[HN Gopher] Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet
___________________________________________________________________
Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet
Author : blakewatson
Score : 734 points
Date : 2023-12-10 20:26 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blakewatson.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blakewatson.com)
| cianmm wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Presumably the mastadon integration. Think twitter with your
| profile directly tied to your personal site - except not
| twitter.
| cianmm wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Hosting all of this stuff on your own would be a lot of fuss
| which most people wouldn't want to bother with.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| 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.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It's just hard to find. Google returns trash
| larrysalibra wrote:
| Try out kagi...they have a filter for "smallweb" posts:
| https://kagi.com/smallweb
|
| The list of sites is on github:
| https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb
| rtpg wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| webrings, IRC, forums and mailing lists, etc.
| 8372049 wrote:
| Back in the day you got actually useful results from
| search engines.
| joquarky wrote:
| Yahoo was originally a text file small enough to fit on a
| 1.44 floppy disk
| latexr wrote:
| When you want that kind of content, you should use a
| different search engine which makes it easy to find.
|
| https://search.marginalia.nu/
| lhmiles wrote:
| Give me your favorite small web links
| cwoolfe wrote:
| How did you get cian.lol? Why isn't it cian.omg.lol?
| Tomte wrote:
| You can register domains yourself and set them up, under
| "Switchboard" --> "External Domain Routes"
| tonymet wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Do it. The more the merrier.
| lannisterstark wrote:
| I just self host stuff on my domain and link them to a Flame
| dashboard for family and friends.
|
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 and
| https://disroot.org.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| No, modern PHP frameworks have come a long way.
| Retr0id wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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!
| lucb1e wrote:
| Also a pentester here. I find C and PHP to be quite
| different. Somehow, C applications always have catastrophic
| issues pop up, sooner or later, where you can make it execute
| random code at least under some circumstances. PHP
| applications can be the same if the team is inexperienced or
| doesn't get the necessary time to apply best practices, but
| I've also seen plenty of PHP applications where we didn't
| find significant issues with the server-side aspects.
|
| PHP applications are fun to test because most teams found
| another set of solutions to the same problems (it has so much
| history that wheels have been reinvented a lot), so you get
| to see new things. They're also typically larger than newer
| and new-style services written in a shiny new language, which
| haven't had time to accumulate as many features and are often
| written as a microservice (smaller components where one/each
| dev can know all the ins and outs, allowing to have a total
| overview so that security controls can much more easily be
| implemented in a unified way).
| block_dagger wrote:
| Concerns with PHP are less about security and more about
| language design, at least that's my take after 22 years of
| dealing with it off and on (full-time "on" for several years).
| wvenable wrote:
| Nope.
|
| PHP itself has also come along way. I don't know if it's
| because of it's reputation that it seems to evolve faster than
| most languages.
|
| I recently used PHP to construct my personal site/blog. I
| didn't use any frameworks but I did use it's statically
| typed/strongly typed features that that is very different from
| how I would have coded in PHP years ago.
| jay-barronville wrote:
| > It's 2023, is that still a reasonable concern?
|
| No. A LOT has changed in the world of PHP over the years. And
| to be honest, I give credit to amazing frameworks like Laravel
| [0] for giving PHP a massive facelift (I consider Taylor Otwell
| one of my software heroes). Overall though, modern PHP software
| is much cleaner and more secure than whatever you knew from
| years ago.
|
| [0]: https://laravel.com
| reddalo wrote:
| I agree about Laravel and Taylor Otwell.
|
| Moreover, I'd like to point out that even if the vast
| majority of PHP-backed websites are based on WordPress,
| WordPress _is not_ an example of good PHP practices at all.
| Its code-base and coding standards are old and horrible.
| joshmanders wrote:
| That's because it tries to not break backwards
| compatibility and spoiler: past web people had horrible
| standards.
| zlg_codes wrote:
| Today's web people have horrible standards, too. Who
| ships an entire browser to ship an application?
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| That's nothing, next they'll ship the entire world's
| knowledge to ship an application :-). Looks at LLMs.
| jay-barronville wrote:
| Agreed re WordPress, although I haven't seen their code in
| YEARS, so maybe their codebase has evolved too.
|
| Re Taylor, if I was a billionaire (or at the very least,
| extremely wealthy), he's one of those folks I'd write a no-
| strings-attached blank check to go build anything he wants
| --just a brilliant and overall great human. I used to be
| very active in the Laravel community many years ago, and
| even way back then, before Laravel was super famous (first
| Laracon days), I remember meeting Taylor and being
| thoroughly impressed. Over the years, on multiple
| occasions, I've heard folks at relatively large
| organizations say they adopted PHP solely because of Taylor
| and Laravel. Recently, when I saw someone mention in a post
| that Taylor has a Lambo now, I was so happy for him--it
| feels great to see him thrive after making the type of
| impact that he has.
| reddalo wrote:
| > so maybe their codebase has evolved too.
|
| Unfortunately, not so much. They still follow PHP 5-days
| style, for example they still haven't adopted the short
| array syntax [], they always use array() which is
| horrible in my opinion.
|
| The code base is horrible, but the front-facing
| experience is not so bad (unless you start installing
| lots of plugins, which tend to add different interface
| styles and lots of banners everywhere in the admin
| panel).
| rchaud wrote:
| PHP, jQuery and W3Schools - HN's combined kryptonite
| Keyframe wrote:
| That crown belongs to Javascript now.
| jay-barronville wrote:
| Please elaborate.
| graypegg wrote:
| The curse of popularity. Relatively more people using
| something, means higher absolute amounts of garbage being
| made with it. I wouldn't say modern javascript tooling gives
| you some obscenely high number of foot guns to target
| practice with, at least compared to the other web-capable
| options. (PHP, Python, Ruby, etc)
| Aeolun wrote:
| Yeah, JS does less with it's stdlib, which I think means a
| lot of people end up using mostly decent packages from npm
| instead of writing extra garbage themselves.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| It was wrongly added to that list I the first place.
| _heimdall wrote:
| Security really was (still is?) a WordPress concern. PHP itself
| isn't really a security issue, security will come from the code
| you write rather than the language itself
| Aeolun wrote:
| Well, it's extremely backwards compatible. To the point my 15
| year old websites written in it still work with some minor (+/-
| 10 lines) modifications.
|
| Presumably you can still write bad code in PHP. But the mysql
| library that was sql injection heaven is now truly dead.
| xwowsersx wrote:
| Not related to security, but I was quite surprised to see how
| far PHP has come since I used it many years ago: [PHP doesn't
| suck (anymore)](https://youtu.be/ZRV3pBuPxEQ)
| smsm42 wrote:
| No it is not. Arguably, it never were. I mean yes, PHP had
| security bugs. So did all other platforms - including, for
| example, the Java one that led to Equifax compromise, which is
| as close as "everybody just lost their privacy" as any single
| break-in can get. I'd argue that PHP's security stance as a
| platform was never substantially worse than any comparable
| platform.
|
| However, you get two additional factors: a) it's easy,
| therefore it attracts beginners and b) it's popular, therefore
| a lot of software uses it. More various software - more
| security issues. More software implemented by beginners - _a
| lot more_ security issues. That was inevitable - any platform
| that was as low entry barrier and as popular and that appeared
| in the same time, when the web was exploding, but the
| understanding of how to manage security on the web was lagging
| behind - would have absolutely the same going on.
|
| But, blaming the tool because a lot of people didn't use it
| correctly - and, also, because due to its novelty there weren't
| proper education and frameworks that made it easy to do the
| right thing - makes little sense. There's nothing security-
| challenged in PHP. It's just that PHP was there when security-
| challenged programmers started to build websites. Most of them
| grew up now and know how to do it right. Either in PHP or in
| any other language.
| graypegg wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Very nice, purchased a handle to support. And passkey support is
| _chef kiss_.
| bovermyer wrote:
| I checked out Omg.lol when it first got popular on HN
| (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 wrote:
| OK, I bit.
|
| Here's my spot: https://dungeonhack.omg.lol/
|
| I look forward to meeting you!
| blakewatson wrote:
| OP here, just wanted to say your tabletop links page is _chef
| 's kiss_.
| jadbox wrote:
| > Now, though, I think I get it.
|
| What do you get now?
| bovermyer wrote:
| The community vibe. The energy. The reason for something
| technologically commonplace to be exceptional and worth
| interest.
| rambambram wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| If you're talking about my personal site
| 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.
| rambambram wrote:
| Yes, I'm talking about your personal site. It might be my
| homegrown RSS reader, because around 10 to 15 of the 900+
| feeds I follow just don't show me the content of the feed
| items. It also doesn't show the feed's title, the
| description and - strangely enough - also not your site's
| favicon (which is outside the scope of the feed itself).
|
| I validated the feed at https://validator.w3.org/feed/check
| .cgi?url=https%3A%2F%2Fww... and everything seems well
| (except for some "recommendations" to make it even better).
|
| I now saved your site in my feed reader as a sort of
| bookmark, so I am reminded by it's existence and will check
| it from time to time, but it would be cool if it shows up
| immediately.
|
| I've not researched the problem yet, but one of the
| possible problems that comes to mind is some server setting
| at your side that stops my external domain from reaching
| it. Which probably is strange, because w3.org can reach it
| without problems.
|
| I'm willing to do a little experiment: if you put online a
| very simple, handmade testfeed, I can try to reach that.
| What you think about that?
| bovermyer wrote:
| I went through and corrected all the little problems the
| validator was reporting. Maybe that will fix it.
|
| Can you try again?
| rambambram wrote:
| Yes, it works! I see a post about a wellness challenge
| from 2 December as being your latest post. Thanks a lot!
| PenguinRevolver wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Is there a reason for that or they just haven't been archived
| yet?
| Ringz wrote:
| Unlikely. Some people archive every page they visit.
| blakewatson wrote:
| Oh wow, you're right. I wonder what's up with that.
| politelemon wrote:
| 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.l...
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| 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
| contrarian1234 wrote:
| 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
| leononame wrote:
| I Disagree. There's not a big difference between someone
| reading your stuff and saving it versus automatic archiving.
| Being able to delete what you said makes real discourse with
| a bad actor very hard if not impossible. If you change your
| mind, you are always free to rectify, but you shouldn't be
| able to pretend you never said this or that.
|
| I know there's a line to draw somewhere, personal blogs
| aren't our countries' leaders' Twitter accounts or press
| conferences. Copying someone's copyrighted work in form of an
| archive might some legal implications I'm not aware of. But
| keeping things for posteriority is important and I don't
| believe people should be able to choose what part of their
| words and actions will be recorded and which won't.
| echelon wrote:
| Vehement disagree. Many of the early communities I
| participated in are gone forever, and it's a shame to think
| of how much more has been lost to time.
|
| In the absolute limit, I hope our future descendents
| reconstruct the past light cone and can replay all of our
| biochemical thoughts and emotions. Perhaps even simulating
| our existence and perception to exacting precision.
|
| Maybe they'll get to see t-rexes in their natural habitat,
| visit lost 90s websites, and feel what taking the organic
| chemistry final was like.
| rd wrote:
| I've had this exact thought a million times.
|
| The first time I tripped acid - I remember writing a page
| of notes on how sad I felt that I would never get to
| experience the exact way a memory occurred to me in the
| past.
|
| What's even more saddening is that with tech like Rewind,
| and what'll be the future of Rewind in 10-20 years, by
| 2040, I fully expect all memories/events ever produced to
| be logged in an almost endless database of all human
| experience.
|
| But - because time is linear, we wouldn't ever fully be
| able to simulate the past of say everything before 2030?
| And that's just so sad.
| Aeolun wrote:
| In one way it's sad, but if we archive everything from
| 2040 onward I guarantee that any pre 2040 years will
| always seem like a better time.
| BirAdam wrote:
| Kind of insane to think about. Part of me is horrified to
| think that this time could be seen as "better" but
| another part says that past was never what you remember
| it as...
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Except for the artifice that is copyright, things don't work
| like that for anything else. _Reality_ doesn 't work like
| that.
|
| > _Once someone posts something, you don 't have a right to
| it in perpetuity_
|
| On the contrary, once someone posts something, _they_ don 't
| have control over it anymore. You can't make me unsee what
| you wrote, or unhear what you said. You have no right to stop
| me from writing it down, and even if you can stop me from
| republishing it verbatim right now, you generally don't have
| the right to do it indefinitely.
|
| > _And once I don 't or change my mind you can't._
|
| To be clear, I'm not dogmatically firm about it, but I
| believe that a word in which you get to distance yourself
| from past views, or mark them mistaken, and people accept it,
| would be _much_ better than the world in which you 're free
| to _gaslight everyone else_ by pretending that something
| never happened, even though it did.
|
| (All that on top of the usual point that it's neither the
| author nor their audience that can judge what's archive-
| worthy - only future people can.)
| notkaiho wrote:
| Brilliant argument/username combo :)
| bovermyer wrote:
| I disagree.
|
| If you publish something publicly, it should be available for
| all time.
|
| If you change your mind, it's on you to make that known.
| porcoda wrote:
| Totally agree. The tech community has a massive arrogance
| problem where we tend towards opt-out vs opt-in for
| everything. Just because us tech-savvy folks understand the
| consequences of, say, posting something online, doesn't mean
| the bulk of humanity who isn't tech savvy also understands
| that and agrees with us.
| JoshuaRogers wrote:
| While we in the tech community are guilty of taking many
| things for granted as generally understood, I'm fairly
| certain that "consequences for past public statements"
| predates the bulk of our modern technology.
| bee_rider wrote:
| There isn't any way we can make being copied opt-in, rather
| than opt-out. We can not copy things. But we can't prevent
| other people from copying things. So, it is better to set
| the expectation that things will be copied, otherwise
| people will be mislead into thinking they can delete their
| content, and will post things they regret.
|
| Plus, if everyone can delete their mistakes, we'll live in
| a world where it looks like nobody makes mistakes, and so
| we'll be less tolerant of mistakes.
| Aeolun wrote:
| > archiving should be opt-in not opt-out
|
| That's really weird. If someone posts a sign on their store
| window, and I take a picture of it, should I be required to
| delete the picture when they remove the sign?
| afpx wrote:
| That's why I have alt accounts - one for each of my different
| personalities.
| johnfernow wrote:
| In the UK, if you publish a book, magazine or newspaper, by
| law you have to send a copy to the British Library for
| archive. A lot of other countries have similar laws. In the
| UK, legal deposit has expanded to include the web (so long as
| the person/group creating the content is in the UK), but
| since many individuals and small businesses are unaware of
| legal deposit, the UK Web Archive will archive a lot of the
| web by themselves.
|
| Tom Scott interviewed some people from the British Library,
| and they explain the importance of archiving:
|
| > The importance of legal deposit not being selective, and
| being everything, is: we can't decide today what's going to
| be important in 50 years' time. We want everything, because
| we don't know what will be important.
|
| He also added his own thoughts:
|
| > I cannot overstate just how useful it is to be able to
| track down things that never made it online, or to research
| out of print, forgotten books where there are no other copies
| available, or to scan through every issue of an obscure local
| newspaper to track down one reference. This is the raw text
| of history, as it happened, and someone has to keep it
| preserved for the future.
|
| source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNVuIU6UUiM
| burkaman wrote:
| The creator's company website is also excluded: https://web.arc
| hive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://neatnik..... Maybe some
| philosophical disagreement?
| lucb1e wrote:
| Presumably due to https://neatnik.net/robots.txt
| 77pt77 wrote:
| > User-agent: ia_archiver
|
| > Disallow: /
|
| Denied!
| flexagoon wrote:
| Wow, thanks for pointing that out, that made me never want
| to join omg.lol
| lucb1e wrote:
| That's not present on another omglol site that was linked
| elsewhere in the thread, though.
|
| I would agree with you if they automatically set this for
| everyone. I'm not sure how come that other sites aren't
| showing up in the archive. (I'm not a customer of theirs
| or anything, I'm already hosting my own stuff)
| rapnie wrote:
| This blocking of the archiver may be philosophical, but not a
| disgreement. Just speculating, but on the fediverse there are
| quite a few people who feel their social interactions are
| personal and 'in the moment'. Something akin to the Cozy Web
| [0] though not being too strict about (everything is still
| public after all).
|
| [0] https://maggieappleton.com/cozy-web
| anjel wrote:
| Works with archive.today: https://archive.is/zAbYO Also works
| with Ghost Archive: https://ghostarchive.org/archive/ValSP
|
| Wayback Machine is arguably a more durable archive site than
| these other two archives, but the fact that it can be archived
| elsewhere would indicate that the problem is likely to be on
| archive.org's end of things rather than omg.lol
| graypegg wrote:
| That kind of sucks :( So much of the "small internet" of the
| past people talk about in relation to this stuff, is only
| really preserved in any significant scale by IA. Hope it's not
| the operator making a big sweeping decision for all users.
| Grimblewald wrote:
| Some might argue that is the magic of it. It is much easier
| to be happy when you miss some things, and look forwars to
| others. Some listen to radio, or use streaming services in a
| radio like way (no skipping, no targeted searches) for the
| same reason, sure they could keep looping their favourite
| song on whatever platform, but its waaay more exciting when
| it comes on unexpectabtly.
|
| Our interactions having a fleeting nature makes them more
| special and forces us to be more emotionally involved.
|
| Just an alternative take, no a statment of my personal
| opinion.
| nicbou wrote:
| If omg.lol is an oasis, this post was a stranger offering you a
| sip. What a refreshingly nice and personal post!
| NanoYohaneTSU wrote:
| It's an ad bro
| crawsome wrote:
| It certainly feels like it.
| beardicus wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Sorry, why would I pay 20/year bucks for this when I have my own
| website/infra?
| james_pm wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| So that you don't have to worry about outages, updates,
| bugfixes, certs, permissions, vulnerabilities, ... like you do
| on your own website/infra?
| akho wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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]?"
| crims0n wrote:
| I get where you are coming from, but I think the answer for
| a lot of us is... for the experience.
| cipheredStones wrote:
| That's a perfectly valid motivation, but if it's really
| what someone is going for, I expect to hear an objection
| that sounds something like "oh, that's cool! but I'd
| rather try out doing it myself" rather than the faintly
| contemptuous "why is this worth $X when I could do it
| myself".
| akho wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Is it conceivable that that you would spend much more than
| an hour maintaining _this_? Including making your stuff fit
| the mold, working around the limitations, and, inevitably,
| moving your stuff to a new service when this one fails, as
| they do?
|
| Also: a VPS replaces quite a few of these services.
| Maintenance beyond initial setup and occasional update is
| rarely needed if you are the only user. People tend to
| overestimate these things.
| uiberto wrote:
| Didn't you know that everyone on HN bakes their own bread?
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _Even the most dirt-cheap VPS is a few bucks more
| expensive on a yearly basis by itself_ "
|
| Not if you get a Black Friday special; here[1] was
| $14.95/year for 40GB SSD, 1GB RAM, 1TB monthly bandwidth,
| 1CPU core.
|
| RackNerd were offering $10.28/year[2] for 10GB SSD storage,
| 768MB RAM.
|
| Hudson Valley offered $8/year[3] for 10GB SSD and 512MB RAM
|
| [1] https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/190984/from-14-95-yr-10
| -gb...
|
| [2] https://lowendbox.com/best-cheap-vps-hosting-
| updated-2020/ (sold out)
|
| [3] https://lowendbox.com/blog/are-you-serious-hudson-valley-
| hos...
| Cyberdog wrote:
| As with many other things, I'd advise against picking a VPS
| plan based on price alone.
|
| I've found Vultr to be both affordable and of consistent
| quality for my modest needs (personal and business web
| hosting plus IRC bouncing). I pay about $5/mo or $60/year.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| That's fine, but the complaint was that a VPS is "a few
| dollars more [than $20/year]" as if that was an
| objectionable amount/increase. In that case, money is the
| main decider and $60 is much worse, and $8 is much
| better. People fighting for "a few dollars" a year are
| likely to be expecting (or unhappily tolerate) lower
| quality.
|
| I've had pretty good experiences of Linux VPSs for around
| $20/year from several companies.
| tredre3 wrote:
| So to beat omg.lol's price you have to hunt for a bargain,
| then hope the price doesn't double in the following year?
|
| Oh, and you also need to own a domain already, otherwise
| it's an extra 10-20 bucks per year.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| No, you can get a free Unix account on sdf.org with web
| hosting and email if you want to build for yourself the
| kind of thing omg.lol does and don't want a VPS. It's
| just "Even the most dirt-cheap VPS is a few bucks more
| [than $20/year]" is outdated, they're available less than
| half that price and likely only getting cheaper in
| future. If you really want, you can risk things like the
| Oracle Cloud Free Tier. If budget is what you want or
| need, then "hunting" (visiting Lowendbox.com) is
| something you are probably willing to do.
|
| omg.lol gives a subdomain rather than a domain, right? So
| do free dynamic DNS providers like noip.com or dyndns.org
| (not sure if they still do free ones). If you want to
| register a domain, you also have outdated pricing, if you
| want cheap don't go for a popular TLD; .de is $4/year
| after the first year at Porkbun.com, .ovh is PS2.99/year
| after the first year at OVH.com, internet people say .ru
| is available for $1/year.
| p4bl0 wrote:
| If you have your own infrastructure to host all of these
| services then you're probably not the target audience. It's ok,
| it's my case too.
|
| But you have to admit that $20/year is quite cheap for all of
| what is provided here, without having to manage it all
| yourself, and with a "no trackers no bullshit" way of doing
| things.
|
| It's really the kind of services I don't need but would almost
| like to need! The last time I had this feeling was about
| Neocities :).
| crawsome wrote:
| Github pages is free. A .info domain is $5/year.
|
| That's already more than half the features you get with this,
| and you get to be on the actual internet, not some dude's
| silo.
|
| As the post's age goes on, I see more criticism, and less
| positive reactions.
| monkeywork wrote:
| >That's already more than half the features you get with
| this, and you get to be on the actual internet, not some
| dude's silo.
|
| "the actual internet" ??
| sedatk wrote:
| > "the actual internet" ??
|
| Microsoft's silo, they mean.
| slalomskiing wrote:
| It's just a fun project why are you taking it so serious
| crawsome wrote:
| It's $20/mo, and a lot of people are eager to spend it so
| it should be subject to due criticism.
| ipodopt wrote:
| It's $20 per year, not per month... and there are promo
| codes for $5/year available most of the time. I don't use
| the site but browsed the guy's mastodon feed.
| rfrey wrote:
| How is hosting your website using a Microsoft silo more "on
| the internet" than using this?
| dsr_ wrote:
| You are not the target audience.
| zeekaran wrote:
| If I have to spend even one hour per year maintaining my own,
| this service is cheaper.
| umairj wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Nah, he's just a deeply unlikeable jerk
| AlexAffe wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Does everything have to end with "in my opinion"? Isn't
| that implied?
| jayveeone wrote:
| Hey man are you okay?
| IlliOnato wrote:
| For me it was a long and slow journey; and I still love Space
| X. But Elon Musk did some really crazy things (starting with
| "pedo guy", and going deeper and deeper).
|
| I don't thing having or loosing my respect would matter to him
| if he knew about it though :-)
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Why can't I like the rockets but also think he's bad at
| twitter?
| tambourine_man wrote:
| "omg.lol is unabashedly built with PHP"
|
| I already like you
| contrarian1234 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The "web design in 4 min" linked to at the bottom of the page is
| very interesting.
| bbx wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| OP here. I love that little site and I link to it often!
| generic92034 wrote:
| From that page: "What is the first thing you need to work on?"
|
| I would say, a page that is usable without scripts. ;)
| damiante wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Nah, you just need a (not ad oriented) search engine.
|
| Things could continue to be small and niche, we just a way to
| find them.
| 8372049 wrote:
| You mean kagi.com?
| mtillman wrote:
| Plug/thanks for https://ooh.directory/ for keeping the dream
| alive.
| xhrpost wrote:
| https://home.omg.lol/directory
| treyd wrote:
| Fwiw, many feeds provided by Mastodon instances are available
| as RSS. Same for other Fedi software, like WriteFreely.
| acegopher wrote:
| Check out the Kagi Small Web: https://blog.kagi.com/small-web
| culopatin wrote:
| How did we find forums back in the day? Someone said something
| somewhere and you looked it up. It was less discoverable but
| less... volatile, because it was just "your" kind of people
| there, not millions of random people who found a hashtag
| ClimaxGravely wrote:
| I wonder about that myself as someone who grew up on this.
|
| I used webcrawler at the very beginning and I'm probably
| looking that things through rose lenses but I found what I
| wanted back then. I think back then in some ways it was
| easier to find your community because SRO and the like wasn't
| a thing back then.
|
| The years where I found my niche forums benefited me much
| more than my college days.
| hooby wrote:
| Might be a tangent - but is more discoverability actually
| desirable in this case?
|
| Could it possibly preserve that "old web" style of interaction,
| if it becomes a global phenomenon that everyone uses? Or does
| this only work as long as it stays a little hidden niche, that
| most people don't know about, and will never find?
|
| Or in other words - can something feel like "the old web"
| (which was early adopters and enthusiasts only) - if it's
| frequented by everyone?
|
| You love the idea of smaller communities - but how can they
| stay small?
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| have you tried https://search.marginalia.nu ?
| kvathupo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Video and images could he links too
| rglullis wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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...
| benignobject wrote:
| Great to see a Mississippian on the top of HN
| crawsome wrote:
| 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.
| rglullis wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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...
| horsefaceman wrote:
| I love this, such a throwback.
| jongjong wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| You got a big corporation on the same team as you. Doesn't
| make them the good guys or "better" in any way. The
| fundamental principles are all broken.
| jongjong wrote:
| Those who are against censorship and are against currency
| debasement are the good guys objectively.
|
| Looking back over the past few years, it should be clear
| that the purpose of censorship was to suppress
| alternative (often correct) information about COVID
| policies.
| rglullis wrote:
| Even if I take your statements at face value: I'm talking
| about Twitter, not Musk. It would help if you stop
| conflating the two.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Do you have a habit of making up people to be mad at, like
| you're doing right now?
| rfrey wrote:
| > Anyone who thinks that free speech is dangerous or harmful in
| any way obviously knows nothing about history and has fallen
| prey to propaganda.
|
| Anyone who thinks Elon Musk is a proponent of free speech has
| not been paying attention.
| shusaku wrote:
| 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
| jim-jim-jim wrote:
| That's the shortcoming of every alternative protocol and "indie
| web" community I've come across. They only attract existing
| techies and have a weird sheen of forced kindness about them.
| If you're just chatting with other programmers under American
| HR communication standards, then how is it any different to
| work?
|
| The true magic of the early web was somebody genius but
| decidedly untechnical like David Bowie shitposting at his own
| fans. There's no special line of code that's going to foster
| that. You have to ruthlessly curate a community to avoid a
| critical mass of sensitive nerds, but guess who the early
| colonizers of these alt platforms are. None of these
| communities will attract today or tomorrow's David Bowies.
| p-e-w wrote:
| > The true magic of the early web was somebody genius but
| decidedly untechnical like David Bowie shitposting at his own
| fans.
|
| No, the magic of the early web was that people treated their
| online identities as a secret alternative life, rather than a
| resume for recruiters, friends, potential partners, and other
| real-world acquaintances to look at.
|
| The Internet of today is little more than a (distorted)
| mirror of people's offline lives. That's why the problems of
| today's Internet are the same as the problems of the real
| world. By contrast, the Internet of the 90s was an exciting
| world of its own, with rules that were dramatically different
| from those of everyday life.
| hsn915 wrote:
| Also many of us were much younger, even teenagers, with
| little to no exposure to HR hell.
| jackstraw14 wrote:
| Many weren't, too.
| paledot wrote:
| > The Internet of today is little more than a (distorted)
| mirror of people's offline lives.
|
| Our offline lives are a distorted mirror of the Internet of
| today.
| rudasn wrote:
| Yeah, in the 90s and 00s I think people published just
| because they could. Either real identity or not. They (we?)
| had something to say, to express.
|
| Nowadays people just publish to be seen. There's a huge
| difference on the type of content this leads to.
| jl6 wrote:
| This, but also because it was something genuinely new that
| had never been seen before. Doubly so if you were young
| then and old now. Everything was novel, and therefore
| interesting - even the bad things. I've seen people
| expressing nostalgia for blink tags.
|
| Perhaps the medium is just a little played out.
| rtpg wrote:
| > None of these communities will attract today or tomorrow's
| David Bowies.
|
| I kind of get what you're saying but I'm tired of people who
| act like "shitposting skills" are a useful quality trait.
| Similarly people who just can't not let something be.
|
| I kind of dislike "forced kindness" as a community philosophy
| (I've met way too many people IRL who have a net persona of
| "super kind" and turn out to be, glibly, sociopaths), but
| "please don't be insufferable" is a nice rule of thumb for
| communities. Plenty of cool stuff made by people who are
| merely a little annoying. Meanwhile too many places have
| "those people" who just won't let something go. Let people
| keep their honor!
| jim-jim-jim wrote:
| Shitposting wasn't the best choice of words, sorry. I think
| you know what I'm getting at though. There are cheeky
| artists and those to whom cheekiness is the art. The latter
| cohort are just annoying trolls, but the former group can
| animate communities. You just don't tend to find them among
| the small souled and dogmatic bitdiddlers that haunt every
| upstart platform.
| hitekker wrote:
| > attract existing techies and have a weird sheen of forced
| kindness about them.
|
| > If you're just chatting with other programmers under
| American HR communication standards, then how is it any
| different to work?
|
| > There's no special line of code that's going to foster
| that.
|
| > you have to ruthlessly curate a community to avoid a
| critical mass of sensitive nerds, but guess who the early
| colonizers of these alt platforms are
|
| Great comment. Aligns with my own observations. On the note
| of "American HR Communication standards & work" I think most
| of us don't have experience participating in, let alone,
| organizing real communities[1]. Since most internet
| communities are awful, imaginary, transient etc, we default
| to the only actual experience we have semi-happily working
| with strangers: our jobs. Adding on top how internet comments
| are forever, cancelations is right around the corner, and
| careers hang in the balance, and you get a Bay Area
| photocopied dialogue.
|
| [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place
| onion2k wrote:
| _guess who the early colonizers of these alt platforms are_
|
| The early web was mostly nerds, but not just tech nerds. I
| made my first site in 1997 and I linked to all sorts of
| things about TV shows, music and games that had been made by
| fans of things. If someone loved the X-Files and wanted to
| contribute to a site about it the only option was to get a
| book about HTML from the library and learn to use FTP. It
| thrived because it was just a group of people enthusiastic
| about things. Few people wanted to criticise because the only
| response you'd get was "well you make a better website
| then!". And when that happened people did. There were
| rivalries that worked like a feedback loop to improve things.
| That's missing today. People just criticise and don't try to
| do better. I blame the rise of guestbooks.
| ykonstant wrote:
| My first experience with "social media" was in the late 90s
| with a website dedicated to the Wheel of Time,
| www.wota.com. We had enormous fun in the forums and web
| chat, and I loved the design and flow. It was mostly hacked
| together in Perl. Rand Al'Thor, if you are reading this,
| where are youuu? It's me, TrueSource! \(>=V<=)/
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > guess who the early colonizers of these alt platforms are
|
| Sorry - what is "colonizer" here? Do you mean users?
| alex_lav wrote:
| I made an account and can't seem to figure out where this
| magical community actually is? It seems like I can just link
| other open services? And for some reason I can receive email?
|
| Not a single other person('s content) in sight though.
| joeross wrote:
| > I'd like to see which accounts are using the services for a
| better community
|
| It's more like after you use it for a little while you look up
| and suddenly realize you're in a new but familiar feeling
| community. It definitely skews developer/blogger/liberal, is
| openly inclusive and mindful of accessibility (not perfect, but
| always trying), there's a lot of overlap with various
| micro.blog/IndieWeb/fediverse communities, a lot of folks with
| active GitHub accounts doing interesting stuff, a strong
| photographer contingent, an overarching "positive vibe" as the
| kids say, and a clear sense that you don't have to remind the
| kind of folks who enjoy using omg.lol that there's a person on
| the other side of the keyboard.
|
| Maybe that still doesn't make much sense to you, but while I'm
| happy to pay for cool stuff people make on the internet, I'm
| paid up with omg.lol through 2030, which just isn't something I
| would do anywhere else.
| proxyon wrote:
| I on the other hand would happily pay through 2030 to avoid
| the people you describe on omg.lol. I dislike pretentious
| tech positivity and HR catladies policing my online life.
| coldpie wrote:
| Cool, man. No one's forcing you to use it. I'm sure you can
| find someplace else.
| proxyon wrote:
| Yeah there's no way I'm hanging out with a bunch of people
| salty at Musk because he stopped Twitter from being an old boys
| club of internet liberals.
| Spivak wrote:
| Dude old Twitter was conservative west-coast brand
| libertarians and it's silly that people keep confusing them
| with liberals for seemingly no other reason than the NAP "as
| long as you're not hurting anyone I don't give a shit" means
| they're tolerant on social issues when they have basically
| nothing else in common with liberals.
| proxyon wrote:
| They banned a huge chunk of the dissident right, banned the
| sitting US president, censored stories harmful to Biden and
| promoted stories harmful to Trump. There is no moment where
| their thumb wasn't on the scales. Yoel Roth was a pronouns
| in bio type of guy along with a huge chunk of the Twitter
| staff. Fair to stay they they weren't "conservative west-
| coast brand libertarians."
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| This is the exact reason I refuse to touch Mastodon - the
| people who are Really Mad about Elon's purchase of Twitter
| are the exact people who made Twitter so toxic that I avoided
| it like the plague. I guess I'm happy that they are self
| sorting onto their own platform, but I'm going to stay far
| away from it.
| rammy1234 wrote:
| Is this different from neocities ?
| 101008 wrote:
| So like Bravenet but in 2023?
| httpsterio wrote:
| 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.
| crawsome wrote:
| > 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
| Arch485 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >... 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.
| rusk wrote:
| Also not legal in Europe where you absolutely are
| responsible for the actions of your processors
| CaptArmchair wrote:
| > Section 8.6 GDPR
|
| > Part b. omg.lol does not believe its processing of
| limited personal data of those outside the United States
| (if any) brings it within the jurisdiction of these laws.
|
| That's a hard disclaimer if there's any.
|
| I read that as: if you're a European user, we do not
| believe you can legally enforce us to honor your rights,
| even though we operate within the EEA.
| ykonstant wrote:
| This is very disappointing, and automatically dismisses
| omg.lol as an option for me as a researcher and educator.
| jacquesm wrote:
| And is illegal to boot. If that's their attitude they
| should not allow Europeans to register in the first place
| because all it will do is set them up for a confrontation
| with the various Data Privacy Offices. And such wilful
| language rules out any apologies.
| CaptArmchair wrote:
| More to the point, the GDPR is quite explicit on here as
| well:
|
| > Article 3.2 goes even further and applies the law to
| organizations that are not in the EU if two conditions
| are met: the organization offers goods or services to
| people in the EU, or the organization monitors their
| online behavior. (Article 3.3 refers to more unusual
| scenarios, such as in EU embassies.)
|
| https://gdpr.eu/companies-outside-of-europe/
|
| Which is pretty much what happens given that they allow
| EU citizens to buy a 20 USD subscription.
| rusk wrote:
| Worth a shot I suppose
| hnbad wrote:
| That's also a sovereign citizen level of legalese. It
| doesn't matter what omg.lol states it believes. If
| anything, this demonstrates clear intent to violate
| users' privacy and be non-compliant with international
| data protection laws.
|
| This is largely a moot point as long as omg.lol remains
| some guy's side project but given that the ToS explicitly
| mentions the possibility of a merger or buyout, this
| feels like it's poisoning the well a bit. If there's any
| upside to this, it's that this makes a buyout far less
| likely because he's essentially saying "yeah, we collect
| a ton of personal information but we don't have the legal
| consent for any of it and explicitly told users we're not
| complying with their regional data protection laws when
| it comes to gathering, processing or storing their
| personal information". Fair enough for the MySpace era of
| Web 2.0 privacy abuse but no longer workable in a world
| with the GDPR and its many regional equivalents.
| agos wrote:
| your comment is spot on. an acquisition is also the
| perfect time to have someone trigger an investigation by
| the local privacy authority for breach of GDPR and I can
| tell with reasonable certainty that the wording on that
| ToS is enough to get fined. Until they have a legal
| presence in the EU they might get away with it, though.
| cderpz wrote:
| >omg.lol does not believe its processing of limited
| personal data of those outside the United States (if any)
| brings it within the jurisdiction of these laws.
|
| Oh dear. That is definitely not correct. The only way for
| omg.lol to not fall under the jurisdiction of the GDPR is
| to not offer their services to people living where it
| applies.
| amne wrote:
| And how would the owner go about that? Implement
| expensive geo-fences and KYC processes for a market they
| are not interested in? If they (EU people) want to use it
| .. they should be able to without expecting the same
| protections as if the business operates in EEA.
|
| How did we get here? To where If I spin up a webserver
| and charge for access now I'm suddenly forced to lick
| your middle finger because you have laws in your country
| saying so?
| sverhagen wrote:
| I'll include the mandatory ianal, but they could even ask
| people to indemnify them, or put up a banner saying: you
| must be in the US, blah-blah. But they're straight up
| saying: don't care about your laws. That seems untenable.
| Towaway69 wrote:
| Hangon, if go to another country I most certainly have to
| follow the laws that apply there.
|
| If I surf over to another (Internet surfing) country
| because the server is physically located in that country,
| I again am forced to follow the laws that apply there.
|
| It does seem illogical to have such setup especially
| since physical I haven't moved.
|
| Now it seems that I can take my laws with me when I visit
| a server in another country. Making everything even more
| confusing.
|
| Unfortunately that does not apply to physically traveling
| to another country: that country doesn't care two bobs
| for my countries laws.
|
| Edit: INAL.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >If I surf over to another (Internet surfing) country
| because the server is physically located in that country,
| I again am forced to follow the laws that apply there.
|
| on the other hand if you go set up a business that sells
| to citizens of that other country do you have to follow
| rules to be allowed to sell stuff there? You see how the
| analogy is a little closer aligned?
| qmarchi wrote:
| Not really. For Example, I setup a business on the Oregon
| side of the Portland, Oregon / Vancouver, Washington
| border. Oregon doesn't have a sales tax, should I have to
| pay Washington sales tax because I had someone buy
| something from my shop in Oregon?
|
| Same kind of deal, omg.lol have my servers located in the
| United States, payment processing happens in the United
| States, in United States Dollars. In no way is omg.lol
| making a special usecase to handle European customers.
|
| Now, Europe is free to attempt to excise their laws
| againt omg.lol, however they wouldn't get much further
| than "you're blocked in the EU" and having to get ISPs
| and transit networks to blocke their traffic, and payment
| networks to stop serving EU customers for that particular
| merchant ID.
| TylerE wrote:
| If you run a site in the US targeting a primarily US user
| base, should you be forced to abide by the laws of Saudi
| Arabia?
| 8372049 wrote:
| The easiest and most reasonable option would be to honor
| GDPR and similar laws.
|
| If you scam people in country A from country B, you're
| criminally liable to country A even if it's not a crime
| in country B. Same if it's espionage (cf. Assange),
| piracy (cf. TPB) and so on. Why should infringing on
| privacy rights be any different?
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's not really that interesting of a question, if the
| owner wants to give the finger to the laws of a region
| with 300+ million people in it then that's their right,
| how they go about doing that in a way that it doesn't
| translate into liability (rather than simply respecting
| the law with regards to EU subjects) is not something
| that we need to solve for them. The choice is theirs, so
| are the consequences.
| hnbad wrote:
| Simple: explicitly state what regions you provide your
| service to, optionally use cheap/free IP geolocation to
| block users from regions you don't wish to provide your
| service in and wherever you have to record a user's
| region anyway limit the options to regions you support or
| display a warning about your terms of service prohibiting
| use from other regions.
|
| There are plenty of sites that only cater to US users and
| have signup forms requiring data like postal addresses or
| payment methods that contain regional information. Heck,
| some US sites even exclude users from certain states for
| various reasons. This service costs money so they need
| the user's billing address anyway. Just restrict access
| there and then like the rest.
|
| The guy who created omg.lol did not "spin up a webserver
| and charge for access", they run a company that collects,
| stores and processes their users' behavioral data and
| personally identifiable information. It's more like a
| hosting company except it's apparently cobbled together
| from various third parties without any due diligence
| about how they operate. And it even uses the phrase
| "privacy-focused" in various parts of its claims. Yeah,
| I'd say it's reasonable to expect a company like that to
| provide basic information like what data it collects, how
| it ensures that data is protected and how a data subject
| can get that data deleted or corrected.
|
| We have laws preventing corporations from selling
| products that are unfit for purpose or food that is
| blatantly toxic and we have laws preventing corporations
| from offering you contracts that demand personal harm or
| indentured servitude. In places like the EU we also have
| laws that prevent companies from using your data without
| consent and making sure you follow the best current
| practices when handling that data. And yeah, if you want
| to make a service that collects all data and monetizes
| the ever living fuck out of it you can still do that, you
| just need to ask your users for consent and allow them to
| opt-out if it isn't essential to doing what the users
| would want to use the service for (i.e. no bait and
| switch).
|
| I don't know why some people find it so hard to
| understand the idea of informed and non-coerced consent.
| Levitz wrote:
| >How did we get here? To where If I spin up a webserver
| and charge for access now I'm suddenly forced to lick
| your middle finger because you have laws in your country
| saying so?
|
| You do business somewhere, you have to abide by the laws
| of that somewhere.
|
| As to how did we got here? I don't know. It probably
| happened sometime around year 500 BC?
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| true they are legally required by EU law to follow GDPR,
| but then it gets into enforcement, Facebook et. al might
| like to not follow GDPR but they are big enough then have
| holdings that the GDPR can take money from.
|
| If omg.lol does not have any business in EU it is
| probably not going to actually be a problem for them
| because EU is unlikely to go to U.S court to try to get
| money - also because I believe that probably wouldn't
| work.
|
| However
|
| 1. if they are trying to get purchased by someone they
| probably should consider potential buyers probably don't
| want to buy a bunch of EU liability.
|
| 2. they should probably refrain from any sort of ambition
| that would give them such a business in the future
| because regulators can be really mean when someone does
| this kind of funny stuff.
|
| 3. if they don't pay if called on it maybe there would be
| a situation where they would get blocked - not sure about
| that but seems reasonable reaction.
| underdeserver wrote:
| Not a lawyer so I might be reading this wrong - but to me
| this says "We might sell the company to someone else, and
| they in turn might sell it to anyone", and that's a bit
| scarier.
| arp242 wrote:
| You can't prevent that, not really. That "section 6.3"
| applies to every company, but these ToS are a bit more
| upfront about it.
| mynameisash wrote:
| > You can't prevent that, not really.
|
| Couldn't you simply codify in the ToS that PII or even
| most/all historical metadata would be scrubbed upon the
| sale of the company? IANAL, but I would assume that a
| company could commit themselves in the user agreement in
| such a way that it guarantees some protection against
| this kind of concern.
| arp242 wrote:
| You can always change the terms of service; no one would
| really notice a detail like this.
|
| And things like email addresses are "PII", and maybe some
| more things that are required to actually run this
| business. So "scrub all PII" isn't really a very feasible
| thing to do in the first place.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| You can't _prevent_ it, but you can make it a breach of
| contract.
|
| (Where the new buyer would breach the contract if passing
| data on.)
| antiframe wrote:
| Is forced selling a thing for sole proprietorships? Is
| including data in a sale forced? You can prevent that if
| you want two ways:
|
| 1) Don't sell the company 2) Sell the company sans data
| (destroy it first)
| arp242 wrote:
| So your "solution" is 1) never change interests, 2) never
| have health problems, 3) never retire, 4) well live
| forever basically?
|
| And no one is going to buy a company stripped of all
| customer data.
|
| This is just not realistic. Any company or website that
| lives long enough will change hands eventually, whether
| it's "selling" or handing it to your first-born son, or
| whatever, for any number of reasons, and when that
| happens you lose control. The best you can do is hand it
| over to someone you trust (if that's possible), but
| nothing is fool-proof.
| jacquesm wrote:
| No, that's not totally reasonable and expected. Change of
| control can be a valid reason for breaking open a previous
| arrangement, especially when that change of control negates
| the exact reason why people would join this to begin with.
|
| After all, if your data can be transferred at will to
| another entity due to a change of ownership and the
| agreement you made can then be annulled (because the new
| owners don't care about your privacy as much as the
| previous ones) then that's an end-run around the whole
| principle.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I love the idea of the service, but yes, those terms (and the
| commentary about the GDPR) are very strong showstoppers for
| me.
| stcredzero wrote:
| _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_
|
| The way I see the current day situation, re: Elon Musk's
| freedom of speech contingency tree -- If X/Twitter and other
| social media prospers, it's good for him and he wins. If those
| die and people rediscover, "people creating their own space
| instead of living on closed platforms," he wins as well.
| UberFly wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| https://www.farcaster.xyz/ is an interesting alternative that's
| not bluesky
| golem14 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Ridj48dhsnsh wrote:
| Not being indexed by search engines is a fatal flaw in my
| opinion. There might be some interesting discussions taking
| place on Mastodon, but I would have no way of knowing.
| aliasxneo wrote:
| I like the idea of it, but I also have no idea how one
| would find any of these cited discussions. It seems having
| an existing social network gives you a strong advantage. As
| a lurker, introvert, and ruralite, I think I'm going to be
| naturally disadvantaged on these types of platforms.
|
| Or maybe I'm just misunderstanding the whole design.
| frikk wrote:
| This is an interesting thought.
|
| As an analogy, there might be some interesting discussions
| happening at my local Community Center, or my neighbor's
| house, but I would have no way of knowing. But to discover
| these discussions, I would need to meet someone with a
| shared interest who would, in turn, share with me a place
| that they go to for continued discussions and to hang out
| with interesting people who share an interest.
|
| So maybe, if done correctly, this is a feature? The good
| content is one extra network connection away, but easy
| enough to find if an advocate chooses to highlight content,
| share a connection, or otherwise create an inbound
| reference to the community.
| lannisterstark wrote:
| Yes and wouldn't you like to join it?
|
| If you had a way to search like "hey there's an
| interesting conversation going on at my local community
| center, maybe I will go and join their next session."
|
| wouldn't you?
| input_sh wrote:
| You have an option in user settings to allow search engines
| to index your profile and public posts. (It's off by
| default.)
| dash2 wrote:
| This argument confuses "everybody hangs out with just a few
| people" with "a few people hang out with a few people". The
| former is a cool idea, sure, but the latter is just a
| description of a not-very-successful service. I mean, I like
| my local pub, but it isn't HN-worthy.
|
| Social media is valuable, that's why people use it. It would
| be nice if we end up coordinating on social media that aren't
| toxic or addictive. Unfortunately mastodon may not make that
| happen, as GP said.
| smallnix wrote:
| So a system that enables thousand if not millions of "pubs"
| would be HN worthy? From what I understand that is mastodon
| and this article is a success story of a single
| instance/"pub".
| hnbad wrote:
| > Social media is valuable, that's why people use it.
|
| That doesn't follow. Neither of those two statements seems
| self-evident.
|
| People typically follow social media for a number of
| reasons and to my mind novelty and the pretense of a sense
| of community are the biggest one. But the latter is usually
| just paper thin. In "successful social media" most social
| interactions are either fleeting or superficial. You argue
| on the Internet with strangers and you pigeonhole them to
| fit your biases. The entire focus for social media is to
| drive up "engagement" because clicks and views mean more ad
| revenue and a bigger "audience". And as the effort of
| providing something genuinely interesting is a lot higher
| than something provocative (which has the benefit of being
| able to simply be an outright lie), that's where social
| media inevitably trends towards.
|
| Pre-social media spaces were a lot more social in the sense
| of being communal: IRC chat rooms would have old guard
| regulars, often lurking around in case something
| interesting pops up; moderation would happen very bluntly
| and immediately to set clear house rules about what is or
| isn't acceptable behavior. Forums had a much lower
| frequency but followed similar patterns. There was a clear
| sense of a shared culture if you stuck around long enough
| and people would actually avoid hanging around in the
| extremely large forums or chat rooms because they were "too
| noisy" to have a conversation. It would usually be where
| you'd go to seek advice or help you couldn't find elsewhere
| and any follow-up would usually happen in a more confined
| space like DMs.
|
| What social media has effectively done is looked at the
| extremely large and noisy spaces and decided that this is
| what everything should be like by default and then bolted
| on some ways to keep track of what conversations you were
| having while mixing the ideas of "people that seem
| interesting/nice" and "accounts that post interesting
| _content_ ", productizing and transactionalizing all social
| interactions. Even Mastodon is guilty of this but on the
| smaller instances at least the scale is limited by default.
|
| The problem with social media being the "marketplace of
| ideas" is that you normally go to the market to get new
| things and then you go to work, go home or go to your
| "third place" (e.g. your peer group, your pub, your club
| house) where you can all show each other what you got.
| Social media wants to be all of those places but because
| the marketplace is the only part that makes money, that's
| all it delivers.
| _heimdall wrote:
| Its a really interesting challenge to solve
|
| Twitter, for example, aimed to be a single, universal town
| square. Mastodon follows much closer to forums where you
| find yourself in smaller, potentially more tightknit
| communities
|
| Both have pros and cons. I don't expect Mastodon will give
| people the same value as social media, but it won't have
| some of the downsides either. Similarly, I don't expect
| social media will ever be sustainable as a coordination
| platform without toxicity and doom scrolling.
| TechSquidTV wrote:
| Mastodon isn't meant for hosting this kind of content, for the
| same reason you aren't meant to put this kind of content on
| Twitter. Mastodon is like a social RSS feed reader.
| john-radio wrote:
| Actually the trending posts I saw when I clicked through to
| social.lol (omg.lol's Mastodon instance) are most of the same
| posts from my Explore page (the # icon) on urbanists.social,
| and most of these posts are not from either of these two
| instances but from diverse (and usually individually
| interesting!) ones, but please keep enjoying that haterade if
| you like the taste.
| omginternets wrote:
| The reason they're good has a lot to do with how hard they are
| to find.
| jszymborski wrote:
| Just following hashtags and using the discover page works
| pretty good for me
| metabagel wrote:
| It doesn't work for me. A lot of people don't realize that
| their posts won't show up in searches on other Mastodon
| instances unless they include hashtags. I found it to be a
| huge chore to find people posting about topics I was
| interested in. I pretty much gave up.
| scythe wrote:
| Discoverability doesn't always have to be so fast. As long as
| the word eventually gets around, maybe a slower kind of
| discovery could be good for some communities.
|
| There's also boardreader.com for finding small communities,
| although I don't think it really tilts towards Mastodon very
| much.
| metabagel wrote:
| Discoverability is Mastodon's Achilles heel.
| 3abiton wrote:
| I'm just curious what is the difference between Mastodon and
| Lemmy. I know they are a decentralized clone of Twitter and
| Reddit, but at their core 90% similar. Is it just the comment
| threads?
| janandonly wrote:
| Maybe the Nostr protocol and all its implementations (that do
| talk with each other) are the true replacement for Twitter?
|
| Check out some trending people/topics on Nostr here:
| https://nostr.band/
| _heimdall wrote:
| I've never quite wrapped my head around how any federated
| network would compete with centralized social media
| platforms, it feels like a solution for a different use case
|
| Federation means we have numerous copies of every single post
| ever shared floating around somewhere, that's a massive waste
| of resources IMO. Similarly, the amount of network traffic
| grows exponentially as the number of full nodes grows and
| again wastes a ton of resources. Those kinds of issues could
| be mitigated by limiting the number of full nodes on the
| network, but then you are driving towards a centralized
| system again.
|
| Federation works really well when the different groups are
| infrequently interacting. Sure there could be a mechanism to
| jump into another circle, but if federation means multiple
| servers needing to know the entire state of the world the
| scaling and coordination problems just don't seem worth it.
| hnbad wrote:
| This may be an unpopular opinion but there won't be a Twitter
| replacement. There may very well be a "next big thing" but it
| won't be like Twitter the same way Twitter wasn't like MySpace
| or MySpace wasn't like FARK etc (not to say these are in any
| way directly related but Twitter certainly wasn't the biggest
| social network by far even if it was culturally influential).
|
| Mastodon exists and it is good at being a federated
| microblogging service. Threads exists and it is good at the
| metrics it's built to deliver. Bluesky exists and it is good at
| being its own little club house. Truth Social exists and it is
| good at being Trump's soapbox. Gab exists and it is good at
| being whatever it is.
|
| Twitter hit a magic sweet spot that can't be replicated. It was
| also a terrible place even before the cultural shifts
| (including those prior to the leveraged buyout). It was the
| place celebrities would show their entire ass to journalists
| and everyone could tag along to tell them how terrible they
| were. It was also the most readily accessible source for
| "citizen journalism" with unfiltered live coverage of major
| tragedies and other "breaking news" - but this has now become
| impossible as it has also become easily accessible to spread
| falsehoods that overwhelm any attempt at fact checking.
|
| X's "revenue sharing" mechanism that effectively monetizes
| outrage bait may be what's killing Twitter for good but even
| prior to that Twitter was already dead. Heck, Twitter was
| always bad even when it was useful. At times the up sides just
| outweighed the down sides if you knew how to use it. For many
| this involved "not being political" (which is already not an
| option if your identity deviates from the "norm" in obvious
| ways, e.g. being a woman) and sticking to specific niches. But
| the discoverability of these niches is also what made them
| prone to the inevitable Twitter drama.
| maxlin wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| subscriptions are most of their income, they don't pay the
| bills at all
| SalmoShalazar wrote:
| I thought community notes already existed as bird watch before
| the takeover?
| patcon wrote:
| 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 :/
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| Twitter is dead, long live X. Twitter as it was no longer
| exists. Regardless of what one may think of Elon's leadership,
| he's making big changes to the platform.
|
| It's a Ship of Theseus argument. How much does a platformm have
| to change before it's no longer what it used to be?
| enumjorge wrote:
| > [Twitter]'s off better than ever
|
| I'd agree that it's hard to take an opinion seriously that
| pronounces Twitter as dead. As you pointed out, when OpenAI's
| drama was unfolding, the conversations happened mainly on
| Twitter. But saying Twitter's current form is the service at
| its best is also hard to take seriously. I tried to follow said
| conversation about OpenAI during Altman's ouster and I found
| the site to be an inconsistently broken mess. To this day, I'm
| still not sure why I'm able to access certain posts without
| signing in, but not others. In my experience, the quality of
| the discussion on the site as a whole has also taken a hit.
|
| And again with the whole freedom of speech. It continues to
| baffle me how people associate Musk with the first amendment.
| He brands himself as a free speech absolutist, but his actions
| have continuously shown him to have no problem silencing
| critics and playing favorites on the platform.
| Timwi wrote:
| > When a blog post starts with saying "twitter is dead"
|
| That's not what they said. They said "it's the day that, for
| me, Twitter died." I read that as meaning "I personally don't
| want to use Twitter anymore."
|
| I personally feel the same about Reddit. I was a very regular
| reader and contributor, but since the big brouha about third-
| party apps I decided that it's dead to me. I'm no longer using
| it. That doesn't mean it has died as a platform, but it does
| mean that I personally have moved on from it.
| jhugo wrote:
| I wanted to move on from Reddit when all of that was going
| down, but it's really the only place on the Internet where I
| could get (just from the memory of the last 24h) a decent
| range of discussion/advice from real people about pizza
| stones, indoor plants, descaling a coffee machine, learning
| piano as an adult, and the answer to the question "TV show
| where someone sings Chattanooga Choo Choo", all from a single
| website that isn't heavily polluted by ads. As long as
| "[query] reddit" makes Google so much better, I can't really
| consider Reddit dead.
| snailmailman wrote:
| "Better than ever" when it's constantly promoting hate speech?
| And Elon is too? And advertisers are dipping out?
|
| And Twitter definitely doesn't have free speech. People still
| get banned, or have their posts artificially limited, but they
| do allow more hate speech.
|
| Nearly everyone I followed on Twitter is on Mastodon now. It
| works great. Conversations still happen there on news topics.
|
| I deleted my Twitter account a while back because my feed
| stopped being people I followed and became people promoting
| conspiracy theories. The site doesn't even work properly
| anymore. People link to threads of tweets but only the first
| tweet displays. And profiles never show latest tweets. (I think
| these might work when logged in? But also don't show any errors
| when logged out? I don't know as I'll never login again)
| mcintyre1994 wrote:
| I'm unconvinced that subscriptions are ever going to make
| enough money to pay the bills. Musk has been pretty clear he
| needs to get advertisers back. I don't think his approach of
| specifically telling Bob Iger to fuck off is going to help with
| that, but he isn't hiding that he needs to figure it out pretty
| quickly.
| prmoustache wrote:
| Well twitter doesn't exist anymore so yes it is dead.
|
| Also it is funny that for a lot of people including me,
| slashdot, digg, twitter and reddit are already a thing of the
| past while we are still visiting regular old forums.
| latexr wrote:
| > When a blog post starts with saying "twitter is dead"
|
| That is not what it says. Please don't straw man and misquote.
|
| > it's off better than ever
|
| By which metric? Certainly not financial.
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/15/business/twitter-cash-flow-el...
|
| > 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.
|
| Those conversations happened all around. There was nothing
| special about Twitter.
|
| > Eventually, with subscriptions paying most of the bills
|
| That's an astronomical assumption.
|
| > X does have pretty much everything it needs, and will only
| grow with time.
|
| So does it have everything it needs, or will it grow? Those
| don't make sense at the same time.
|
| > You can't put a price on Freedom of Speech.
|
| If you're a free speech absolutist, Twitter is _definitely not_
| the platform for you.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ElonJet
|
| https://slate.com/technology/2023/05/elon-musk-turkey-twitte...
|
| https://thewire.in/tech/musk-twitter-takedown-government-com...
| gdsdfe wrote:
| Woah people really hate AI on that mastodon instance
| smsm42 wrote:
| 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.
| elxx wrote:
| Anyone can look at the live feed here and see that this is made
| up:
|
| 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 wrote:
| 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/ It seems to be coming
| from different instances, though. I have no idea how Mastodon
| chooses what content to show on that page.
| smsm42 wrote:
| I just went to https://social.lol/
| blakewatson wrote:
| Yeah unfortunately that's Mastodon pulling from other
| instances. Here's the local timeline:
| https://social.lol/public/local
| famahar wrote:
| 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.
| Tomte wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| OK, just spent twenty bucks. Don't regret it.
| bkeating wrote:
| Thought you were referring to https://o.mg.lol/ lol
| kennedy wrote:
| ohh this is cool
| dataengineer56 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I'm holding out for omg.lawl
| krick wrote:
| 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).
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