Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

https://blakewatson.com/journal/omg-lol-an-oasis-on-the-internet/

by blakewatson • 3 years ago

820 323 3 years ago

cianmm3• 3 years ago

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

lannisterstark4• 3 years ago

I skimmed OPs post, and then read yours, and I'm still a bit confused as to how it's different than just hosting a mishmash of different but related services yourself. If you could not, yes that's fine. But if you could, what really are the advantages?

tw04• 3 years ago

Presumably the mastadon integration. Think twitter with your profile directly tied to your personal site - except not twitter.

alexeldeib• 3 years ago

This is the classic Dropbox criticism, no?

Moreover, the pleasure has nothing to do with self hosting or not, it’s just a pleasant and whimsical UX while being technically solid.

graypegg4• 3 years ago

I think you kind of answered your question, no? Setting up web things, especially when they have a chance to get quite bursty hug-of-death traffic, is hard for most people. I'd prefer to set things up myself but I know that places me in a verrrrry small minority of folks.

cianmm3• 3 years ago

I argue with computers for my day job, I don’t want to do that after work hours too. I’m happy to pay somebody else (especially Adam who is just so active with the community) a fairly paltry sum to do it for me.

rsynnott• 3 years ago

Hosting all of this stuff on your own would be a lot of fuss which most people wouldn’t want to bother with.

soulofmischief• 3 years ago

Just because I can manage a service doesn't mean I want to all the time. I'm a busy guy and already have client infrastructure to manage. At a point in my life where I'm trying to cut down on things I have to tend to.

stjohnswarts3• 3 years ago

I suspect that it's simply ease of use. Sure you can use a mish mash of self hosting, online dedicated services, etc, but this looks more simple and cohesive and for $20 a year you don't have to worry about the overhead of all those other things, you just add the content you want and don't worry about the details.

tambourine_man3• 3 years ago

That internet is not dead, you know? It’s just the the other part grew so massively.

There are still people writing blog posts and websites that don’t require you to dismiss 5 popups before you can interact with it. It can be done.

lacrimacida2• 3 years ago

It’s just hard to find. Google returns trash

lhmiles• 3 years ago

Give me your favorite small web links

cwoolfe• 3 years ago

How did you get cian.lol? Why isn't it cian.omg.lol?

Tomte2• 3 years ago

You can register domains yourself and set them up, under "Switchboard" --> "External Domain Routes"

tonymet• 3 years ago

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

kibwen2• 3 years ago

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

lopis• 3 years ago

Do it. The more the merrier.

lannisterstark4• 3 years ago

I just self host stuff on my domain and link them to a Flame dashboard for family and friends.

https://github.com/pawelmalak/flame

Dashboard is only accessible by my wireguard network, Which they can turn the LAN mode on on, so it doesn't route all their traffic, just to the local domain.

unshavedyak• 3 years ago

You’ve got me thinking the same thing. Omg.lol seems as interesting as it is enticing me to build a similar thing for fun.

ghewgill• 3 years ago

There are various similar communities, which don't have to compete with one another because the internet is a big place. Two that jump to mind are https://tildeverse.org and https://disroot.org.

shermantanktop• 3 years ago

“omg.lol is unabashedly built with PHP”

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

mattl• 3 years ago

No, modern PHP frameworks have come a long way.

Retr0id• 3 years ago

Speaking as someone who has pentested a few PHP codebases over the years, rather than as a developer, It's a bit like C. That is, it's an absolute footgun in the wrong hands, and a lesser footgun in experienced hands.

For experienced devs following best practices and using modern frameworks it's "mostly fine", and that's the side of things that's been improved over the years, but most of the old rakes are still there to be stood on.

wvenable2• 3 years ago

but most of the old rakes are still there to be stood on.

I don't think that's necessarily true -- a lot of features have been deprecated and removed.

lucb1e3• 3 years ago

Also a pentester here. I find C and PHP to be quite different. Somehow, C applications always have catastrophic issues pop up, sooner or later, where you can make it execute random code at least under some circumstances. PHP applications can be the same if the team is inexperienced or doesn't get the necessary time to apply best practices, but I've also seen plenty of PHP applications where we didn't find significant issues with the server-side aspects.

PHP applications are fun to test because most teams found another set of solutions to the same problems (it has so much history that wheels have been reinvented a lot), so you get to see new things. They're also typically larger than newer and new-style services written in a shiny new language, which haven't had time to accumulate as many features and are often written as a microservice (smaller components where one/each dev can know all the ins and outs, allowing to have a total overview so that security controls can much more easily be implemented in a unified way).

block_dagger• 3 years ago

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).

wvenable2• 3 years ago

Nope.

PHP itself has also come along way. I don't know if it's because of it's reputation that it seems to evolve faster than most languages.

I recently used PHP to construct my personal site/blog. I didn't use any frameworks but I did use it's statically typed/strongly typed features that that is very different from how I would have coded in PHP years ago.

jay-barronville3• 3 years ago

It’s 2023, is that still a reasonable concern?

No. A LOT has changed in the world of PHP over the years. And to be honest, I give credit to amazing frameworks like Laravel [0] for giving PHP a massive facelift (I consider Taylor Otwell one of my software heroes). Overall though, modern PHP software is much cleaner and more secure than whatever you knew from years ago.

[0] https://laravel.com

reddalo2• 3 years ago

I agree about Laravel and Taylor Otwell.

Moreover, I'd like to point out that even if the vast majority of PHP-backed websites are based on WordPress, WordPress is not an example of good PHP practices at all. Its code-base and coding standards are old and horrible.

rchaud• 3 years ago

PHP, jQuery and W3Schools - HN's combined kryptonite

Keyframe• 3 years ago

That crown belongs to Javascript now.

jay-barronville3• 3 years ago

Please elaborate.

graypegg4• 3 years ago

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)

tambourine_man3• 3 years ago

It was wrongly added to that list I the first place.

_heimdall4• 3 years ago

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

Aeolun4• 3 years ago

Well, it’s extremely backwards compatible. To the point my 15 year old websites written in it still work with some minor (+/- 10 lines) modifications.

Presumably you can still write bad code in PHP. But the mysql library that was sql injection heaven is now truly dead.

xwowsersx• 3 years ago

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)

smsm424• 3 years ago

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.

graypegg4• 3 years ago

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

toomuchtodo2• 3 years ago

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

bovermyer6• 3 years ago

I checked out Omg.lol when it first got popular on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34269772).

At the time, I thought it was an amalgamation of things I already did on my own or otherwise had a community for (e.g., Neocities, Tilde Town).

Now, though, I think I get it. There's something to be said for sustained energy.

bovermyer6• 3 years ago

OK, I bit.

Here's my spot: https://dungeonhack.omg.lol/

I look forward to meeting you!

blakewatson4• 3 years ago

OP here, just wanted to say your tabletop links page is chef's kiss.

jadbox• 3 years ago

Now, though, I think I get it.

What do you get now?

bovermyer6• 3 years ago

The community vibe. The energy. The reason for something technologically commonplace to be exceptional and worth interest.

rambambram3• 3 years ago

Nice blog you have there! My RSS reader finds a feed on your website, but has problems showing it. It seems to validate as a valid Atom feed, so I was wondering if you ever heard before of external sites not being able to load it?

bovermyer6• 3 years ago

If you're talking about my personal site https://benovermyer.com, no, I have not heard of problems rendering the RSS for it.

If you are having issues I would like as much detail as you can provide.

PenguinRevolver• 3 years ago

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

yellow_lead• 3 years ago

Is there a reason for that or they just haven't been archived yet?

Ringz• 3 years ago

Unlikely. Some people archive every page they visit.

blakewatson4• 3 years ago

Oh wow, you’re right. I wonder what’s up with that.

politelemon• 3 years ago

Just tried and I see someone else also tried after seeing your comment.

The same snapshot had been made 25 minutes ago. You can make new capture of this URL after 1 hour.

But yeah it's strange, nothing appears in the archive:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://bw.omg.l...

toomuchtodo2• 3 years ago

It’s possible the site owner has asked the Archive to dark site specific captures. Capture jobs will still run, but they won’t be available publicly (until some future date).

You can always run your own crawls with grab site: https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/grab-site

contrarian12345• 3 years ago

I think that's great.. archiving should be opt-in not opt-out

You can read and access my work/words as I want. And once I don't or change my mind you can't. Once someone posts something, you don't have a right to it in perpetuity .. That's how things should work - but that's just my opinion

leononame• 3 years ago

I Disagree. There's not a big difference between someone reading your stuff and saving it versus automatic archiving. Being able to delete what you said makes real discourse with a bad actor very hard if not impossible. If you change your mind, you are always free to rectify, but you shouldn't be able to pretend you never said this or that.

I know there's a line to draw somewhere, personal blogs aren't our countries' leaders' Twitter accounts or press conferences. Copying someone's copyrighted work in form of an archive might some legal implications I'm not aware of. But keeping things for posteriority is important and I don't believe people should be able to choose what part of their words and actions will be recorded and which won't.

echelon• 3 years ago

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.

TeMPOraL• 3 years ago

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.)

bovermyer6• 3 years ago

I disagree.

If you publish something publicly, it should be available for all time.

If you change your mind, it's on you to make that known.

porcoda• 3 years ago

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.

Aeolun4• 3 years ago

archiving should be opt-in not opt-out

That’s really weird. If someone posts a sign on their store window, and I take a picture of it, should I be required to delete the picture when they remove the sign?

afpx• 3 years ago

That's why I have alt accounts - one for each of my different personalities.

johnfernow• 3 years ago

In the UK, if you publish a book, magazine or newspaper, by law you have to send a copy to the British Library for archive. A lot of other countries have similar laws. In the UK, legal deposit has expanded to include the web (so long as the person/group creating the content is in the UK), but since many individuals and small businesses are unaware of legal deposit, the UK Web Archive will archive a lot of the web by themselves.

Tom Scott interviewed some people from the British Library, and they explain the importance of archiving:

The importance of legal deposit not being selective, and being everything, is: we can't decide today what's going to be important in 50 years' time. We want everything, because we don't know what will be important.

He also added his own thoughts:

I cannot overstate just how useful it is to be able to track down things that never made it online, or to research out of print, forgotten books where there are no other copies available, or to scan through every issue of an obscure local newspaper to track down one reference. This is the raw text of history, as it happened, and someone has to keep it preserved for the future.

source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNVuIU6UUiM

stjohnswarts3• 3 years ago

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.

CaptainFever• 3 years ago

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 reasonable.

burkaman• 3 years ago

The creator's company website is also excluded: https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://neatnik..... Maybe some philosophical disagreement?

lucb1e3• 3 years ago

Presumably due to https://neatnik.net/robots.txt

rapnie2• 3 years ago

This blocking of the archiver may be philosophical, but not a disgreement. Just speculating, but on the fediverse there are quite a few people who feel their social interactions are personal and 'in the moment'. Something akin to the Cozy Web [0] though not being too strict about (everything is still public after all).

[0] https://maggieappleton.com/cozy-web

anjel• 3 years ago

Works with archive.today: https://archive.is/zAbYO Also works with Ghost Archive: https://ghostarchive.org/archive/ValSP

Wayback Machine is arguably a more durable archive site than these other two archives, but the fact that it can be archived elsewhere would indicate that the problem is likely to be on archive.org's end of things rather than omg.lol

graypegg4• 3 years ago

That kind of sucks :( So much of the "small internet" of the past people talk about in relation to this stuff, is only really preserved in any significant scale by IA. Hope it's not the operator making a big sweeping decision for all users.

Grimblewald• 3 years ago

Some might argue that is the magic of it. It is much easier to be happy when you miss some things, and look forwars to others. Some listen to radio, or use streaming services in a radio like way (no skipping, no targeted searches) for the same reason, sure they could keep looping their favourite song on whatever platform, but its waaay more exciting when it comes on unexpectabtly.

Our interactions having a fleeting nature makes them more special and forces us to be more emotionally involved.

Just an alternative take, no a statment of my personal opinion.

nicbou• 3 years ago

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

NanoYohaneTSU• 3 years ago

It's an ad bro

footlose_38157• 3 years ago

It certainly feels like it.

beardicus• 3 years ago

are you saying the author was paid for this post? seems like an enthusiastic user to me. do you know what an advertisement is?

1B05H1N• 3 years ago

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

james_pm• 3 years ago

I happily pay $20/year so I don't need to worry about it. Not everyone can or wants to run their own infra.

airstrike• 3 years ago

So that you don't have to worry about outages, updates, bugfixes, certs, permissions, vulnerabilities, ... like you do on your own website/infra?

akho2• 3 years ago

It's the same infrastructure, with the same outages.

The other points are something for the developers of your software distribution to worry about, same as if you buy a packaged service.

erxam• 3 years ago

Even without taking into account the time investment in maintaining your own infra, it compares favorably with everything else. Even the most dirt-cheap VPS is a few bucks more expensive on a yearly basis by itself, and you still have to buy domains and similar.

Running your own infra only really works out if you either have access to great hardware for super-cheap or WANT the experience from setting everything up.

cipheredStones2• 3 years ago

It consistently surprises me how much software engineers devalue the effort of software engineering when it comes to their personal lives.

If you're a SWE in an English-speaking country, you almost certainly make $20 post-tax for at most one hour of work - 30m at SV salaries, as little as 15m if you're at a FAANG-ish company. Is it conceivable that you would spend less than an hour a year maintaining something like this if you were to do it yourself? I don't think so.

Most people can't earn money in increments of one additional hour, of course, but it still sounds strange to hear people say "why should I spend [the amount of money I earn in half an hour] per year when I could just do it myself [with an amount of professional effort I would expect to be paid 20x as much for]?"

jodrellblank3• 3 years ago

"Even the most dirt-cheap VPS is a few bucks more expensive on a yearly basis by itself"

Not if you get a Black Friday special; here[1] was $14.95/year for 40GB SSD, 1GB RAM, 1TB monthly bandwidth, 1CPU core.

RackNerd were offering $10.28/year[2] for 10GB SSD storage, 768MB RAM.

Hudson Valley offered $8/year[3] for 10GB SSD and 512MB RAM

[1] https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/190984/from-14-95-yr-10-gb...

[2] https://lowendbox.com/best-cheap-vps-hosting-updated-2020/ (sold out)

[3] https://lowendbox.com/blog/are-you-serious-hudson-valley-hos...

p4bl0• 3 years ago

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 :).

footlose_38157• 3 years ago

Github pages is free. A .info domain is $5/year.

That's already more than half the features you get with this, and you get to be on the actual internet, not some dude's silo.

As the post's age goes on, I see more criticism, and less positive reactions.

dsr_• 3 years ago

You are not the target audience.

zeekaran• 3 years ago

If I have to spend even one hour per year maintaining my own, this service is cheaper.

dannyw• 3 years ago

How much did you spend on your last lunch?

Why did you pay 5x the price of ingredients?

umairj• 3 years ago

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

camdenlock• 3 years ago

I don’t know why; probably a curious desire to see how bad Elon Musk would screw it up

It’s been interesting to watch people go from nerd-crushing on Elon (omg rockets! omg electric vehicles yay climate!) to loathing him in the blink of an eye. Goes to show what’s really important to some people…

AlexAffe2• 3 years ago

Elon bashing is 99% some companies campaign. There is an amount of money involved beyond our wildest imagination. World economy kind of money. You don't read Elon and Tesla content on reddit frontpage with 30k ups on average almost 24/7 without there being companies involved spending heavily.

meepmorp• 3 years ago

Instead of a conspiracy or coordinated campaign against Elon Musk, what if a lot of people have come to think that he's a douchebag and upvote links about him saying/doing what they see as douchey things? Maybe he's actually done some stuff over the last few years that's made him genuinely unpopular with a lot of people; maybe it's not because "They" are trying to destroy him, but because many people actually find his behavior off-putting.

jayveeone2• 3 years ago

Nah, he's just a deeply unlikeable jerk

IlliOnato• 3 years ago

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 :-)

Dylan168072• 3 years ago

Why can't I like the rockets but also think he's bad at twitter?

tambourine_man3• 3 years ago

“omg.lol is unabashedly built with PHP”

I already like you

contrarian12345• 3 years ago

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

bhasi• 3 years ago

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

bbx• 3 years ago

I didn’t realise it was linked to in this article. I built that on a whim several years ago. It’s more about what can be done in 4 min rather than what’s being done. But I’m glad it inspired people to try to style their own website themselves.

blakewatson4• 3 years ago

OP here. I love that little site and I link to it often!

generic92034• 3 years ago

From that page: "What is the first thing you need to work on?"

I would say, a page that is usable without scripts. ;)

damiante• 3 years ago

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

chongli• 3 years ago

Discoverability and smallness are at odds. This problem isn’t specific to the internet. That quaint, beautiful postcard town does not remain so once it’s been discovered. Eternal September happens everywhere.

mmazing• 3 years ago

Discoverability and smallness are at odds.

Is it really true on the internet though? omg.lol could presumably stay "small-appearing" and "quaint" and have millions of users. How could you really tell the difference?

If it were all indexed you could drill down and find people who share your interests, that doesn't necessarily ruin the website, yeah?

moralestapia• 3 years ago

Nah, you just need a (not ad oriented) search engine.

Things could continue to be small and niche, we just a way to find them.

mtillman• 3 years ago

Plug/thanks for https://ooh.directory/ for keeping the dream alive.

xhrpost• 3 years ago

https://home.omg.lol/directory

treyd• 3 years ago

Fwiw, many feeds provided by Mastodon instances are available as RSS. Same for other Fedi software, like WriteFreely.

acegopher• 3 years ago

Check out the Kagi Small Web: https://blog.kagi.com/small-web

culopatin• 3 years ago

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

ClimaxGravely2• 3 years ago

I wonder about that myself as someone who grew up on this.

I used webcrawler at the very beginning and I'm probably looking that things through rose lenses but I found what I wanted back then. I think back then in some ways it was easier to find your community because SRO and the like wasn't a thing back then.

The years where I found my niche forums benefited me much more than my college days.

hooby• 3 years ago

Might be a tangent - but is more discoverability actually desirable in this case?

Could it possibly preserve that "old web" style of interaction, if it becomes a global phenomenon that everyone uses? Or does this only work as long as it stays a little hidden niche, that most people don't know about, and will never find?

Or in other words - can something feel like "the old web" (which was early adopters and enthusiasts only) - if it's frequented by everyone?

You love the idea of smaller communities - but how can they stay small?

082349872349872• 3 years ago

have you tried https://search.marginalia.nu ?

kvathupo• 3 years ago

I like this.

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

kibwen2• 3 years ago

If you can live without video and images, you could comfortably host even a very large forum (on the order of the top 10% of subreddits by volume) with only a $5/month VPS, as long as you made it serve static pages and were judicious with your tech stack. The cost of hosting text alone wasn't prohibitive 20 years ago, and it's even less so today.

lacrimacida2• 3 years ago

Video and images could he links too

rglullis5• 3 years ago

Media is (ought) to be stored in a shared, content addressable storage system like torrent magnet links and IPFS. Backed by something like Tahoe-LAFS.

benignobject• 3 years ago

Great to see a Mississippian on the top of HN

footlose_38157• 3 years ago

I don't really want to yuck the author's yum, because they're obviously in a period of exploration and having fun, but I don't think this is a good solution.

I forget the name of the guy, or his project, but I recall some "Innovator" was criticized years ago when they tried doing their own "meta-ICANN" + Social network. They said it was going to be the next WWW, but what they were really doing was promising web 3.0 in a silo, at-a-cost... This was maybe 1-2 years before Zuckerberg's Metaverse concept failed. I thought the reasons were obvious that it, or metaverse never succeeded.

For beginners, I don't see how this is immune to all the same things that are wrong with ICANN. Except, this $20 is more expensive than most ICANN TLDs.

Similar to ICANN woes, what's stopping spammers and bots from buying space and presence there like anywhere else? What's stopping squatters from buying your name here and holding it up, or quickly propping-up a celebrity to launch a money scam? Do you think once a service like this gets popular, that it's much different than Myspace?

Is it really appropriate to send someone $20/year for this kind of thing? You can get a Github Pages for free, use Jekyll on it to run a blogging app, and get a <5$ .info domain, and you already have more than half the features here. The rest of the feature list is all interchangeable with some open source solution out there.

With the price barrier (Any price, really) you will get selective participation based on people who eager to spend money on these kinds of memberships. So I'd say that this community has one thing in common, they are (bots or) people, who are eager to give their money away for that kind of convenience. I hesitate if I would ever want to be a part of that community even for free. Basically a Twitter badge in the shape of a trendy subdomain and blogpage that someone sub-leased out to you. You join someone's social silo and get to feel like you're in an enlightened club.

And what of longevity? I assume you lose your blog, your domain, and your and invested work if you don't pay the subscription?

Call me closed-minded, but this has "Sell it at-scale, get as much money as you can, and shut it down in a few years once I buy that Condo in the hills" kind of energy to me. It's just someone else trying to make their own metaverse, and that failed with Zuckerberg's money. Why would this succeed? I can't help but see it's just a new clean slate, with the same problems of the old formula, just waiting to be enshittified.

rglullis5• 3 years ago

I do not want to hijack the thread, but I can't help but look at this and think at how many things I seem to have gotten wrong with communick.

Both of them seem to have a similar purpose: to be a place to offer a bunch of services that can work as alternatives to the Big platforms, and to charge a modest but fair price for it. Everything else, I seem to have gotten wrong.

I was convinced that issues of network effects could be mitigated by offering group packages (so that you could come and bring your friends along). Turns out that thinking was from my time working at phone companies who offer "family and friends" plans, which is not something that people do online. People might be online friends, but seldom they will care about sharing a package group.

I thought that the people who would be geeky enough to want their own DNS would already have had their own domain, so it never occurred to me to add subdomain spaces.

I thought that having separate packages for each service would let people pick whatever they want, but in the end it seems that making a single plan with a single price makes for a much more compelling product.

Seeing omg.lol at the top of HN is amazing validation of the business model that I think needs to grow to help us get rid of Big Tech, but holy shit do I need help with product and biz development.

quickthrower22• 3 years ago

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

horsefaceman• 3 years ago

I love this, such a throwback.

jongjong3• 3 years ago

In the fall of 2022, I started using Twitter more. I don’t know why; probably a curious desire to see how bad Elon Musk would screw it up.

I stopped reading there. I'm not interested in using a product made by someone who regurgitates ESG nonsense without thinking. I want these people and these ideologies out of my life. They need to do some soul-searching. What is bad about Elon that you want him to fail?

Anyone who thinks that free speech is dangerous or harmful in any way obviously knows nothing about history and has fallen prey to propaganda.

monooso• 3 years ago

What is bad about Elon that you want him to fail?

Read the text you quoted again. The author doesn't say anything about wanting Musk to fail.

I stopped reading there.

That's a shame. You missed out on a fun blog post.

rglullis5• 3 years ago

Put aside the personality of Musk:

- jacking up the price of the API

- Removing chronological timeline completely, to the point that one can not simply get a list of one's tweets by going to their profile

- his vision of the "everything app".

- the "pay to play" aspect of the blue check.

Are more than enough reason for me to want Twitter to fail.

I do not want a social media that favors those who are paying, and I do not want a company that started a simple communications platform to become even more of an ubiquitous device for Surveillance Capitalism.

jongjong3• 3 years ago

My experience is that before Musk, I felt like I was shadow-banned. No engagement. Also, as a consumer, the content was basically the same junk as all other media platforms. Now I feel like I'm getting all the latest news and things are actually happening. Small interactions between regular people are taking place again. It's not just some centralized mainstream broadcast platform as it used to be. It's way better.

Dylan168072• 3 years ago

Do you have a habit of making up people to be mad at, like you're doing right now?

rfrey2• 3 years ago

Anyone who thinks that free speech is dangerous or harmful in any way obviously knows nothing about history and has fallen prey to propaganda.

Anyone who thinks Elon Musk is a proponent of free speech has not been paying attention.

rezoneight3• 3 years ago

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.

shusaku• 3 years ago

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

jim-jim-jim2• 3 years ago

That's the shortcoming of every alternative protocol and "indie web" community I've come across. They only attract existing techies and have a weird sheen of forced kindness about them. If you're just chatting with other programmers under American HR communication standards, then how is it any different to work?

The true magic of the early web was somebody genius but decidedly untechnical like David Bowie shitposting at his own fans. There's no special line of code that's going to foster that. You have to ruthlessly curate a community to avoid a critical mass of sensitive nerds, but guess who the early colonizers of these alt platforms are. None of these communities will attract today or tomorrow's David Bowies.

p-e-w2• 3 years ago

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.

rtpg2• 3 years ago

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!

hitekker• 3 years ago

attract existing techies and have a weird sheen of forced kindness about them.
If you're just chatting with other programmers under American HR communication standards, then how is it any different to work?
There's no special line of code that's going to foster that.
you have to ruthlessly curate a community to avoid a critical mass of sensitive nerds, but guess who the early colonizers of these alt platforms are

Great comment. Aligns with my own observations. On the note of "American HR Communication standards & work" I think most of us don't have experience participating in, let alone, organizing real communities[1]. Since most internet communities are awful, imaginary, transient etc, we default to the only actual experience we have semi-happily working with strangers: our jobs. Adding on top how internet comments are forever, cancelations is right around the corner, and careers hang in the balance, and you get a Bay Area photocopied dialogue.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place

onion2k• 3 years ago

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.

robertlagrant• 3 years ago

guess who the early colonizers of these alt platforms are

Sorry - what is "colonizer" here? Do you mean users?

alex_lav2• 3 years ago

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.

fLaMEd• 3 years ago

https://home.omg.lol/directory

joeross2• 3 years ago

I’d like to see which accounts are using the services for a better community

It’s more like after you use it for a little while you look up and suddenly realize you’re in a new but familiar feeling community. It definitely skews developer/blogger/liberal, is openly inclusive and mindful of accessibility (not perfect, but always trying), there's a lot of overlap with various micro.blog/IndieWeb/fediverse communities, a lot of folks with active GitHub accounts doing interesting stuff, a strong photographer contingent, an overarching “positive vibe” as the kids say, and a clear sense that you don’t have to remind the kind of folks who enjoy using omg.lol that there’s a person on the other side of the keyboard.

Maybe that still doesn’t make much sense to you, but while I’m happy to pay for cool stuff people make on the internet, I’m paid up with omg.lol through 2030, which just isn’t something I would do anywhere else.

proxyon• 3 years ago

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.

iteratethis• 3 years ago

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.

rammy1234• 3 years ago

Is this different from neocities ?

101008• 3 years ago

So like Bravenet but in 2023?

httpsterio• 3 years ago

I just joined after reading the post. This wasn't the first time I've heard of Omg.lol but I wasn't entirely convinced earlier.

For a long while, I've felt kinda lonely online as all of the communities and little corners online I've been part off have slowly died. I guess I've sort of been digitally homeless.

I really enjoy the latest trends when it comes to indieweb and digital gardens, people creating their own space instead of living on closed platforms, so this definitely hit all the marks for me. I don't think I've bought anything online faster than just now haha.

Blake just cost me twenty quid, but I'm happy to vote with my feet instead of selling my data and attention to big corporations.

footlose_38157• 3 years ago

Section 6.3 We may share personal information in connection with a corporate transaction, like a merger or sale of our company, the sale of most of our assets, or a bankruptcy.
Section 6.5 Except where explicitly stated to the contrary in this Policy, in some cases, particularly given the limited amount and type of information and data collected through omg.lol, we have not restricted contractors’ own use or disclosure of that information or data. We are not responsible for the conduct or policies of Stripe, or other contractors.

INAL but that seems pretty cookie-cutter "Company is not ruling-out selling your data to others".

https://home.omg.lol/info/legal

Arch485• 3 years ago

Also not a lawyer, but that sounds more like "if another company acquires us, we will give your info to them" and then separately "Stripe might sell your data; we're not responsible for them".

Which is rotally reasonable/expected imho.

JohnFen• 3 years ago

I love the idea of the service, but yes, those terms (and the commentary about the GDPR) are very strong showstoppers for me.

stcredzero• 3 years ago

I really enjoy the latest trends when it comes to indieweb and digital gardens, people creating their own space instead of living on closed platforms

The way I see the current day situation, re: Elon Musk's freedom of speech contingency tree -- If X/Twitter and other social media prospers, it's good for him and he wins. If those die and people rediscover, "people creating their own space instead of living on closed platforms," he wins as well.

UberFly• 3 years ago

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

stevebmark• 3 years ago

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

hiidrew• 3 years ago

https://www.farcaster.xyz/ is an interesting alternative that's not bluesky

golem14• 3 years ago

Maybe that's a feature. Early Gopher was similar, and people adapted by writing hubs/directories.

Not everyone needs their content to reach record # of visitors.

inamberclad• 3 years ago

What is the long-term potential supposed to be? Is Mastodon supposed to replace Twitter, or is it supposed to enhance the lives of people? I'm a member of several small forums that just don't grow. It's the same people each day, and that's fine. It's much closer to how human interactions work in real life. You don't join an ever-expanding pool of people where you strive to maximize your connections (or at least, I don't). Instead, you probably have a relatively small group of people that you hang out with more often.

ClimaxGravely2• 3 years ago

Even then I have a small fraction of the followers from twitter than I do on mastadon and I still get way more engagement. Both in numbers and quality. It's not oldschool forums quality but it feels a lot closer.

p-e-w2• 3 years ago

Well said. It's astonishing how much the corporate/capitalist mantra "if you're not growing, you're dying" has taken hold in the world of open source and free culture. People not only fail to realize how unsustainable and destructive that idea is, many don't even seem to know that alternative community models exist, and have been practiced since forever.

Ridj48dhsnsh• 3 years ago

Not being indexed by search engines is a fatal flaw in my opinion. There might be some interesting discussions taking place on Mastodon, but I would have no way of knowing.

dash2• 3 years ago

This argument confuses “everybody hangs out with just a few people” with ”a few people hang out with a few people”. The former is a cool idea, sure, but the latter is just a description of a not-very-successful service. I mean, I like my local pub, but it isn’t HN-worthy.

Social media is valuable, that’s why people use it. It would be nice if we end up coordinating on social media that aren’t toxic or addictive. Unfortunately mastodon may not make that happen, as GP said.

TechSquidTV• 3 years ago

Mastodon isn't meant for hosting this kind of content, for the same reason you aren't meant to put this kind of content on Twitter. Mastodon is like a social RSS feed reader.

john-radio• 3 years ago

Actually the trending posts I saw when I clicked through to social.lol (omg.lol's Mastodon instance) are most of the same posts from my Explore page (the # icon) on urbanists.social, and most of these posts are not from either of these two instances but from diverse (and usually individually interesting!) ones, but please keep enjoying that haterade if you like the taste.

omginternets• 3 years ago

The reason they’re good has a lot to do with how hard they are to find.

jszymborski• 3 years ago

Just following hashtags and using the discover page works pretty good for me

metabagel3• 3 years ago

It doesn’t work for me. A lot of people don’t realize that their posts won’t show up in searches on other Mastodon instances unless they include hashtags. I found it to be a huge chore to find people posting about topics I was interested in. I pretty much gave up.

scythe• 3 years ago

Discoverability doesn't always have to be so fast. As long as the word eventually gets around, maybe a slower kind of discovery could be good for some communities.

There's also boardreader.com for finding small communities, although I don't think it really tilts towards Mastodon very much.

metabagel3• 3 years ago

Discoverability is Mastodon’s Achilles heel.

rconti• 3 years ago

TBF, a problem that twitter also had.

3abiton• 3 years ago

I'm just curious what is the difference between Mastodon and Lemmy. I know they are a decentralized clone of Twitter and Reddit, but at their core 90% similar. Is it just the comment threads?

janandonly• 3 years ago

Maybe the Nostr protocol and all its implementations (that do talk with each other) are the true replacement for Twitter?

Check out some trending people/topics on Nostr here: https://nostr.band/

_heimdall4• 3 years ago

I've never quite wrapped my head around how any federated network would compete with centralized social media platforms, it feels like a solution for a different use case

Federation means we have numerous copies of every single post ever shared floating around somewhere, that's a massive waste of resources IMO. Similarly, the amount of network traffic grows exponentially as the number of full nodes grows and again wastes a ton of resources. Those kinds of issues could be mitigated by limiting the number of full nodes on the network, but then you are driving towards a centralized system again.

Federation works really well when the different groups are infrequently interacting. Sure there could be a mechanism to jump into another circle, but if federation means multiple servers needing to know the entire state of the world the scaling and coordination problems just don't seem worth it.

hnbad4• 3 years ago

This may be an unpopular opinion but there won't be a Twitter replacement. There may very well be a "next big thing" but it won't be like Twitter the same way Twitter wasn't like MySpace or MySpace wasn't like FARK etc (not to say these are in any way directly related but Twitter certainly wasn't the biggest social network by far even if it was culturally influential).

Mastodon exists and it is good at being a federated microblogging service. Threads exists and it is good at the metrics it's built to deliver. Bluesky exists and it is good at being its own little club house. Truth Social exists and it is good at being Trump's soapbox. Gab exists and it is good at being whatever it is.

Twitter hit a magic sweet spot that can't be replicated. It was also a terrible place even before the cultural shifts (including those prior to the leveraged buyout). It was the place celebrities would show their entire ass to journalists and everyone could tag along to tell them how terrible they were. It was also the most readily accessible source for "citizen journalism" with unfiltered live coverage of major tragedies and other "breaking news" - but this has now become impossible as it has also become easily accessible to spread falsehoods that overwhelm any attempt at fact checking.

X's "revenue sharing" mechanism that effectively monetizes outrage bait may be what's killing Twitter for good but even prior to that Twitter was already dead. Heck, Twitter was always bad even when it was useful. At times the up sides just outweighed the down sides if you knew how to use it. For many this involved "not being political" (which is already not an option if your identity deviates from the "norm" in obvious ways, e.g. being a woman) and sticking to specific niches. But the discoverability of these niches is also what made them prone to the inevitable Twitter drama.

maxlin10• 3 years ago

When a blog post starts with saying "twitter is dead" it doesn't really make it worth reading further. "Twitter is dead" was said pretty much as numerously as "2 more weeks" but it's off better than ever, with Community Notes having proved themselves and X now having proved its capability to serve its main mission by working as the town square on issues related to OpenAI, Gaza, etc, etc.

Eventually, with subscriptions paying most of the bills, I hope the API access per-client is brought back without extra costs too. But even without, X does have pretty much everything it needs, and will only grow with time. You can't put a price on Freedom of Speech.

twelvedogs• 3 years ago

subscriptions are most of their income, they don't pay the bills at all

maxlin10• 3 years ago

That is simply not true. Subscriptions are at best at ~20% but lookin up. And yes they do actually pay bills, no landlord would have had them pause that for this long lol

VerminOctopus1• 3 years ago

I thought community notes already existed as bird watch before the takeover?

patcon• 3 years ago

Yeah, Elon just rebranded it, and pushed fwd its full deployment

I was fully bought into the premise of birdwatch due to it being based on a great tool I've worked with for years (Pol.is), but Elon seemed to have loved it for all the wrong reasons, in a way that irked me. He seemingly just wanted to cut the trust & safety teams, and remove onus of creating policy :/

TheAceOfHearts• 3 years ago

Twitter is dead, long live X. Twitter as it was no longer exists. Regardless of what one may think of Elon's leadership, he's making big changes to the platform.

It's a Ship of Theseus argument. How much does a platformm have to change before it's no longer what it used to be?

enumjorge• 3 years ago

[Twitter]'s off better than ever

I'd agree that it's hard to take an opinion seriously that pronounces Twitter as dead. As you pointed out, when OpenAI's drama was unfolding, the conversations happened mainly on Twitter. But saying Twitter's current form is the service at its best is also hard to take seriously. I tried to follow said conversation about OpenAI during Altman's ouster and I found the site to be an inconsistently broken mess. To this day, I'm still not sure why I'm able to access certain posts without signing in, but not others. In my experience, the quality of the discussion on the site as a whole has also taken a hit.

And again with the whole freedom of speech. It continues to baffle me how people associate Musk with the first amendment. He brands himself as a free speech absolutist, but his actions have continuously shown him to have no problem silencing critics and playing favorites on the platform.

maxlin10• 3 years ago

I really recommend just logging in once, the unregistered UX is crappy intentionally.

You're the first one to bring up First Amendment. We are not talking about it. Note that "Freedom of Speech" and "First amendment" are different things. Freedom of Speech can mean laws (and there are other nations but just USA) but it also means an idea, an ideal. Crudely, an environment that acknowledges the old saying of "sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me".

If you see the forest from the trees you'd see Elon actually runs a platform that favors Freedom of Speech more than any other platform by a country mile. On X any violations of it are exceptions (the ones you're talking about), NOT the modus operandi.

Timwi• 3 years ago

When a blog post starts with saying "twitter is dead"

That's not what they said. They said “it’s the day that, for me, Twitter died.” I read that as meaning “I personally don't want to use Twitter anymore.”

I personally feel the same about Reddit. I was a very regular reader and contributor, but since the big brouha about third-party apps I decided that it's dead to me. I'm no longer using it. That doesn't mean it has died as a platform, but it does mean that I personally have moved on from it.

jhugo• 3 years ago

I wanted to move on from Reddit when all of that was going down, but it's really the only place on the Internet where I could get (just from the memory of the last 24h) a decent range of discussion/advice from real people about pizza stones, indoor plants, descaling a coffee machine, learning piano as an adult, and the answer to the question "TV show where someone sings Chattanooga Choo Choo", all from a single website that isn't heavily polluted by ads. As long as "[query] reddit" makes Google so much better, I can't really consider Reddit dead.

maxlin10• 3 years ago

I guess there is a distinction but considering how people usually talk, the thing said registers the same, especially as the guy did wrote in the form that he was "biding his time" expecting Twitter to actually die and for everything being done there being uncontroversially bad for the platform. I would differentiate those things the same way you did in a different context.

Reddit was by far the most common platform for me to visit. Overall community there has degraded over the years (more than in places like HN!), not helped by moderation being seemingly all over the place nowadays, possibly affected by the culling. I reported someone for a relatively minor but reportable infraction and their 10 year account got instantly permabanned. All while I had to send appeals 15 days continuously to get my alternate account and subreddit unbanned, with a very reasonable plea that my subreddit is doing the same as another one that has existed for ~7 years, after which it got unbanned for one day of no action.

snailmailman• 3 years ago

“Better than ever” when it’s constantly promoting hate speech? And Elon is too? And advertisers are dipping out?

And Twitter definitely doesn’t have free speech. People still get banned, or have their posts artificially limited, but they do allow more hate speech.

Nearly everyone I followed on Twitter is on Mastodon now. It works great. Conversations still happen there on news topics.

I deleted my Twitter account a while back because my feed stopped being people I followed and became people promoting conspiracy theories. The site doesn’t even work properly anymore. People link to threads of tweets but only the first tweet displays. And profiles never show latest tweets. (I think these might work when logged in? But also don’t show any errors when logged out? I don’t know as I’ll never login again)

maxlin10• 3 years ago

More and more of the time when someone mentions "hate speech" they're just angry something isn't being moderated like Reddit. One needs to have perspective and if you have zero accusations of enabling hate speech as a platform that big, you're actually the bad guy.

X does have the best model of Free Speech. Nothing can be perfect but they're the F1 car of the effort when others are oxcarts on rails. Yes conversations happen even on Facebook, I have frequented it this month. Doesn't mean they are that meaningful or capable of actually working as the critically-needed Town Square.

X requires login for many things, as it did during the Twitter times. Congratulations for shooting yourself in the foot by impulsively deleting your account I guess? Like, what in earth would that benefit you instead of just having a pause ...

mcintyre1994• 3 years ago

I’m unconvinced that subscriptions are ever going to make enough money to pay the bills. Musk has been pretty clear he needs to get advertisers back. I don’t think his approach of specifically telling Bob Iger to fuck off is going to help with that, but he isn’t hiding that he needs to figure it out pretty quickly.

maxlin10• 3 years ago

Sure, in the short term yes. You can't fix the lack of funds from advertisers with subscriptions in a few days.

But eventually I hope it will. Being dependent on advertisers is kryptonite for platforms of user speech, regardless if it's YouTube or X.

prmoustache• 3 years ago

Well twitter doesn't exist anymore so yes it is dead.

Also it is funny that for a lot of people including me, slashdot, digg, twitter and reddit are already a thing of the past while we are still visiting regular old forums.

maxlin10• 3 years ago

Semantics. Sure, Twitter is dead. For the benefit of everybody. X again is more lively than ever, for the good of not just current civilization, but near and far future.

X will have some trouble shedding some of Twitter's old behaviors and such though, and it can't really scale down to a boutique-level platform like HN. But these are fundamentally different types of platforms due to the kind of people they attract.

latexr2• 3 years ago

When a blog post starts with saying "twitter is dead"

That is not what it says. Please don’t straw man and misquote.

it's off better than ever

By which metric? Certainly not financial.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/15/business/twitter-cash-flow-el...

X now having proved its capability to serve its main mission by working as the town square on issues related to OpenAI, Gaza, etc, etc.

Those conversations happened all around. There was nothing special about Twitter.

Eventually, with subscriptions paying most of the bills

That’s an astronomical assumption.

X does have pretty much everything it needs, and will only grow with time.

So does it have everything it needs, or will it grow? Those don’t make sense at the same time.

You can't put a price on Freedom of Speech.

If you’re a free speech absolutist, Twitter is definitely not the platform for you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ElonJet

https://slate.com/technology/2023/05/elon-musk-turkey-twitte...

https://thewire.in/tech/musk-twitter-takedown-government-com...

maxlin10• 3 years ago

It is not a straw man. Considering how the post starts, the writer fully expected the platform to die. Also literally "twitter is dead" "twitter is dead to me" "twitter is quite dead" go inside a reasonable interpretation considering there's always loss.

Other parts can only be considered incorrect if you lose sight of the big picture! As I said, you can't put a price on Freedom Of Speech. And considering the platform is technically very operational, it is being protected.

Your other points like "subscriptions will NEVER pay for everything!" are only the kinds of things that do actually end up turning true to unique tech companies, which X absolutely is like now.

> X does have pretty much everything it needs, and will only grow with time.
So does it have everything it needs, or will it grow? Those don’t make sense at the same time.

Wrong. It has everything it needs to function, and will eventually grow. Like with anything, usually the prerequisite for growth is sustainability in a stable state.

If you're a free speech absolutist, and not a total idiot who doesn't see forest from the trees, Twitter for sure wasn't the platform for you, but X is pretty much the only one due to its popularity and successfully driven iniatives to protect it. Pointing out things like ElonJet (of whose handling was reasonable anyway due to security), or some Twitter's old behaviours not being handled yet due to international complications is not seeing the forest.

gdsdfe• 3 years ago

Woah people really hate AI on that mastodon instance

smsm424• 3 years ago

Opened the front page of the "community of the nicest, most interesting people". Here's what I found, omitting some jokes, "dear diary", etc (profanity omitted, light rephrasing to keep it short):

AI is taking our jobs

Trump is a liar

MAGA republicans are plotting against democracy and Trump is Putin's puppet

Trump is bad

AOC is cool, she's showing that evil GOP

Twitter is dying

Christians are hateful bigots

Republicans are Nazis

Republicans hate women and want them to die

Ayn Rand is stupid and I already realized it as a kid

Hunter Biden is an innocent victim of a vast right wing conspiracy

Elon Musk is evil and stupid

Trump is stupid, while Obama is smart

I didn't search for that on purpose or anything, didn't time it, just opened the first page at the random moment and scrolled for a couple of screens. It's not 100% of content, but what I described is the majority of it. Maybe I got particularly unlucky. But if I haven't, I fail to recognize how it's different from 99% of reddit or anywhere else on the internet? Which is the part I am supposed to be impressed with, where was my nostalgia for the Internet of the olden days supposed to wake up (and yes, I was there, Gandalf)? I'm just not getting it. I mean, I have nothing against people getting together and having one more place out of millions to discuss all the ways Trump is stupid and evil, but I feel like that's not exactly what the description in the article promised me.

elxx• 3 years ago

Anyone can look at the live feed here and see that this is made up:

https://social.lol/public/local

I had to scroll through over 24 hours of posts before hitting anything political, an article about abortion in Texas. Definitely not the majority of the content and it took way more scrolling than a couple of screens. I still haven't seen anything else on your list yet.

coldpie2• 3 years ago

While that guy obviously has an axe to grind, if you visit the main page of that URL there's plenty of tiresome politics all over the place: https://social.lol/ It seems to be coming from different instances, though. I have no idea how Mastodon chooses what content to show on that page.

smsm424• 3 years ago

I just went to https://social.lol/

blakewatson4• 3 years ago

Yeah unfortunately that’s Mastodon pulling from other instances. Here’s the local timeline: https://social.lol/public/local

famahar• 3 years ago

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

Tomte2• 3 years ago

I signed up last year when it hit HN big. I didn't really found access to the community (which is my fault), but I love the feature set, and am debating with my self whether to extend the membership. 20 dollars is little to me, but it's another thing in the back of my mind where "I should do something with it".

Mastodon totally doesn't interest me, it turned out, that was a big argument for joining omg.lol back then.

bandrami• 3 years ago

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

bkeating• 3 years ago

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

kennedy• 3 years ago

ohh this is cool

dataengineer56• 3 years ago

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

mortallywounded• 3 years ago

I'm holding out for omg.lawl

krick• 3 years ago

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

riow• 3 years ago

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

benjamim2• 3 years ago

I love everything omg.lol offers. I've been a customer for more than a year now. And recently bought another two more years.

After reading the comments. I think most of you have no idea what this service is.

For example: If you want to know where the customers are you have a map for that:

https://home.omg.lol/map (is optionally appear on the map)

This is my:

- Twitter: https://benjamim.status.lol/ (what I write here it's cross-post to mastodon)

- Flickr: https://benjamim.some.pics/

- Blog: https://benjamim.weblog.lol/

This is just a glimpse from a super "happy client".

And if you have any questions, I'm sure you just need to ask Prami (https://social.lol/@prami) and he'll answer them.

Benjamim (https://benjamim.omg.lol)

Ikatza2• 3 years ago

Do you have a referral code?

benjamim2• 3 years ago

Hum... I think everyone one have one, you can read more here: https://home.omg.lol/info/referrals

Ikatza2• 3 years ago

Just joined using your referral code. Thanks Blake!

Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

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