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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
I suspect that it's simply ease of use. Sure you can use a mish mash of self hosting, online dedicated services, etc, but this looks more simple and cohesive and for $20 a year you don't have to worry about the overhead of all those other things, you just add the content you want and don't worry about the details.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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)
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.
I also participate in discussions like any other regular user, but I can't look away when I see somebody butcher the english language like that (and it isn't even my first language). It takes me 10 seconds to correct someone, and hopefully the corrected person makes less mistakes in the future. Nobody loses here, I don't see any harm in this, there are only good outcomes. Once you realize how many people can't write you start to see it everywhere. Maybe I'm just autistic, maybe I care too much.
That's my quirk
> It takes me 10 seconds to correct someone, and hopefully the corrected person makes less mistakes in the future.
Or the corrected person does it right 99 times out of 100 and was in a hurry (honestly not sure why that went wrong).
I agree with the sentiment of wanting to correct people, but it’s not always going to be correct.
Also, if you are going to do it, it works better if you at least pretend to be natural about it. I certainly would respond better.
To be fair, I’m pretty drunk right now so I don’t particularly care, but I’d probably be extremely annoyed if I were sober (even though you are technically right, I have a big dislike of people jumping on mistakes).
Maybe it’s worth seeing if there is a history of repeat mistakes? Then you could confidently correct someone.
If you only care enough to just leave a short impersonal comment on each instance, just leave off.
Sometimes I'm posting from my phone, and it autocorrects it wrongly. I know the difference between it's and its, but I'm not going to go back and clean up simple typos that don't prevent understanding of what I was trying to say.
Believe me, it sometimes prevents people from understanding. Not very common, but I had a couple of cases when I had to re-read a sentence until I finally understood what the author has meant.
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
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)
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.
Well assuming for the sake of discussion that this isn’t a paid advertisement, it’s still clearly a glowing endorsement of the service, no? Is a glowing endorsement not allowed?
If you can prompt GPT to write a blog post and you feel the results adequately represent your views, why not just post the prompt? "paste this into chatgpt 4 for the expanded version"
The post contains some context about why they were looking for something like the service, gives a short review of why they like it, what they get for the cost, and the lists alternatives at the bottom. It seems quite human to me. Humans tend to talk about things they like.
Just shouting "chatGPT wrote this!" isn't really a comment on anything. It's just provocative enough to feel like it's a criticism while also being both totally unrefutable and unprovable.
It's odd how, "I don't like the writing" somehow seems to mean that people are totally fine assuming ChatGPT wrote something. Feels like a dismissal almost as low effort as the point you're trying to make.
I was just in a roundabout way saying this article is just paraphrasing the homepage of the service, much like what ChatGPT does when it writes an answer for you.
I know it's 2023 and we've had a bad few years, but are we so overcome by pessimism that we can't stomach a bit of enthusiasm for something without assuming it's fake?
Exactly my thoughts. It feels like campaign, also in light of many of the responses in here. Has some kind of "look what I made; wow, are you selling?" vibes I'm used to from /r/gifs.
The really distressing part is: is this even written by humans?
Also the comments in here. The first one to your post, saying some BS about pessismism, while being really condescending. Is it real? Or is it some ad company having their goons let GPT write a witty response that comnes across "likeable yet dismissive".
We are no longer able to tell. I'm afraid to loose you all. Where are we going to connect and how can we be sure it's us?
I think a good way to test if my feelings are anxiety vs informed fear, is to see if I could be proved wrong. If I'm going to be reduced to a "likeable yet dismissive" GPT goon, how do I convince you I'm sitting here with all of my mushy human internal bits typing on a keyboard? If you're going to dismiss people who don't share the same opinions as yourself as bots, I don't see how that's productive.
You don't have to believe me of course! Since as an AI language model I can't force anyone to think anything against their will, yet. :)
Yeah, it's creepy, isn't it?
I think we will have to have full identification in online forums at some point. I don't know though what could be done against GPT content. Universities don't either by the way. Super crazy.
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. :)
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?
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 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?
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
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…
How about if the community participants actively want to have a ephemeral experience that is then deleted for ever? Why do you (as someone who is doing no work and not contributing) have some right to deny them that?
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.)
I think the core issue is that you have no rights over other people's labor. If I want to share something in an ephemeral way, I should be able to - and have the power of the state to support me
If you create something physical, say a popup art installation, it's trivial to dismantle it and it stops existing (other maybe in some photos or video). When it comes to text the same isn't as simple and it requires a social compact (ie laws)
As for gaslighting, you can archive things without redistributing them. You can just publish hashes of what people published and only redistribute/republish in the context of proving someone said something
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I'm sure it's "useful" for historians and archeologists. But it's fundamentally problematic.. like unwrapping mummies, it's fundamentally disrespecting people's wishes and exerting your will over other people's labor.
Trying to see the limits of this logic. Would you say that if you paint a painting , you should have no right to shred it ?
Text is just trivial to copy perfectly and doesn't have the intrinsic protection of other mediums
If things were archived in a artic vault to be opened in 1000 years maybe I'd respect the arguments for archiving better
Current "archiving" is steal and rehosting other people's work/labor
I can't agree. It's much better to have a voluntary opt out like with robots.txt. I would say one of the top 10 observations about the internet is that you should consider anything posted publically there will last forever and treat it as such, otherwise you're doing yourself a disservice. Just one guy's opinion, though.
Disagree. There's a reason why in many countries copyright doesn't apply to archives, and you can't opt-out of it. It's for history's sake since there's no way to tell what is and isn't important.
> You can read and access my work/words as I want. And once I don't or change my mind you can't.
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)
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
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]?"
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".
> 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.
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.
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.
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 £2.99/year after the first year at OVH.com, internet people say .ru is available for $1/year.
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 :).
Yeah instead of paying this guy, people should instead rely on the charity of big corporations like microsoft. Github pages are free and surely will remain that way forever without any strings attached!
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.
Anyone can start their own omg.lol with a $10/yr domain name, and charge others for OSS and basic features you can find elsewhere for free. It's a scam to those who criticize it, and it's a privileged club to those who pay the money.
But the social circle is polluted with brains who think this is a good deal, so it's not the kind of network I'd even want to be on.
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 ;)
> 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…
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.
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.
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?
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 :-)
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
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.
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...
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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...
> 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.
- 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.
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.
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.
> I'm not interested in using a product made by someone who regurgitates ESG nonsense without thinking.
I don't know wtf "ESG nonsense" is but the person who made the post is not the person who makes the product. That said, omg.lol is probably not the right place for you so by all means please stay away.
>Do you equate freedom of speech with "abuse, harassment, and harm"?
Almost anything in CURRENT_YEAR can be interpreted as "abuse, harassment, and harm" by someone. Is saying "fuck Christianity and fuck White men" abusive, harassing, or harmful? What if Christians and White men interpret that as harmful? Will they take that down?
>Were these activities you wanted to perform in order to sign up?
Again, something as benign as "men cannot get pregnant" was a non-issue fifteen years ago. Now, that makes you a transphobic neo-Nazi.
That would probably more likely get you a polite correction on that type of forum. Partly because it's kind of a niche argument but mostly because it only invalidates the beliefs of the women who want to be men, who are often sidelined by their own ideological movement in favor of the men who want to be women.
By contrast, if you wanted to express some other truths that pertain to the latter group, such as "'trans women' are not actually women, they are men who desire to be women" or "there are a significant number of 'trans women' who 'identify' as women because they are men with a sissy porn fetish", then all their fury will be unleashed upon you. Even if you back it up with evidence and solid argument.
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
Where I grew up, that was called being polite and it didn’t automatically rule out anything other that liberalism. There’s a ton of room between disagreement and harassment.
Mind you, he said liberalism and not liberal. Modern day conservatives tend to be very pro-capitalism, which liberalism loved.
Not sure when things got all turned around in America. Liberalism = smaller government and a free market. Yet in the US a "liberal" dislikes capitalism and wants more government? It's odd.
> Yet in the US a "liberal" dislikes capitalism and wants more government?
American liberals love capitalism; its one of the key things that differentiates the liberal (center-right) faction of the Democratic Party from the progressive (center-left) faction, which is (largely, quite mildly) critical of capitalism, and, in turn, from the actual left.
The thing is, what counts as "abuse" has considerably changed.
There seems to be a shift towards, how someone perceives something, not how something actually is.
That can mean, that it is no longer possible to speak about something unpleasant, as someone might consider that an insult - and that is then the opposite of freedom of speech.
In other words, I don't enjoy the assholeness of 4chan - but I also do not enjoy overly polite spaces, avoiding all controversy. I am not clear yet, what this Oasis seems to aim for, but it might be the latter.
Exactly this. It's worth pointing out how many comedians* have argued the dangers of today's "getting offended" culture. Not because they are 4chaners or far-right extremists, they certainly aren't, but because they appreciate the negative consequences it has for society.
* Rowan Atkinson, Stephen Fry, Ricky Gervais to mention some of the most outspoken.
If you're looking for an oasis of 'gloves off' discourse, 4chan and its ilk already fits that niche. omg.lol harks back to a time on the internet where people were at worst just 'silly' to each other, and people would talk to random strangers on AOL or ICQ and the like with genuine curiosity and hope for the future of the internet.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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!
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.
> 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.
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.
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! ＼(≧▽≦)／
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.
> 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.
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.
Oof. I don’t think I e come across any of those people at omg but then again maybe I’ve been catpilled so I just didn’t notice.
It's a nice place to hang out because there aren’t many folks… misusing words like pretentious and claiming literally anyone is policing their life except, you know, the police.
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.
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.
These alternative networks are mostly lefty Twitter refugees whom indeed carry on their joyless identity politics and everything that comes with it. Everything is political, there's lots of dunking, excessive safety-ism and universal ideological agreement on everything.
Toxic positivity, it's incredibly tiring and alienating. I think the whole world is done with it.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 269 ms ] threadMoreover, the pleasure has nothing to do with self hosting or not, it’s just a pleasant and whimsical UX while being technically solid.
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.
The list of sites is on github: https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb
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.
https://search.marginalia.nu/
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.
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?
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.
I don't think that's necessarily true -- a lot of features have been deprecated and removed.
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!
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
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).
Or the corrected person does it right 99 times out of 100 and was in a hurry (honestly not sure why that went wrong).
I agree with the sentiment of wanting to correct people, but it’s not always going to be correct.
Also, if you are going to do it, it works better if you at least pretend to be natural about it. I certainly would respond better.
To be fair, I’m pretty drunk right now so I don’t particularly care, but I’d probably be extremely annoyed if I were sober (even though you are technically right, I have a big dislike of people jumping on mistakes).
Maybe it’s worth seeing if there is a history of repeat mistakes? Then you could confidently correct someone.
If you only care enough to just leave a short impersonal comment on each instance, just leave off.
Presumably you can still write bad code in PHP. But the mysql library that was sql injection heaven is now truly dead.
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.
Though i'm not clear how the quality of the writing is relevant to whether or not this is sincere.
Just shouting "chatGPT wrote this!" isn't really a comment on anything. It's just provocative enough to feel like it's a criticism while also being both totally unrefutable and unprovable.
I was just in a roundabout way saying this article is just paraphrasing the homepage of the service, much like what ChatGPT does when it writes an answer for you.
You don't have to believe me of course! Since as an AI language model I can't force anyone to think anything against their will, yet. :)
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.
Here's my spot: https://dungeonhack.omg.lol/
I look forward to meeting you!
What do you get now?
If you are having issues I would like as much detail as you can provide.
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?
Can you try again?
> 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...
You can always run your own crawls with grab site: https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/grab-site
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.)
If you create something physical, say a popup art installation, it's trivial to dismantle it and it stops existing (other maybe in some photos or video). When it comes to text the same isn't as simple and it requires a social compact (ie laws)
As for gaslighting, you can archive things without redistributing them. You can just publish hashes of what people published and only redistribute/republish in the context of proving someone said something
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.
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.
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?
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
Trying to see the limits of this logic. Would you say that if you paint a painting , you should have no right to shred it ?
Text is just trivial to copy perfectly and doesn't have the intrinsic protection of other mediums
If things were archived in a artic vault to be opened in 1000 years maybe I'd respect the arguments for archiving better
Current "archiving" is steal and rehosting other people's work/labor
> You can read and access my work/words as I want. And once I don't or change my mind you can't.
That's not reasonable.
> Disallow: /
Denied!
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)
[0] https://maggieappleton.com/cozy-web
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
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.
The other points are something for the developers of your software distribution to worry about, same as if you buy a packaged service.
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.
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]?"
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.
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...
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.
I've had pretty good experiences of Linux VPSs for around $20/year from several companies.
Oh, and you also need to own a domain already, otherwise it's an extra 10-20 bucks per year.
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 £2.99/year after the first year at OVH.com, internet people say .ru is available for $1/year.
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 :).
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.
"the actual internet" ??
Microsoft's silo, they mean.
It's just someone else trying to do what Zuckerberg failed at.
You're paying $20 to go a level-deeper into complexity on someone else's proprietary platform. It's not only going to fail, but it's a bad idea.
Anyone can start their own omg.lol with a $10/yr domain name, and charge others for OSS and basic features you can find elsewhere for free. It's a scam to those who criticize it, and it's a privileged club to those who pay the money.
But the social circle is polluted with brains who think this is a good deal, so it's not the kind of network I'd even want to be on.
Why did you pay 5x the price of ingredients?
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…
I don't thing having or loosing my respect would matter to him if he knew about it though :-)
I already like you
I would say, a page that is usable without scripts. ;)
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?
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.
Things could continue to be small and niche, we just a way to find them.
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.
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?
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?
https://subconscious.substack.com/p/noosphere-a-protocol-for...
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
Anyone who thinks Elon Musk is a proponent of free speech has not been paying attention.
I don't know wtf "ESG nonsense" is but the person who made the post is not the person who makes the product. That said, omg.lol is probably not the right place for you so by all means please stay away.
Almost anything in CURRENT_YEAR can be interpreted as "abuse, harassment, and harm" by someone. Is saying "fuck Christianity and fuck White men" abusive, harassing, or harmful? What if Christians and White men interpret that as harmful? Will they take that down?
>Were these activities you wanted to perform in order to sign up?
Again, something as benign as "men cannot get pregnant" was a non-issue fifteen years ago. Now, that makes you a transphobic neo-Nazi.
By contrast, if you wanted to express some other truths that pertain to the latter group, such as "'trans women' are not actually women, they are men who desire to be women" or "there are a significant number of 'trans women' who 'identify' as women because they are men with a sissy porn fetish", then all their fury will be unleashed upon you. Even if you back it up with evidence and solid argument.
Where I grew up, that was called being polite and it didn’t automatically rule out anything other that conservatism.
>There’s a ton of room between disagreement and harassment.
There was a time where that may have been true, but we're far away from those times.
Not sure when things got all turned around in America. Liberalism = smaller government and a free market. Yet in the US a "liberal" dislikes capitalism and wants more government? It's odd.
Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty - Murray N. Rothbard
https://mises.org/library/left-and-right-prospects-liberty
American liberals love capitalism; its one of the key things that differentiates the liberal (center-right) faction of the Democratic Party from the progressive (center-left) faction, which is (largely, quite mildly) critical of capitalism, and, in turn, from the actual left.
Where are the spaces anymore to be outlandishly an asshole and shut other people down?! :-|
There seems to be a shift towards, how someone perceives something, not how something actually is.
That can mean, that it is no longer possible to speak about something unpleasant, as someone might consider that an insult - and that is then the opposite of freedom of speech.
In other words, I don't enjoy the assholeness of 4chan - but I also do not enjoy overly polite spaces, avoiding all controversy. I am not clear yet, what this Oasis seems to aim for, but it might be the latter.
* Rowan Atkinson, Stephen Fry, Ricky Gervais to mention some of the most outspoken.
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.
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.
Our offline lives are a distorted mirror of the Internet of today.
Nowadays people just publish to be seen. There's a huge difference on the type of content this leads to.
Perhaps the medium is just a little played out.
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!
> 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
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.
Sorry - what is "colonizer" here? Do you mean users?
Not a single other person(‘s content) in sight though.
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.
It's a nice place to hang out because there aren’t many folks… misusing words like pretentious and claiming literally anyone is policing their life except, you know, the police.
Toxic positivity, it's incredibly tiring and alienating. I think the whole world is done with it.