The hostname is pretty fun sounding, seems to offer a basic profile page and email forwarding. Assuming the setup is noob friendly I wouldn’t call it a very unfair price. Yes you can do it for cheaper in gandi but seems more daunting a task.
It's not just a subdomain. It's the landing page, an email address with forwarding, creation of a Mastodon account on their instance... there's a lot there.
$20/year is actually a bargain as it would likely cost you more than that each month to run all of that yourself
Many DNS registrars offer very similar sets of value-add services for free for real TLDs people buy through them. Web "parking pages" and vanity email forwarding are table stakes.
What wouldn't be table stakes, would be if each of these was its own Mastodon instance, or something else like that that actually had an OpEx cost.
There are plenty of free-to-use Mastodon instances. They claim theirs is nicer, but it's hard to tell upfront, so it makes sense to me that they'd focus on the whole personal homepage aspect.
If I liked the omg.lol domain name a ton, I'd pay for this.
The main reason is you have more protection and guaranteed continual ownership of the thing (depending on the TLD you choose, of course). Whereas if this service shut down in 12 months time ... well it wouldn't be buckling any trends by doing so.
And if they shut down and let the omg.lol lapse or sell it, someone could then redirect all the subdomains to who knows what.
Another reason might be domain trust? If spammers use omg.lol subdomains the entire thing might be blacklisted for email.
Domains are easier to resell. I don't think there will be a secondary market for omg.lol and if you sell you business based on an omg.lol it will be a red flag vs. a top level domain.
On the other hand if you intent is a personal CV / bio type page, with email (you need fastmail too) and so on, the $20 is a great deal.
But I would rather just use a xyz.netlify.com for such a project, then couple that with a free email service.
> Another reason might be domain trust? If spammers use omg.lol subdomains the entire thing might be blacklisted for email.
I think that them being on the https://wiki.mozilla.org/Public_Suffix_List makes that unlikely. (a Public Suffix is a thing like .co.uk — would it make sense to blacklist .co.uk? Not unless you're the type of postmaster who is willing to blacklist entire TLDs like .biz as well.)
Ok I didn't know about this list. Feel like I should have known! I always though it was up to countries and top-level operators. I imagined something like .uk publishing somehow that .co.uk is a top level domain, for example.
I think the requirements to run a top level domain, like .lol itself are pretty onerous? But I wonder if it is easier to get your subdomain added to the public suffix list, and I wonder what legal guarantees are afforded to someone who registers such a domain.
- 3.1: The fact that a content license is necessary at all, and that it's still worded too broadly for my taste.
- 3.2: "We may change, suspend, or discontinue any of our Services." [...] "We make no representation, warranty or condition regarding the availability or operability of the Services at any time." This means you effectively have no ownership of the subdomain and no control over the availability of the services. Your website, email address, Mastodon instance, etc., may become permanently nonfunctional at any moment, without any recourse.
For the same reason people have been paying for services like this for over 2 decades? This is such a strange thread. If you don't want an omg.lol site, don't buy one! I'm not!
This might be a super interesting case study, because if I had to bet, it's that 80%+ of the hate on this thread comes from the DNS feature omg.lol added --- a feature not common among other content hosting services, and that probably doesn't need to be there at all for omg.lol's market. They made a feature for nerds, not realizing that you have to be super careful about nerds or they'll bite your head off for trying to appeal to them the wrong way. Third-level domains! The gall!
I can see a lot of potential here as an alternative for people like me who don't have or want social media accounts. Sometimes I do want to share a profile with people without linking to my business website. But managing a separate domain / server / registration / email / etc. for that purpose hasn't seemed worth it. $20 a year is pretty reasonable.
I think the one thing that would stop me from taking up on a service like this would be the "omg.lol" - it's just a little too off-brand for a guy who wears all black and hates texting. But I can see how a lot of people might be into it.
Hah! Good point. I might have to give it a shot just for the irony factor. Kinda like a happy face Tshirt. I saw an original one from the 80s (70s ?) in a vintage store for like $500, almost bought it... so in a way, as something you only wear a couple times a year this would be a real bargain ;)
I do like the idea of not just a landing page and email, but a little identity package that's not part of a social network.
I bought <my-name>.is.gay, because lol (nothing derogatory, I just used it as a link shortener). About 6 months later it stopped working because apparently reselling subdomains isn't allowed for .gay :(
I feel like most people either haven't started anything and had to deal with spam, or they think every business should a billion dollar grow at all costs business that loses money.
Making it free would have missed out on the probably 2 dozen people that converted from this post.
What kind of strange conspiracy rabbit holes have you dug yourself into? Take a step back and get out asap. It's just a fun subdomain to have... do you _really_ expect this is some secret initiative to start new social platform to rival "twitter/parler/etc" full of only "neoliberals"? oof.
Where in the description did you infer this was in any way attempting to become "the ultimate fix for online discourse"?
it is obviously on the front page because people are running away from Twitter, now that the dominant, extreme left has lost control of the narrative there.
Slow loading times, 8 bit images, animated gifs, crazy colorful pages, pages optimized for a screen resolution, for a special browser,...
no thank you, i stay on the new web ;-)
Slow loading times, 8 GB images, animated gifs, crazy dull pages, pages optimized for mobile, for a special browser,... no thank you, i stay on the old web ;-)
I set up an account and made a small donation for the 'verified' account thing.
I can use my sdf email address for email newsletters and such. I also log in (as another poster mentioned) and use the text mode browser for checking on Web sites from outside my local and national network.
Finally the system is a nice example of netbsd in action.
I have not joined in any of the forums &c yet. I might play with gopher and gemini for lutz
Wow, and I was embarrassed to log in again after ~3Y. Awesome that it still works. I have been meaning to check in again, so this thread is a great reminder.
What is SDF? I found it (sdf.org) but still unsure of what is the practical use. It reminds me of hashbang.sh, of which I also have an account but never found a use for it.
There really isn't any practical non-hobbyist use, just a community built around being a user in an old-school multiuser remote computer and basic web services.
SDF was an inspiration when I first found it. I think that it’s hard to capture what was so magical about it in a land of beige Windows boxes.
But what’s really amazing about it is that people still host things on there. And on top of that there are active message boards where people actually talk. It’s a weird little corner of the universe.
In a way I wish they had modernized a bit. But also I think if it turned into another PaaS system it would lose its charm. It is better off with the “weird” constraints that it has because it keeps it interesting.
could someone explain what is SDF? i genuinely tried to search but where i live it means "homeless" I also know about "signed distance functions" and while they are so cool indeed i doubt you're talking about it ?
The longer something has existed, the longer it is likely to continue existing. Going with Gmail or a custom domain is a really safe bet. There is no way I’d use an email service that’s less than 10 years old now.
My gmail account from when I was a kid is still active and working while most of the vanity/foss/privacy focused ones I signed up for have since died.
You can move a custom domain easily enough. I am about to do that to move away for the GSuite’s fees. Worst case, I’ll invest into running a service on my own. Best case, I’ll just use Proton or FastMail, etc.
I guess registrars can go down too but it seems less likely.
It’s a probability thing. Obviously everything old was once new. And everything dead was once old. But take any thing that exists right now and the most likely outcome is based on this rule.
If we take the C programming language, and one created last year, which one would you expect to still be used in 10 years? You can do this comparison for any two things where there is no inherent end date.
> If we take the C programming language, and one created last year, which one would you expect to still be used in 10 years?
That's a different thing altogether. Because it does not take in account market adoption. If C was a language on life-support with no major project using it, it could be as old as hell but I would not bet on it to be around and useful 10 years from now.
Also, that saying is stupid because it makes it look like you can predict the future of technologies by using a single factor, while reality a rich, multi-dimensional set of problems.
On the contrary, it is solidly rooted in math. On average, and without other context, a random sample will be close to the middle.
Given a random sample of any thing at an arbitrary point in time, on average it will be in the middle of its lifetime. Something that is X years old will on average, continue for X more years. Of course, additional information lets you refine that estimate considerably, but it is mathematically sound and surprisingly applicable to everyday life (e.g. using a single serial number on a product to estimate total production).
> On average, and without other context, a random sample will be close to the middle.
The thing is, we typically have a lot of context for every technology we discuss, so bringing back this saying that reduces everything to one-dimension is just silly.
You typically don't, you just think you do much like how stock pickers think they know but end up failing to beat the market average. There's too many unknowns and variables to even come close to an educated guess.
If you are truly an expert, you have a fighting chance. As a human, that means you are limited to a tiny number of specific subject matters.
Gmail isn't old enough. Go back another generation, AOL, Yahoo mail, etc. Best bet is probably some university email address. Now those are long-lived, if they let you keep it.
I agree. I trust this one more than if Google would launch a free, customizable "start page" service like it. They're killing their free services like no tomorrow.
I didn't, omg lol is really not my style. Besides that, I already have a fun domain name that I use as an email alias. I pay $10 a yearly and it gets a laugh every time I give it to someone.
Other than hosting a basic web page, the other features are not useful to me.
I created an account and I consider shutting my own low traffic, personal homepage and blog. I think I belong to a sort of target demographic there. I also chose this to finally get a "start page" on the web with links to my social network profiles to find me. There are many others like it but they usually don't offer the same value and bonus feature sets at all.
That it's $20/year is very little but also significantly raising the likelihood it'll stay around for years. The author is also intelligently creating relatively low maintenance but high value services so this actually looks workable in the long term.
If this was positioned as "20usd/year mastodon account on our cool instance and - BTW - you get free webpage and email forwarding" would get much closer to the audience.
I sense the point of this funny domain is the community, and community is centered on mastodon instance which btw, is not cheap to run as soon as it grows beyond a few hundred people. (I'm including potential moderation costs)
I think you could be underestimating it. I’d guess there’s a simmering level of interest among a lot of people, especially those more conscious of moving away from big tech / corporate platforms. FWIW, this tipped me over the edge into setting up a Mastodon account — it was very painless. We’ll see whether I actually start using Mastodon, but it’s a start.
They have grown from 300K monthly active users to 2.5M in December. Nothing compared to social networks at large, crazy numbers compared to the omg.lol user base.
You really have no interest in the concept of a non-corporate / non–billionaire-controlled Twitter? Not trying to bait you, but genuinely curious on your stance.
I believe the issue for many people is not the "non-corporate / non-billionaire-control" part, and more the "twitter" part. It may sound weird to people who use twitter, but much of the world don't have the slightest interest in the concept.
It makes no difference if the person controlling it is a billionaire good guy or bad guy. The result is the same. If you go down the route of mastodon then all you’re doing is segregation.
In scenario A you pool people together into 1 big void and everyone gets angry and both sides consider each other wrong.
In scenario B you segregate people into groups of opinions where the moment your opinion differs you’re kicked from that group.
Either way we are long past the time when you could have an educated conversation and debate.
I have no desire to join a void with single opinions and nothing to discuss.
The whole point of federated activitypub servers is the opposite of segregation - everyone gets to use whatever server they want and they can still interact with anyone else. Servers blacklisting each other (or defederating) is possible of course, but nothing's stopping you from just joining another server, and twitter at this point is just a large defederated mastodon instance anyway.
Server black listing can be copied so servers can get blocked before they are even listed. If an admin doesn’t like you and you get banned then you have to rebuild your social circle. You could host your own but really who wants to do that?
Not parent commenter but; I personally don't have any interest in what you described. Especially when it's something like mastodon, which is inferior in almost every aspect.
- All clients are straight up bad but this is mostly personal opinion.
- I don't want to maintain and pay for a personal instance
- On public instances there is always the risk of the admins deciding not to run it anymore without notice. In that case you lose all your followers.
- Due to how it's designed; some things are very inconvenient. For example; when I click a link to someone's profile on the internet, I can't see if I follow them or not unless they are on my server. Then I have to copy their url, go to my instance, search and follow. Too much friction for a simple and one of the most important actions of the platform.
- With these inconveniences (that are not easy to solve without centralization), it's imho impossible for it to go mainstream. It requires a certain level of tech-saviness. Even the concept of "choosing an instance" is confusing for most people. I don't want to just follow or be followed by techbros and edgy artists. I like having normal converstaions with regular people.
I would be interested in an alternative to Twitter but in its current state, Mastodon isn't that.
>when I click a link to someone's profile on the internet, I can't see if I follow them or not unless they are on my server. Then I have to copy their url, go to my instance, search and follow. Too much friction for a simple and one of the most important actions of the platform.
I get that is quite a UX/UI problem. However, given what is now known about FAANG and big tech corp, I would rather have my data unreliable and use bad UX/UI for online exchange then to use the mainstream big corp platforms. Personally I don't want to be a product.
What recent information about FAANG (and presumably Twitter) pushed you over the edge? Genuine question in case it comes across sharp, for all those except Netflix I haven't respected their business practices or ethics for at least a decade.
The UI/UX problems of Mastodon really are due to the federation model, they aren't inevitable when moving away from a corporate walled garden. Bit of a dead horse on HN, but RSS really does most of what Mastodon does better, throw in WebMentions and you have all the social features too. To the original thread here, it's be very cool to see indieweb support on omg.lol since everyone gets a subdomain and webpage already!
Not disagreeing with you that there is an amount of friction at the moment. However, just to provide some counterpoints:
> All clients are straight up bad but this is mostly personal opinion.
There are a _lot_ of new clients in active development right now. I'm on the private alpha of Ivory by Tapbots (who built the popular Tweetbot client), and it's quite good.
> On public instances there is always the risk of the admins deciding not to run it anymore without notice. In that case you lose all your followers.
Agreed that this is an issue, but there are ways around it. I'm a member of a coop-run instance, social.coop.
> Due to how it's designed; some things are very inconvenient. For example; when I click a link to someone's profile on the internet, I can't see if I follow them or not unless they are on my server. Then I have to copy their url, go to my instance, search and follow.
Agreed, but most clients resolve this.
> it's imho impossible for it to go mainstream.
Strong disagree - I think it's already going mainstream, and lots of non-tech people are picking it up every day.
> Even the concept of "choosing an instance" is confusing for most people. I don't want to just follow or be followed by techbros and edgy artists. I like having normal converstaions with regular people.
Agreed, but this is resolved by just picking one of the big, popular instances. I was on universeodon.com first, and was immediately having "normal" conversations with "regular" people.
Again, your comment absolutely rightfully points out that there _is_ friction there. However, I don't think it's at all insurmountable, and I think it will continue to improve and gain traction.
I generally agree, but Mastodon is getting a lot of dev attention right now due to the Twitter problems, and while FOSS tends to improve slower and more incrementally, it also tends to only improve (as opposed to user-hostile pivots and so forth). For this use case, I'd rather use a clunky service that'll be around for the rest of my life than a slick one that might get bought by Elon Jr or whoever.
The service has been around for years, the real die-hards are actually on the IRC (which recently got a tie-in with a Discord server for those who want to chat on there without having the technical knowhow to use IRC).
I personally got it for the webpage, to use as an online business card, and have been loving all of the other stuff that surrounds it like the new Weblog feature
There are a lot of negative folks in the comments here but I think this is kind of neat. I helped a buddy set up a little art boutique site using a .lol domain and the overall feedback was that people liked the whimsy. Combine that with the fact that that TLD was heavily discounted on porkbun at the time and it all made reasonable business sense!
He’s just a baby but still needs a unique email for me to create him accounts (eg frequent flyer, global entry) and I had previously been using a +variant on my gmail.
I saw the same need, but I've actually purchased domains for all of my children, so that when they get older, I can transfer ownership to them.
10-18 years is a long time window, so I felt that purchasing a domain was more appropriate than setting up an address at a service which may or may not still be available in decades.
Thank goodness for services like Purelymail[1] and Forward Email[2] that offer free or cheap forwarding from various domains!
The negativity here is bizarre. This looks just about exactly like the first steps we need to create good spaces for social networking and publishing online. The guy is already taking feedback about subdomains and looking at selling domains, which obviously would give people a little more control and assurance they can own their stuff.
The readership of this site is for some reason primed to immediately surface negative feedback for almost anything creative that gets posted. It happens for basically every “Show HN.”
> The idea of curating alternate services together and offering it as a product feels novel - does anyone else do this?
It's a different but related concept: Framasoft in France (https://framasoft.org/fr/). It's a non-profit that provides open-source alternatives to common cloud services. They also teach people how to install and configure these tools on their own server instead of relying on providers reselling their data.
I love PeerTube. Been running an instance of it of my own for a few weeks.
I currently have only two videos on it so far.
The subject of the videos on my instance are computing and music.
My instance does not allow others to sign up, but I would like to invite other creators to host videos about computing and music on my instance. I tried to reach out to one person that was currently using YouTube and who was making videos about computing to ask them if they wanted to host their videos on my PeerTube instance instead. Didn’t hear back from that person yet.
I would like for about ten to one hundred people who have a history of creating videos about computing or music to join my instance. The goal being that we would be enough people on the instance so that every week there is 1 to 2 new videos posted, while still being few enough people so that we are not flooded with many videos, and while also maintaining a strict focus on videos whose topics are restricted to one or more of the following three:
- computing (by this I mean programming, software engineering, computer science and such)
- music (includes music videos for music created by the person, as well as videos about music theory and videos about music production)
- electronics (meaning things like microcontrollers, soldering, PCB design, etc)
Essentially, to create a small and focused community.
Still not sure how to actually get other people to join though. For now my strategy will be to continue making videos of my own, and occasionally reaching out to others to ask them personally if they want to join the instance when I see someone that makes content of a similar nature as the kind that I host on my instance.
Two common types of services are bundling and unbundling. Either compiling multiple existing products or services into one, or offering one focused part of some overbundled service. It's the circle of life.
> I expected to hate this and walked away thinking it was a pretty ok idea. Good job!
Same here.. Though the services aren't bad, but the decent API made me feel like there's really some love put in.
The main thing that put me off is the two acronyms that I barely hear anymore.. haven't seen lol in a long time and omg has certainly decreased for me, I'd feel awkward using it.
Maybe if they had an additional re-branded version that was less 'hip', I'd be up for it :D
I've been a happy omg.lol subscriber for years, originally as a fun little joke but it's actually pretty useful and I use my profile as my "link in bio" for twitter and other social sites.
The founder, Adam, is a genuinely good dude. He just keeps adding more features and the service gets better and better.
It seems like a very nice service. It is great to hear that they are already around for quite some time.
And remember: if you’re not paying, you are the product. This seams both very reasonably priced and also priced high enough that if you take a little care at running things well it can be sustainable
Interesting, how many years would you estimate it's been around?
I see their Mastodon server is pretty new (since last July) and wayback doesn't have the homepage archived at all. Can't think of another way of checking.
Idk why but why are people getting mad at stuff that literally affects every other type of services online (like the chance of it shutting down)?
20$/year also doesnt sound all that expensive, thats 1.6$ per month! I rarely ever pay for things online, but I know damn well that anyone who pays for this service and then not use it would probably forget that they are paying because its so cheap!
Sigh Hacker News moment I guess. Criticising harshly for something thats suppose to be fun.
The difference here is you are sharing email addresses, domains, feeds, networks, etc. none of which you will ever own if the service shuts down.
Other services can shut down but this type of entrenchment isn't there when my cloud notes shuts down, or when my hosted collaborative kanban shuts down. They can give me my data and I can go elsewhere. I don't have to get the world to update contacts and bookmarks and other stuff like that.
You get a surprising amount of functionality for $20. I just got an account and I've been poking around for about an hour. I'm seriously impressed. You get:
- a webpage
- DNS
- email forwarding
- a statuslog
- url shortener
- a pastebin
- a weblog
- an optional Mastodon account
- optional IRC/Discord
- and probably some more stuff I missed
And all of this stuff is much more configurable than it would typically be on other services. It is ripe for creative integrations. Oh and the whole thing can be interacted with through an API. Pretty cool for $20. Definitely not the same as "just getting your own domain."
Worth noting many of the services on omg.lol support custom domains, e.g. https://zwe.st/omglol is on the URL shortener.
I extensively use the API for pastebin and URL shortener. It's very much a selling point for me -- love being able to control things on the command line with a few simple scripts.
Great package of tiny little web apps for a good dollar amount and a great author.
It's not $20. It's $20 per year. I know that might be semantic for some people, but for much of these services, I wouldn't want it going away after 1 year if I'm unable to pay that cost again. And for that reason, I think it's worth noting.
Domain registration has to be renewed, either per year or per <x> years if you buy a bunch of licenses up front. So what's the alternative to this then? A lot of domains can cost around $20 per year.
The thing with a domain registration is that you know if you pay for ten years in advance, you WILL have it for ten years. With most SaaS, you have absolutely no guarantee this is going to be the case.
It is totally reasonable to charge a recurring fee for providing an ongoing service, but to be clear you are not buying a domain that needs registration. You are buying a subdomain of the domains that this company already owns. Some other sites give those away for free because there is no marginal cost per subdomain.
I think the main difference is a proper domain from a major registrar grants you ownership rights that you don't get from leased subdomains like OP's (mainly the ability to keep the domain even if the registrar goes out of business; and moving the domain between registrars).
If you buy a gTLD domain through a registrar, your ownership of the domain is bound by the rules established by ICANN [1][2]. If you purchase an eTLD+1 [3] subdomain from omg.lol (as part of the offered services) you're not covered by [1][2] but instead by [4, Section 1.5 part B, Section 3.2 part A].
What this means is OP can arbitrarily shutdown their offering at their sole discretion and, as a result, you'll lose access to the eTLD+1 you've purchased (domain, email, all gone). However, if you purchase a gTLD domain through an ICANN accredited registrar, the registrar can't unilaterally do the same (even if the registrar implodes, you still own the domain and you can move it elsewhere).
The only real difference is that Verisign makes more money than omg.lol, hence they have more resources and incentives to not screw you over. That, of course, has incredible weight, and indeed I'd not trust omg.lol while I do trust Verisign.
You can move between registrars, but the registrar's not the one that you're leasing the domain from; they're just a reseller.
The entity that you're actually leasing the domain from is the registry operator-- such as Verisign for .com or PIR for .org. And, yes, it's still a lease relationship-- while there are some ICANN-mandated consumer protections around your "purchase" of a domain, if you stop paying your annual renewal (or run out of whatever amount of time you've prepaid), that domain isn't yours any more.
Omg.lol is operating the same way (albeit not under ICANN oversight, as they're not running a gTLD); they've just cut out the middleman and are leasing subdomains directly rather than via third-party registrars.
Not entirely true; I'd argue it's closer to subleasing a part of the property they're currently leasing from an ICANN accredited registrar.
> they've just cut out the middleman
Quite the opposite! They've just introduced themselves as yet another middleman on top of the already existing middleman (there's still a value proposition to this, but it's not the same).
That’s the main issue I see, they can stop the service at any time and then you’ll have no chance to get the subdomain back. You’re in a much better position with an actual second-level domain, because you can move the domain between service providers and registrars, and depending on locality you may also have actual legal rights to keep owning the domain.
Even for newer second-level domains like .lol and cool-looking ccTLDs like .io, the possibility that the registrar is going to end it, become unstable, or change policy is real. They’re marketing gimmicks.
What if this service stops to exist after 2 years? Then any place you advertised/published this subdomain will need to be updated. With your own domain you won't have that issue, ever. Why would you give that up?
These are ongoing services so a once off payment doesn't make sense for the business. The alternatives are self-hosting and free services, self hosting is great. If you are using free services though, they could disappear too, and you have to question the business model of anyone givingyou something for nothing.
At least if you are paying for it you are entering into a contract of service from the provider which gives you a lot of legal recourse and leverage and also supports the business so that they do keep providing you the service.
I have been a paying customer for years, and I don't expect to ever leave. My favorites are:
- DNS capabilities
- Friendly and fast customer support
- Great, smooth, pretty UI on all platforms
See, I don't get this. Last time I tried fastmail I ended up on proton because it was just slightly... Kludgy. DNS was slow. Webmail was a mess. And the mobile client scene wasn't worth it.
It's just really good at being an email provider. Reliable, privacy-respecting, good support, and with a webmail client to rival (or beat) Gmail.
Plus they frequently develop new useful features, like partnering with Bitwarden and 1Password to generate throwaway email address on the fly at your domain.
I tried fastmail once when I was looking for a new provider. Free trial, they said. So I created an account, switched over my MX records, changed my mail client, etc. Seemed fine.
That is, until I received an email from my father. I couldn't open it. It was so perplexing that I eventually opened a ticket with support to see what I screwed up. Turns out their "free trial" only worked with other fastmail addresses until verified my account. The only supported method of verification was to create a paid account. Support wouldn't or couldn't help until I verified. I was pretty pissed; felt like I got bait and switched. What good is a trial that only works with a service that (relatively) very few people use? I closed my account, moved to purelymail, and haven't looked back.
I still have no idea what email my dad sent me. They might be a great service otherwise, but this gave me a very sour experience.
I would be very curious to hear from a Fastmail rep on this as my demo account never did anything like this to my recollection, though that was a long time ago at this point and I’ve been a happy subscriber for 5+ years.
Fastmail is just normal IMAP unlike Gmail, so it works with email clients without weirdness around folders and archiving. It also supports native push notifications on iOS, which Gmail does not. And it works well with your own domain names.
That said I switched to using iCloud mail with my own domain as soon as it was available.
I love the service, I hate the name. It's got too much cute/whimsy for my taste, and it just makes me feel like the "hello fellow teenagers" guy. If they had the same everything but it was a "short and easy to spell/pronounce" domain service, I would 100% go for it.
It doesn't have to be entirely boring, but less... cute. Also I think that meme language has a high risk of drifting into the cringe zone, and then that will feel bad too. I would have the same problem with lit.lol or yeet.lol.
Am I alone in being willing to pay more for less whimsy? Give me the $30/year plan where I can pick bucket.web or tiny.star or something less of the moment.
oh same. I'm not sure I'd want this with anything other than my own domain name anyway, but definitely I wouldn't want "omg.lol". I hate that internet-ass humor.
No, that's not what those docs say you can do. It looks like you can either use a DNS A record to point "example.com" directly to omg.lol's IP address, or use a CNAME record to point "example.com" to whatever IP address "example.omg.lol" points to. In both of these cases, your browser's url bar would still say "example.com".
Yes that. But also in addition to that you can set A or CNAME records and do whatever you want. Just like with any domain. You can even set NS records and manage records with cloudflare.
So yes you can use your own domain but edit the profile with omg.lol
That's actually a shockingly decent list of provided features for $20 a year. A more than fair price, and worth every dime as long as the servers are at least semi-reliable. I pay $12 a year for a domain, and another $5 per month for a VPS to host services on that domain, and even that's totally worth it to me, so $20 a year for all that they're offering (even if it is only on a subdomain)? Quite good indeed…
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 254 ms ] threadThe eTLD stuff they mention are interesting, still trying to understand what it actually means though. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Suffix_List
$20/year is actually a bargain as it would likely cost you more than that each month to run all of that yourself
What wouldn't be table stakes, would be if each of these was its own Mastodon instance, or something else like that that actually had an OpEx cost.
"Pay 20usd/y for your social account in our mastodon instance and get free subdomain, webpage and email forwarding"
I would find this totally acceptable, considering the potential costs of actually running a mastodon instance.
If I liked the omg.lol domain name a ton, I'd pay for this.
And if they shut down and let the omg.lol lapse or sell it, someone could then redirect all the subdomains to who knows what.
Another reason might be domain trust? If spammers use omg.lol subdomains the entire thing might be blacklisted for email.
Domains are easier to resell. I don't think there will be a secondary market for omg.lol and if you sell you business based on an omg.lol it will be a red flag vs. a top level domain.
On the other hand if you intent is a personal CV / bio type page, with email (you need fastmail too) and so on, the $20 is a great deal.
But I would rather just use a xyz.netlify.com for such a project, then couple that with a free email service.
I think that them being on the https://wiki.mozilla.org/Public_Suffix_List makes that unlikely. (a Public Suffix is a thing like .co.uk — would it make sense to blacklist .co.uk? Not unless you're the type of postmaster who is willing to blacklist entire TLDs like .biz as well.)
I think the requirements to run a top level domain, like .lol itself are pretty onerous? But I wonder if it is easier to get your subdomain added to the public suffix list, and I wonder what legal guarantees are afforded to someone who registers such a domain.
[0] https://home.omg.lol/info/legal
- 3.2: "We may change, suspend, or discontinue any of our Services." [...] "We make no representation, warranty or condition regarding the availability or operability of the Services at any time." This means you effectively have no ownership of the subdomain and no control over the availability of the services. Your website, email address, Mastodon instance, etc., may become permanently nonfunctional at any moment, without any recourse.
This might be a super interesting case study, because if I had to bet, it's that 80%+ of the hate on this thread comes from the DNS feature omg.lol added --- a feature not common among other content hosting services, and that probably doesn't need to be there at all for omg.lol's market. They made a feature for nerds, not realizing that you have to be super careful about nerds or they'll bite your head off for trying to appeal to them the wrong way. Third-level domains! The gall!
I think the one thing that would stop me from taking up on a service like this would be the "omg.lol" - it's just a little too off-brand for a guy who wears all black and hates texting. But I can see how a lot of people might be into it.
I do like the idea of not just a landing page and email, but a little identity package that's not part of a social network.
I'm in the boat with style but I threw 20$ at it because I know I'll get a few interesting looks. Might even add it to my "recruiter" resume.
Making it free would have missed out on the probably 2 dozen people that converted from this post.
On another note, what about this caused all these haters to crawl out?
The A16Z crypto fund announcement must be open in another tab
edit: now that I revisit it, SDF does appear to provide more services, though probably with less commitment to reliability than omg.lol
I can use my sdf email address for email newsletters and such. I also log in (as another poster mentioned) and use the text mode browser for checking on Web sites from outside my local and national network.
Finally the system is a nice example of netbsd in action.
I have not joined in any of the forums &c yet. I might play with gopher and gemini for lutz
But what’s really amazing about it is that people still host things on there. And on top of that there are active message boards where people actually talk. It’s a weird little corner of the universe.
In a way I wish they had modernized a bit. But also I think if it turned into another PaaS system it would lose its charm. It is better off with the “weird” constraints that it has because it keeps it interesting.
Edit: oh ok i think i found it: SDF.ORG ?
https://archive.is/7LxAh
My gmail account from when I was a kid is still active and working while most of the vanity/foss/privacy focused ones I signed up for have since died.
aka the (postulated) Lindy Effect
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
I guess registrars can go down too but it seems less likely.
horses for carriage seem to defy that kind of assumption
Gotta love these kind of sayings that have virtually no connection with reality.
If we take the C programming language, and one created last year, which one would you expect to still be used in 10 years? You can do this comparison for any two things where there is no inherent end date.
That's a different thing altogether. Because it does not take in account market adoption. If C was a language on life-support with no major project using it, it could be as old as hell but I would not bet on it to be around and useful 10 years from now.
Also, that saying is stupid because it makes it look like you can predict the future of technologies by using a single factor, while reality a rich, multi-dimensional set of problems.
Given a random sample of any thing at an arbitrary point in time, on average it will be in the middle of its lifetime. Something that is X years old will on average, continue for X more years. Of course, additional information lets you refine that estimate considerably, but it is mathematically sound and surprisingly applicable to everyday life (e.g. using a single serial number on a product to estimate total production).
The thing is, we typically have a lot of context for every technology we discuss, so bringing back this saying that reduces everything to one-dimension is just silly.
If you are truly an expert, you have a fighting chance. As a human, that means you are limited to a tiny number of specific subject matters.
It's unlikely that Gmail will shut down though so there are a lot of reliable exceptions
To be fair, this should be what to expect from any large corporation, but sadly, many don't.
Lurkers are 90%, 10% have accounts, and 10% of those with accounts comment. This was the breakdown of some major subreddits maybe 6 years ago.
Other than hosting a basic web page, the other features are not useful to me.
That it's $20/year is very little but also significantly raising the likelihood it'll stay around for years. The author is also intelligently creating relatively low maintenance but high value services so this actually looks workable in the long term.
I sense the point of this funny domain is the community, and community is centered on mastodon instance which btw, is not cheap to run as soon as it grows beyond a few hundred people. (I'm including potential moderation costs)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds
In scenario A you pool people together into 1 big void and everyone gets angry and both sides consider each other wrong.
In scenario B you segregate people into groups of opinions where the moment your opinion differs you’re kicked from that group.
Either way we are long past the time when you could have an educated conversation and debate.
I have no desire to join a void with single opinions and nothing to discuss.
- All clients are straight up bad but this is mostly personal opinion. - I don't want to maintain and pay for a personal instance - On public instances there is always the risk of the admins deciding not to run it anymore without notice. In that case you lose all your followers. - Due to how it's designed; some things are very inconvenient. For example; when I click a link to someone's profile on the internet, I can't see if I follow them or not unless they are on my server. Then I have to copy their url, go to my instance, search and follow. Too much friction for a simple and one of the most important actions of the platform. - With these inconveniences (that are not easy to solve without centralization), it's imho impossible for it to go mainstream. It requires a certain level of tech-saviness. Even the concept of "choosing an instance" is confusing for most people. I don't want to just follow or be followed by techbros and edgy artists. I like having normal converstaions with regular people.
I would be interested in an alternative to Twitter but in its current state, Mastodon isn't that.
I get that is quite a UX/UI problem. However, given what is now known about FAANG and big tech corp, I would rather have my data unreliable and use bad UX/UI for online exchange then to use the mainstream big corp platforms. Personally I don't want to be a product.
The UI/UX problems of Mastodon really are due to the federation model, they aren't inevitable when moving away from a corporate walled garden. Bit of a dead horse on HN, but RSS really does most of what Mastodon does better, throw in WebMentions and you have all the social features too. To the original thread here, it's be very cool to see indieweb support on omg.lol since everyone gets a subdomain and webpage already!
> All clients are straight up bad but this is mostly personal opinion.
There are a _lot_ of new clients in active development right now. I'm on the private alpha of Ivory by Tapbots (who built the popular Tweetbot client), and it's quite good.
> On public instances there is always the risk of the admins deciding not to run it anymore without notice. In that case you lose all your followers.
Agreed that this is an issue, but there are ways around it. I'm a member of a coop-run instance, social.coop.
> Due to how it's designed; some things are very inconvenient. For example; when I click a link to someone's profile on the internet, I can't see if I follow them or not unless they are on my server. Then I have to copy their url, go to my instance, search and follow.
Agreed, but most clients resolve this.
> it's imho impossible for it to go mainstream.
Strong disagree - I think it's already going mainstream, and lots of non-tech people are picking it up every day.
> Even the concept of "choosing an instance" is confusing for most people. I don't want to just follow or be followed by techbros and edgy artists. I like having normal converstaions with regular people.
Agreed, but this is resolved by just picking one of the big, popular instances. I was on universeodon.com first, and was immediately having "normal" conversations with "regular" people.
Again, your comment absolutely rightfully points out that there _is_ friction there. However, I don't think it's at all insurmountable, and I think it will continue to improve and gain traction.
I personally got it for the webpage, to use as an online business card, and have been loving all of the other stuff that surrounds it like the new Weblog feature
I hope this works out for you and your users.
He’s just a baby but still needs a unique email for me to create him accounts (eg frequent flyer, global entry) and I had previously been using a +variant on my gmail.
Having a vanity email alias seems more fun.
10-18 years is a long time window, so I felt that purchasing a domain was more appropriate than setting up an address at a service which may or may not still be available in decades.
Thank goodness for services like Purelymail[1] and Forward Email[2] that offer free or cheap forwarding from various domains!
[1]: https://purelymail.com/
[2]: https://forwardemail.net/
The idea of curating alternate services together and offering it as a product feels novel - does anyone else do this?
I'd love to see hosting offered for curated open source services that are interoperable. Sort of like all those WordPress hosts of yore (and today!).
Edit: omg.lol, is it AOL?? :D
Edit 2: The price is even the same! $19.95 vs $20
It's a different but related concept: Framasoft in France (https://framasoft.org/fr/). It's a non-profit that provides open-source alternatives to common cloud services. They also teach people how to install and configure these tools on their own server instead of relying on providers reselling their data.
This includes, among other things, PeerTube.
PeerTube is a federated alternative to YouTube.
https://joinpeertube.org/
I love PeerTube. Been running an instance of it of my own for a few weeks.
I currently have only two videos on it so far.
The subject of the videos on my instance are computing and music.
My instance does not allow others to sign up, but I would like to invite other creators to host videos about computing and music on my instance. I tried to reach out to one person that was currently using YouTube and who was making videos about computing to ask them if they wanted to host their videos on my PeerTube instance instead. Didn’t hear back from that person yet.
I would like for about ten to one hundred people who have a history of creating videos about computing or music to join my instance. The goal being that we would be enough people on the instance so that every week there is 1 to 2 new videos posted, while still being few enough people so that we are not flooded with many videos, and while also maintaining a strict focus on videos whose topics are restricted to one or more of the following three:
- computing (by this I mean programming, software engineering, computer science and such)
- music (includes music videos for music created by the person, as well as videos about music theory and videos about music production)
- electronics (meaning things like microcontrollers, soldering, PCB design, etc)
Essentially, to create a small and focused community.
Still not sure how to actually get other people to join though. For now my strategy will be to continue making videos of my own, and occasionally reaching out to others to ask them personally if they want to join the instance when I see someone that makes content of a similar nature as the kind that I host on my instance.
There is also https://librem.one services.
I think Mozilla is trying to do this, although not super successfully.
Same here.. Though the services aren't bad, but the decent API made me feel like there's really some love put in.
The main thing that put me off is the two acronyms that I barely hear anymore.. haven't seen lol in a long time and omg has certainly decreased for me, I'd feel awkward using it. Maybe if they had an additional re-branded version that was less 'hip', I'd be up for it :D
maybe Zoho for business apps?
$19.95 per month vs $20 per year.
The founder, Adam, is a genuinely good dude. He just keeps adding more features and the service gets better and better.
And remember: if you’re not paying, you are the product. This seams both very reasonably priced and also priced high enough that if you take a little care at running things well it can be sustainable
I guess you could also be both though, no?
Interesting, how many years would you estimate it's been around?
I see their Mastodon server is pretty new (since last July) and wayback doesn't have the homepage archived at all. Can't think of another way of checking.
From then to now is 3 years 9 months and ~20 days.
As comparison: I've got a two letter GitHub account and joined in late 2009, so 1.5 years after its founding.
Idk why but why are people getting mad at stuff that literally affects every other type of services online (like the chance of it shutting down)?
20$/year also doesnt sound all that expensive, thats 1.6$ per month! I rarely ever pay for things online, but I know damn well that anyone who pays for this service and then not use it would probably forget that they are paying because its so cheap!
Sigh Hacker News moment I guess. Criticising harshly for something thats suppose to be fun.
Other services can shut down but this type of entrenchment isn't there when my cloud notes shuts down, or when my hosted collaborative kanban shuts down. They can give me my data and I can go elsewhere. I don't have to get the world to update contacts and bookmarks and other stuff like that.
- a webpage
- DNS
- email forwarding
- a statuslog
- url shortener
- a pastebin
- a weblog
- an optional Mastodon account
- optional IRC/Discord
- and probably some more stuff I missed
And all of this stuff is much more configurable than it would typically be on other services. It is ripe for creative integrations. Oh and the whole thing can be interacted with through an API. Pretty cool for $20. Definitely not the same as "just getting your own domain."
https://bw.omg.lol/
I extensively use the API for pastebin and URL shortener. It's very much a selling point for me -- love being able to control things on the command line with a few simple scripts.
Great package of tiny little web apps for a good dollar amount and a great author.
https://zac.omg.lol/
Ah, good point.
All domains are like that, though, even TLDs.
Com could be free as well. The only real difference is choice.
Or to put it differently, you say it doesnt need registration. Well, it does. They require it. So what.
What this means is OP can arbitrarily shutdown their offering at their sole discretion and, as a result, you'll lose access to the eTLD+1 you've purchased (domain, email, all gone). However, if you purchase a gTLD domain through an ICANN accredited registrar, the registrar can't unilaterally do the same (even if the registrar implodes, you still own the domain and you can move it elsewhere).
[1] ICANN Registrants' Benefits and Responsibilities: https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/benefits-2013-09-16-en
[2] ICANN Registrar Compliance Program: https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/registrar-2012-02-25-e...
[3] https://jfhr.me/what-is-an-etld-+-1/
[4] Neatnik LLC (the company behind omg.lol): https://home.omg.lol/info/legal
The entity that you're actually leasing the domain from is the registry operator-- such as Verisign for .com or PIR for .org. And, yes, it's still a lease relationship-- while there are some ICANN-mandated consumer protections around your "purchase" of a domain, if you stop paying your annual renewal (or run out of whatever amount of time you've prepaid), that domain isn't yours any more.
Omg.lol is operating the same way (albeit not under ICANN oversight, as they're not running a gTLD); they've just cut out the middleman and are leasing subdomains directly rather than via third-party registrars.
Not entirely true; I'd argue it's closer to subleasing a part of the property they're currently leasing from an ICANN accredited registrar.
> they've just cut out the middleman
Quite the opposite! They've just introduced themselves as yet another middleman on top of the already existing middleman (there's still a value proposition to this, but it's not the same).
TL;DR: subtenant rights ⊈ tenant rights
Of course, only as long as they can operate the service forever...
At least if you are paying for it you are entering into a contract of service from the provider which gives you a lot of legal recourse and leverage and also supports the business so that they do keep providing you the service.
That said, the billing side wasn't bad.
Plus they frequently develop new useful features, like partnering with Bitwarden and 1Password to generate throwaway email address on the fly at your domain.
That is, until I received an email from my father. I couldn't open it. It was so perplexing that I eventually opened a ticket with support to see what I screwed up. Turns out their "free trial" only worked with other fastmail addresses until verified my account. The only supported method of verification was to create a paid account. Support wouldn't or couldn't help until I verified. I was pretty pissed; felt like I got bait and switched. What good is a trial that only works with a service that (relatively) very few people use? I closed my account, moved to purelymail, and haven't looked back.
I still have no idea what email my dad sent me. They might be a great service otherwise, but this gave me a very sour experience.
That said I switched to using iCloud mail with my own domain as soon as it was available.
It doesn't have to be entirely boring, but less... cute. Also I think that meme language has a high risk of drifting into the cringe zone, and then that will feel bad too. I would have the same problem with lit.lol or yeet.lol.
Am I alone in being willing to pay more for less whimsy? Give me the $30/year plan where I can pick bucket.web or tiny.star or something less of the moment.
https://home.omg.lol/info
I can't find it in the Help docs.
Am I reading that correctly?
Meaning, your profile wouldn't be served from "example.com" but instead, "example.com" would simply do a browser redirect to "omg.lol/example"
So yes you can use your own domain but edit the profile with omg.lol