the article promised me.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
elxx 3y ago
Anyone can look at the live feed here and see that this is made up: https://social.lol/public/local https://social.lol/public/local I had to scroll through over 24 hours of posts before hitting anything political, an article about abortion in Texas. Definitely not the majority of the content and it took way more scrolling than a couple of screens. I still haven't seen anything else on your list yet.
- coldpie 3y ago
  While that guy obviously has an axe to grind, if you visit the main page of that URL there's plenty of tiresome politics all over the place: https://social.lol/ https://social.lol/ It seems to be coming from different instances, though. I have no idea how Mastodon chooses what content to show on that page.

famahar 3y ago

Looks fun. I'm considering signing up but I think I'd just be more happy not having a heavy online presence. Twitter falling apart made me really enjoy being offline and connecting with friends and family. Small community is key I find. omg seems like the right direction in this regard.

DarnyEscoba 3y ago

[dead]

Tomte 3y ago

I signed up last year when it hit HN big. I didn't really found access to the community (which is my fault), but I love the feature set, and am debating with my self whether to extend the membership. 20 dollars is little to me, but it's another thing in the back of my mind where "I should do something with it". Mastodon totally doesn't interest me, it turned out, that was a big argument for joining omg.lol back then.

bandrami 3y ago

OK, just spent twenty bucks. Don't regret it.

bkeating 3y ago

Thought you were referring to https://o.mg.lol/ https://o.mg.lol/ lol

kennedy 3y ago
ohh this is cool

sproketboy 3y ago

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dataengineer56 3y ago

rdrama is the closest thing that I've found to recreating that "old web" feeling, but it comes with caveats and it's not for the faint of heart.

mortallywounded 3y ago

I'm holding out for omg.lawl

krick 3y ago

I never figured out how to use Mastodon and the likes. Can somebody explain? I mean, I would know how to use it if my goal was self-indulgent shitposting or very questionable marketing strategy, but these services are always mentioned as an alternative to Twitter, and Twitter is primarily a news-feed (which probably works because some other famous people are engaged in shitposting and marketing strategies, but this is none of my concern — for me it's just a news-feed).

riow 3y ago

omg.lol! Finally, a solution to... absolutely none of the problems we actually have. If your biggest issue was not having a quirky domain name to share memes, congratulations, your prayers have been answered! #FirstWorldSolutions

benjamim 3y ago

I love everything omg.lol offers. I've been a customer for more than a year now. And recently bought another two more years. After reading the comments. I think most of you have no idea what this service is. For example: If you want to know where the customers are you have a map for that: https://home.omg.lol/map https://home.omg.lol/map (is optionally appear on the map) This is my: - Twitter: https://benjamim.status.lol/ https://benjamim.status.lol/ (what I write here it's cross-post to mastodon) - Flickr: https://benjamim.some.pics/ https://benjamim.some.pics/ - Blog: https://benjamim.weblog.lol/ https://benjamim.weblog.lol/ This is just a glimpse from a super "happy client". And if you have any questions, I'm sure you just need to ask Prami (https://social.lol/@prami https://social.lol/@prami) and he'll answer them. Benjamim (https://benjamim.omg.lol https://benjamim.omg.lol)

Ikatza 3y ago
Do you have a referral code?
- benjamim 3y ago
  Hum... I think everyone one have one, you can read more here: https://home.omg.lol/info/referrals https://home.omg.lol/info/referrals