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> Nekoweb is a free static website hosting service, created in 2024 by a group of coders, programmers and artists, passionate for the old web and personal websi

> Nekoweb is a free static website hosting service, created in 2024 by a group of coders, programmers and artists, passionate for the old web and personal websites. > Join us on our discord to chat with the community and the developers! Gating discussion of the open web in a proprietary service is an interesting decision. Shows that we're still far too reliant on closed protocols for even smaller nontrivial tasks like making a message board.

tr3ntg 3y ago
Welcome to HackerNews, a proprietary service
- yoavm 3y ago
  At least you can use Hacker News without an account. You can probably even read the news and discussions here with curl.
  - ambigious7777 3y ago
    I think you can also use Discord without an account (sort-of). If you get an invite you can use a temporary account. From my recent expirenence though, it seems like this feature is a little broken with it requesting email verification.
- littlestymaar 3y ago
  Nobody is talking about IP here, it's about using standard and open protocols. HN and Nekoweb are both proprietary services, that's fine, but they run on HTTP and the only thing you need to interact with it is a web browser of some sort, whereas nekoweb's discord “server” relies on a third party (Discord) and uses a nonstandard closed protocol.
  - jerbear4328 3y ago
    Discord runs in the browser, same as HN. And the HTTP APIs they use aren't officially documented (except HN's read-only ones via Firebase and Algolia) (though both are easily reverse engineered and OSS frontends exist). There's not much difference.
    - littlestymaar 3y ago
      The big difference is that Discord is a third party here. Nekoweb, like HN, could implement their own first party forum, but instead rely on a centralized third party from which they cannot migrate. It's very far from the “passionate for the old web and personal websites” stance they are marketing in their pitch. Also AFAIK you cannot be banned from HN for using the API, whereas Discord will ban you for any “misuse”. You also don't need to be logged-in to access HN, which is also indexable by search engines, whereas Discord isn't.
    - anthk 3y ago
      Discord it's a cage. HN can be accesed by JS-less browsers and the content will be indexable by any web search engine. There's a huge difference.
  - busk07 3y ago
    By your reasoning, any backend that’s not accessible directly by the user is proprietary. HN would then also be proprietary, because it relies on a third party (HN) and uses a nonstandard closed protocol (this comment section). Any website that stores data and exposes it via their own UI is proprietary (I leave this vague on purpose, as it is up to interpretation). Discord can be run in the browser and is accessible via APIs. I think it’s as open as any other web app by a company that has a commercial interest. Services like Discord have lowered the entry barrier for non-technical conversation and community-building online. It certainly seems to be polarizing. I’ve noticed a lot of my friends and colleagues either embrace it or despise it. I wouldn’t mind an open-source alternative to it, but with the extensive features that it offers that’s hard to achieve.
    - littlestymaar 3y ago
      > By your reasoning, any backend that’s not accessible directly by the user is proprietary I've never said such thing. It doesn't matter if you can access things directly: proprietary means it's not FOSS, that's it. > Discord can be run in the browser and is accessible via APIs. I think it’s as open as any other web app by a company that has a commercial interest You need an account to browse Discord, which they can take away from you anytime. If you lose your account you lose your membership to any invite-only communities you belong to, which can be a big deal if you don't have other means to communicate with them to get invited back. Also, Discord isn't indexable by search engines. So, no there's a big difference between Discord and most web forums. Also, I don't have anything in particular against Discord (it's miles ahead of Slack in UX for instance, which I hate with a passion), but when people advertise themselves as fans of the old web, and link to their Discord, one can only smirk from the irony.
      - iCarrot 3y ago
        Kinda weird to start talking FOSS when the website itself never ever claimed to have anything to do with FOSS. What does search engines indexability have to do with FOSS? There's no shortage of old school forums locked behind membership system, not indexable by any search engines. Also Discord is an instant messaging software and not "web". It just happens to have a web frontend. It's OK to be nostalgic of the old web but not the old instant messaging softwares.
xk_id 3y ago
Haha I’m glad I’m not the only one who noticed the irony. It really devalues the whole thing. The next phase in online consumer culture will certainly be the commodification of the old web: reduced to a performative aesthetic, divorced from its original substance.
- kofani 3y ago
  Ye it what artists and designers talks, the trend cycle.
- infecto 3y ago
  What irony? It is made for the artistic look and feel of websites as they once were. Seems to have nothing to do with the "open web" as you might like to put it.
- jamilton 3y ago
  You'd be lucky if that's the next phase, more likely it's just more Twitters and Facebooks.
NPC82 3y ago
The people of Nekoweb demand an IRC server -- maybe, IDK.
derrida 3y ago
I really don't get the discord phenomena, it seems like more bloatware and demands on attention and notifications - I mean - IRC is right there and you can at least control your own attention span however you want.
- erremerre 3y ago
  Try asking a question in a IRC, and in a Discord, and you will get the phenomena is just that in discord at least someone answer you.
- 0xEF 3y ago
  I didn't get it either. At first. Then I had a reason to use it. I am a long time IRC user, and still use that to this day, but in a much less frequent capacity. IRC is a comparative ghost town when thrown up against Discord. Part of the reason for that is accessibility. Discord does everything IRC does in terms of channels, bots, etc, but packages it in a UI that the masses can easily consume. The addition of voice without having to run Teamspeak or something alongside like we did back in the day. A stable mobile app brings it all together in a portable, easy-to-use package. I resisted it for awhile, with my younger friends adopting it fairly quickly. Then small businesses and we apps started using it and suddenly half the things I interacted with on a daily basis had their own Discord server. So, I broke rank and tried it What I found were a few key communities relevant to my interests that were having actual neverending conversations about this I like. Compared to IRC, where response time can be days for any type of question, and that's if someone is in the mood to be friendly instead of crufty. This is the primary reason why I stay in Discord and IRC is just sort of collecting dust in my world. The community either aged out or just became so jaded that they made it inhospitable.
  - imdsm 3y ago
    Had the same experience more or less. I was on IRC during 9/11, and many other major world events, and it's key to my online experiences back in the day, but these days I haven't used it in almost a year. I moved to Slack over a decade ago, for business, introducing it to where I was working at the time, and then five years ago or so, moved to Discord for the community aspect. These days it's almost primarily all on Discord. There are a lot of features that I don't use, but it's what Slack should have been, back when Slack was meant to replace IRC. The interface works, it's available on my phone, it has call ability, multiple servers within my account and no need to keep a bouncer running.
infecto 3y ago
Does Nekoweb declare to be part of the open web? Seems more like the artistic feel for websites as they used to be. Not a very valid argument in that context.
summerlight 3y ago
The word "free" here doesn't seem about being a "free software", but being a complimentary service.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

tr3ntg 3y ago

Welcome to HackerNews, a proprietary service

yoavm 3y ago
At least you can use Hacker News without an account. You can probably even read the news and discussions here with curl.
- ambigious7777 3y ago
  I think you can also use Discord without an account (sort-of). If you get an invite you can use a temporary account. From my recent expirenence though, it seems like this feature is a little broken with it requesting email verification.
littlestymaar 3y ago
Nobody is talking about IP here, it's about using standard and open protocols. HN and Nekoweb are both proprietary services, that's fine, but they run on HTTP and the only thing you need to interact with it is a web browser of some sort, whereas nekoweb's discord “server” relies on a third party (Discord) and uses a nonstandard closed protocol.
- jerbear4328 3y ago
  Discord runs in the browser, same as HN. And the HTTP APIs they use aren't officially documented (except HN's read-only ones via Firebase and Algolia) (though both are easily reverse engineered and OSS frontends exist). There's not much difference.
  - littlestymaar 3y ago
    The big difference is that Discord is a third party here. Nekoweb, like HN, could implement their own first party forum, but instead rely on a centralized third party from which they cannot migrate. It's very far from the “passionate for the old web and personal websites” stance they are marketing in their pitch. Also AFAIK you cannot be banned from HN for using the API, whereas Discord will ban you for any “misuse”. You also don't need to be logged-in to access HN, which is also indexable by search engines, whereas Discord isn't.
  - anthk 3y ago
    Discord it's a cage. HN can be accesed by JS-less browsers and the content will be indexable by any web search engine. There's a huge difference.
- busk07 3y ago
  By your reasoning, any backend that’s not accessible directly by the user is proprietary. HN would then also be proprietary, because it relies on a third party (HN) and uses a nonstandard closed protocol (this comment section). Any website that stores data and exposes it via their own UI is proprietary (I leave this vague on purpose, as it is up to interpretation). Discord can be run in the browser and is accessible via APIs. I think it’s as open as any other web app by a company that has a commercial interest. Services like Discord have lowered the entry barrier for non-technical conversation and community-building online. It certainly seems to be polarizing. I’ve noticed a lot of my friends and colleagues either embrace it or despise it. I wouldn’t mind an open-source alternative to it, but with the extensive features that it offers that’s hard to achieve.
  - littlestymaar 3y ago
    > By your reasoning, any backend that’s not accessible directly by the user is proprietary I've never said such thing. It doesn't matter if you can access things directly: proprietary means it's not FOSS, that's it. > Discord can be run in the browser and is accessible via APIs. I think it’s as open as any other web app by a company that has a commercial interest You need an account to browse Discord, which they can take away from you anytime. If you lose your account you lose your membership to any invite-only communities you belong to, which can be a big deal if you don't have other means to communicate with them to get invited back. Also, Discord isn't indexable by search engines. So, no there's a big difference between Discord and most web forums. Also, I don't have anything in particular against Discord (it's miles ahead of Slack in UX for instance, which I hate with a passion), but when people advertise themselves as fans of the old web, and link to their Discord, one can only smirk from the irony.
    - iCarrot 3y ago
      Kinda weird to start talking FOSS when the website itself never ever claimed to have anything to do with FOSS. What does search engines indexability have to do with FOSS? There's no shortage of old school forums locked behind membership system, not indexable by any search engines. Also Discord is an instant messaging software and not "web". It just happens to have a web frontend. It's OK to be nostalgic of the old web but not the old instant messaging softwares.

xk_id 3y ago

Haha I’m glad I’m not the only one who noticed the irony. It really devalues the whole thing. The next phase in online consumer culture will certainly be the commodification of the old web: reduced to a performative aesthetic, divorced from its original substance.

kofani 3y ago
Ye it what artists and designers talks, the trend cycle.
infecto 3y ago
What irony? It is made for the artistic look and feel of websites as they once were. Seems to have nothing to do with the "open web" as you might like to put it.
jamilton 3y ago
You'd be lucky if that's the next phase, more likely it's just more Twitters and Facebooks.

NPC82 3y ago

The people of Nekoweb demand an IRC server -- maybe, IDK.

derrida 3y ago

I really don't get the discord phenomena, it seems like more bloatware and demands on attention and notifications - I mean - IRC is right there and you can at least control your own attention span however you want.

erremerre 3y ago
Try asking a question in a IRC, and in a Discord, and you will get the phenomena is just that in discord at least someone answer you.
0xEF 3y ago
I didn't get it either. At first. Then I had a reason to use it. I am a long time IRC user, and still use that to this day, but in a much less frequent capacity. IRC is a comparative ghost town when thrown up against Discord. Part of the reason for that is accessibility. Discord does everything IRC does in terms of channels, bots, etc, but packages it in a UI that the masses can easily consume. The addition of voice without having to run Teamspeak or something alongside like we did back in the day. A stable mobile app brings it all together in a portable, easy-to-use package. I resisted it for awhile, with my younger friends adopting it fairly quickly. Then small businesses and we apps started using it and suddenly half the things I interacted with on a daily basis had their own Discord server. So, I broke rank and tried it What I found were a few key communities relevant to my interests that were having actual neverending conversations about this I like. Compared to IRC, where response time can be days for any type of question, and that's if someone is in the mood to be friendly instead of crufty. This is the primary reason why I stay in Discord and IRC is just sort of collecting dust in my world. The community either aged out or just became so jaded that they made it inhospitable.
- imdsm 3y ago
  Had the same experience more or less. I was on IRC during 9/11, and many other major world events, and it's key to my online experiences back in the day, but these days I haven't used it in almost a year. I moved to Slack over a decade ago, for business, introducing it to where I was working at the time, and then five years ago or so, moved to Discord for the community aspect. These days it's almost primarily all on Discord. There are a lot of features that I don't use, but it's what Slack should have been, back when Slack was meant to replace IRC. The interface works, it's available on my phone, it has call ability, multiple servers within my account and no need to keep a bouncer running.

infecto 3y ago

Does Nekoweb declare to be part of the open web? Seems more like the artistic feel for websites as they used to be. Not a very valid argument in that context.

summerlight 3y ago

The word "free" here doesn't seem about being a "free software", but being a complimentary service.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]