Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

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.

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

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.

... we have not restricted contractors’ own use or disclosure of that information or data. We are not responsible for the conduct or policies of Stripe, or other contractors.

I mean this seems pretty suspect for anyone privacy focused.

Also not legal in Europe where you absolutely are responsible for the actions of your processors

omg.lol does not believe its processing of limited personal data of those outside the United States (if any) brings it within the jurisdiction of these laws.

Oh dear. That is definitely not correct. The only way for omg.lol to not fall under the jurisdiction of the GDPR is to not offer their services to people living where it applies.

And how would the owner go about that? Implement expensive geo-fences and KYC processes for a market they are not interested in? If they (EU people) want to use it .. they should be able to without expecting the same protections as if the business operates in EEA.

How did we get here? To where If I spin up a webserver and charge for access now I'm suddenly forced to lick your middle finger because you have laws in your country saying so?

Hangon, if go to another country I most certainly have to follow the laws that apply there.

If I surf over to another (Internet surfing) country because the server is physically located in that country, I again am forced to follow the laws that apply there.

It does seem illogical to have such setup especially since physical I haven't moved.

Now it seems that I can take my laws with me when I visit a server in another country. Making everything even more confusing.

Unfortunately that does not apply to physically traveling to another country: that country doesn't care two bobs for my countries laws.

Edit: INAL.

If I surf over to another (Internet surfing) country because the server is physically located in that country, I again am forced to follow the laws that apply there.

on the other hand if you go set up a business that sells to citizens of that other country do you have to follow rules to be allowed to sell stuff there? You see how the analogy is a little closer aligned?

Not really. For Example, I setup a business on the Oregon side of the Portland, Oregon / Vancouver, Washington border. Oregon doesn't have a sales tax, should I have to pay Washington sales tax because I had someone buy something from my shop in Oregon?

Same kind of deal, omg.lol have my servers located in the United States, payment processing happens in the United States, in United States Dollars. In no way is omg.lol making a special usecase to handle European customers.

Now, Europe is free to attempt to excise their laws againt omg.lol, however they wouldn't get much further than "you're blocked in the EU" and having to get ISPs and transit networks to blocke their traffic, and payment networks to stop serving EU customers for that particular merchant ID.

If you run a site in the US targeting a primarily US user base, should you be forced to abide by the laws of Saudi Arabia?

I'll include the mandatory ianal, but they could even ask people to indemnify them, or put up a banner saying: you must be in the US, blah-blah. But they're straight up saying: don't care about your laws. That seems untenable.

That's not really that interesting of a question, if the owner wants to give the finger to the laws of a region with 300+ million people in it then that's their right, how they go about doing that in a way that it doesn't translate into liability (rather than simply respecting the law with regards to EU subjects) is not something that we need to solve for them. The choice is theirs, so are the consequences.

Simple: explicitly state what regions you provide your service to, optionally use cheap/free IP geolocation to block users from regions you don't wish to provide your service in and wherever you have to record a user's region anyway limit the options to regions you support or display a warning about your terms of service prohibiting use from other regions.

There are plenty of sites that only cater to US users and have signup forms requiring data like postal addresses or payment methods that contain regional information. Heck, some US sites even exclude users from certain states for various reasons. This service costs money so they need the user's billing address anyway. Just restrict access there and then like the rest.

The guy who created omg.lol did not "spin up a webserver and charge for access", they run a company that collects, stores and processes their users' behavioral data and personally identifiable information. It's more like a hosting company except it's apparently cobbled together from various third parties without any due diligence about how they operate. And it even uses the phrase "privacy-focused" in various parts of its claims. Yeah, I'd say it's reasonable to expect a company like that to provide basic information like what data it collects, how it ensures that data is protected and how a data subject can get that data deleted or corrected.

We have laws preventing corporations from selling products that are unfit for purpose or food that is blatantly toxic and we have laws preventing corporations from offering you contracts that demand personal harm or indentured servitude. In places like the EU we also have laws that prevent companies from using your data without consent and making sure you follow the best current practices when handling that data. And yeah, if you want to make a service that collects all data and monetizes the ever living fuck out of it you can still do that, you just need to ask your users for consent and allow them to opt-out if it isn't essential to doing what the users would want to use the service for (i.e. no bait and switch).

I don't know why some people find it so hard to understand the idea of informed and non-coerced consent.

How did we get here? To where If I spin up a webserver and charge for access now I'm suddenly forced to lick your middle finger because you have laws in your country saying so?

You do business somewhere, you have to abide by the laws of that somewhere.

As to how did we got here? I don't know. It probably happened sometime around year 500 BC?

The easiest and most reasonable option would be to honor GDPR and similar laws.

If you scam people in country A from country B, you're criminally liable to country A even if it's not a crime in country B. Same if it's espionage (cf. Assange), piracy (cf. TPB) and so on. Why should infringing on privacy rights be any different?

true they are legally required by EU law to follow GDPR, but then it gets into enforcement, Facebook et. al might like to not follow GDPR but they are big enough then have holdings that the GDPR can take money from.

If omg.lol does not have any business in EU it is probably not going to actually be a problem for them because EU is unlikely to go to U.S court to try to get money - also because I believe that probably wouldn't work.

However

1. if they are trying to get purchased by someone they probably should consider potential buyers probably don't want to buy a bunch of EU liability.

2. they should probably refrain from any sort of ambition that would give them such a business in the future because regulators can be really mean when someone does this kind of funny stuff.

3. if they don't pay if called on it maybe there would be a situation where they would get blocked - not sure about that but seems reasonable reaction.

Section 8.6 GDPR

Part b. omg.lol does not believe its processing of limited personal data of those outside the United States (if any) brings it within the jurisdiction of these laws.

That's a hard disclaimer if there's any.

I read that as: if you're a European user, we do not believe you can legally enforce us to honor your rights, even though we operate within the EEA.

This is very disappointing, and automatically dismisses omg.lol as an option for me as a researcher and educator.

And is illegal to boot. If that's their attitude they should not allow Europeans to register in the first place because all it will do is set them up for a confrontation with the various Data Privacy Offices. And such wilful language rules out any apologies.

More to the point, the GDPR is quite explicit on here as well:

Article 3.2 goes even further and applies the law to organizations that are not in the EU if two conditions are met: the organization offers goods or services to people in the EU, or the organization monitors their online behavior. (Article 3.3 refers to more unusual scenarios, such as in EU embassies.)

https://gdpr.eu/companies-outside-of-europe/

Which is pretty much what happens given that they allow EU citizens to buy a 20 USD subscription.

That's also a sovereign citizen level of legalese. It doesn't matter what omg.lol states it believes. If anything, this demonstrates clear intent to violate users' privacy and be non-compliant with international data protection laws.

This is largely a moot point as long as omg.lol remains some guy's side project but given that the ToS explicitly mentions the possibility of a merger or buyout, this feels like it's poisoning the well a bit. If there's any upside to this, it's that this makes a buyout far less likely because he's essentially saying "yeah, we collect a ton of personal information but we don't have the legal consent for any of it and explicitly told users we're not complying with their regional data protection laws when it comes to gathering, processing or storing their personal information". Fair enough for the MySpace era of Web 2.0 privacy abuse but no longer workable in a world with the GDPR and its many regional equivalents.

your comment is spot on. an acquisition is also the perfect time to have someone trigger an investigation by the local privacy authority for breach of GDPR and I can tell with reasonable certainty that the wording on that ToS is enough to get fined. Until they have a legal presence in the EU they might get away with it, though.

Worth a shot I suppose

Not a lawyer so I might be reading this wrong - but to me this says "We might sell the company to someone else, and they in turn might sell it to anyone", and that's a bit scarier.

You can't prevent that, not really. That "section 6.3" applies to every company, but these ToS are a bit more upfront about it.

You can't prevent that, not really.

Couldn't you simply codify in the ToS that PII or even most/all historical metadata would be scrubbed upon the sale of the company? IANAL, but I would assume that a company could commit themselves in the user agreement in such a way that it guarantees some protection against this kind of concern.

You can always change the terms of service; no one would really notice a detail like this.

And things like email addresses are "PII", and maybe some more things that are required to actually run this business. So "scrub all PII" isn't really a very feasible thing to do in the first place.

Is forced selling a thing for sole proprietorships? Is including data in a sale forced? You can prevent that if you want two ways:

1) Don't sell the company 2) Sell the company sans data (destroy it first)

So your "solution" is 1) never change interests, 2) never have health problems, 3) never retire, 4) well live forever basically?

And no one is going to buy a company stripped of all customer data.

This is just not realistic. Any company or website that lives long enough will change hands eventually, whether it's "selling" or handing it to your first-born son, or whatever, for any number of reasons, and when that happens you lose control. The best you can do is hand it over to someone you trust (if that's possible), but nothing is fool-proof.

You can't prevent it, but you can make it a breach of contract.

(Where the new buyer would breach the contract if passing data on.)

No, that's not totally reasonable and expected. Change of control can be a valid reason for breaking open a previous arrangement, especially when that change of control negates the exact reason why people would join this to begin with.

After all, if your data can be transferred at will to another entity due to a change of ownership and the agreement you made can then be annulled (because the new owners don't care about your privacy as much as the previous ones) then that's an end-run around the whole principle.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

I’ve had this exact thought a million times.

The first time I tripped acid - I remember writing a page of notes on how sad I felt that I would never get to experience the exact way a memory occurred to me in the past.

What’s even more saddening is that with tech like Rewind, and what’ll be the future of Rewind in 10-20 years, by 2040, I fully expect all memories/events ever produced to be logged in an almost endless database of all human experience.

But - because time is linear, we wouldn’t ever fully be able to simulate the past of say everything before 2030? And that’s just so sad.

In one way it’s sad, but if we archive everything from 2040 onward I guarantee that any pre 2040 years will always seem like a better time.

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…

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.

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.

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.

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.)

Brilliant argument/username combo :)

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.

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

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.

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

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?

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

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

Wow, thanks for pointing that out, that made me never want to join omg.lol

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)

User-agent: ia_archiver

Disallow: /

Denied!

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

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

Unlikely. Some people archive every page they visit.

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...

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

This is an interesting thought.

As an analogy, there might be some interesting discussions happening at my local Community Center, or my neighbor's house, but I would have no way of knowing. But to discover these discussions, I would need to meet someone with a shared interest who would, in turn, share with me a place that they go to for continued discussions and to hang out with interesting people who share an interest.

So maybe, if done correctly, this is a feature? The good content is one extra network connection away, but easy enough to find if an advocate chooses to highlight content, share a connection, or otherwise create an inbound reference to the community.

Yes and wouldn't you like to join it?

If you had a way to search like "hey there's an interesting conversation going on at my local community center, maybe I will go and join their next session."

wouldn't you?

You have an option in user settings to allow search engines to index your profile and public posts. (It's off by default.)

I like the idea of it, but I also have no idea how one would find any of these cited discussions. It seems having an existing social network gives you a strong advantage. As a lurker, introvert, and ruralite, I think I'm going to be naturally disadvantaged on these types of platforms.

Or maybe I'm just misunderstanding the whole design.

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.

So a system that enables thousand if not millions of "pubs" would be HN worthy? From what I understand that is mastodon and this article is a success story of a single instance/"pub".

Social media is valuable, that’s why people use it.

That doesn't follow. Neither of those two statements seems self-evident.

People typically follow social media for a number of reasons and to my mind novelty and the pretense of a sense of community are the biggest one. But the latter is usually just paper thin. In "successful social media" most social interactions are either fleeting or superficial. You argue on the Internet with strangers and you pigeonhole them to fit your biases. The entire focus for social media is to drive up "engagement" because clicks and views mean more ad revenue and a bigger "audience". And as the effort of providing something genuinely interesting is a lot higher than something provocative (which has the benefit of being able to simply be an outright lie), that's where social media inevitably trends towards.

Pre-social media spaces were a lot more social in the sense of being communal: IRC chat rooms would have old guard regulars, often lurking around in case something interesting pops up; moderation would happen very bluntly and immediately to set clear house rules about what is or isn't acceptable behavior. Forums had a much lower frequency but followed similar patterns. There was a clear sense of a shared culture if you stuck around long enough and people would actually avoid hanging around in the extremely large forums or chat rooms because they were "too noisy" to have a conversation. It would usually be where you'd go to seek advice or help you couldn't find elsewhere and any follow-up would usually happen in a more confined space like DMs.

What social media has effectively done is looked at the extremely large and noisy spaces and decided that this is what everything should be like by default and then bolted on some ways to keep track of what conversations you were having while mixing the ideas of "people that seem interesting/nice" and "accounts that post interesting content", productizing and transactionalizing all social interactions. Even Mastodon is guilty of this but on the smaller instances at least the scale is limited by default.

The problem with social media being the "marketplace of ideas" is that you normally go to the market to get new things and then you go to work, go home or go to your "third place" (e.g. your peer group, your pub, your club house) where you can all show each other what you got. Social media wants to be all of those places but because the marketplace is the only part that makes money, that's all it delivers.

Its a really interesting challenge to solve

Twitter, for example, aimed to be a single, universal town square. Mastodon follows much closer to forums where you find yourself in smaller, potentially more tightknit communities

Both have pros and cons. I don't expect Mastodon will give people the same value as social media, but it won't have some of the downsides either. Similarly, I don't expect social media will ever be sustainable as a coordination platform without toxicity and doom scrolling.

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.

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.

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

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.

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/

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.

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.

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

Discoverability is Mastodon’s Achilles heel.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

“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?

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

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.

That's because it tries to not break backwards compatibility and spoiler: past web people had horrible standards.

Today's web people have horrible standards, too. Who ships an entire browser to ship an application?

That's nothing, next they'll ship the entire world's knowledge to ship an application :-). Looks at LLMs.

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.

so maybe their codebase has evolved too.

Unfortunately, not so much. They still follow PHP 5-days style, for example they still haven't adopted the short array syntax [], they always use array() which is horrible in my opinion.

The code base is horrible, but the front-facing experience is not so bad (unless you start installing lots of plugins, which tend to add different interface styles and lots of banners everywhere in the admin panel).

PHP, jQuery and W3Schools - HN's combined kryptonite

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.

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.

Most notably, in 5.4.0 (in 2012!) they removed register_globals and magic_quotes. (Which had both been deprecated and off-by-default for a while before, I believe.)

The former was notoriously insecure, as what it did was promote anything passed in as a cookie, GET, or POST variable into a global-scoped variable inside your script. Since PHP didn't require any sort of declaring-your-variables-before-using-them, it was pretty easy to wind up with scripts written in a way that would allow this an unwise amount of access to the script's internals.

The latter automatically escaped special characters with backslashes in all the aforementioned user-provided variables so you could pass them straight into mysql queries. It was, however, optional and so caused errors because code got written relying on it and then ran on servers with it disabled, allowing SQL injection attacks... or double-escaping things in code written the other way around.

But these days are long behind us!

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).

That crown belongs to Javascript now.

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.

Please elaborate.

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)

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.

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

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.

No, modern PHP frameworks have come a long 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).

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

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.

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

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.

"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...

So to beat omg.lol's price you have to hunt for a bargain, then hope the price doesn't double in the following year?

Oh, and you also need to own a domain already, otherwise it's an extra 10-20 bucks per year.

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.

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.

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]?"

I get where you are coming from, but I think the answer for a lot of us is... for the experience.

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".

Didn't you know that everyone on HN bakes their own bread?

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.

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 :).

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.

It’s just a fun project why are you taking it so serious

It’s $20/mo, and a lot of people are eager to spend it so it should be subject to due criticism.

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.

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

"the actual internet" ??

"the actual internet" ??

Microsoft's silo, they mean.

How is hosting your website using a Microsoft silo more "on the internet" than using this?

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

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.

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

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

You are not the target audience.

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 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.

To be entirely fair (in my situation), what I do at work and what I find fun to do with computers are two different things :P

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?

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

It’s just hard to find. Google returns trash

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.

webrings, IRC, forums and mailing lists, etc.

Back in the day you got actually useful results from search engines.

When you want that kind of content, you should use a different search engine which makes it easy to find.

https://search.marginalia.nu/

Try out kagi...they have a filter for "smallweb" posts: https://kagi.com/smallweb

The list of sites is on github: https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb

Give me your favorite small web links

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

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

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

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.

Also many of us were much younger, even teenagers, with little to no exposure to HR hell.

Many weren't, too.

Yeah, in the 90s and 00s I think people published just because they could. Either real identity or not. They (we?) had something to say, to express.

Nowadays people just publish to be seen. There's a huge difference on the type of content this leads to.

The Internet of today is little more than a (distorted) mirror of people's offline lives.

Our offline lives are a distorted mirror of the Internet of today.

This, but also because it was something genuinely new that had never been seen before. Doubly so if you were young then and old now. Everything was novel, and therefore interesting - even the bad things. I’ve seen people expressing nostalgia for blink tags.

Perhaps the medium is just a little played out.

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.

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! ＼(≧▽≦)／

guess who the early colonizers of these alt platforms are

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

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

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.

Cool, man. No one's forcing you to use it. I'm sure you can find someplace else.

Yeah there's no way I'm hanging out with a bunch of people salty at Musk because he stopped Twitter from being an old boys club of internet liberals.

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.

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 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.

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.

You mean kagi.com?

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?

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.

https://home.omg.lol/directory

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

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

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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 :/

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

“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)

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.

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.

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...

[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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

Yes, I'm talking about your personal site. It might be my homegrown RSS reader, because around 10 to 15 of the 900+ feeds I follow just don't show me the content of the feed items. It also doesn't show the feed's title, the description and - strangely enough - also not your site's favicon (which is outside the scope of the feed itself).

I validated the feed at https://validator.w3.org/feed/check.cgi?url=https%3A%2F%2Fww... and everything seems well (except for some "recommendations" to make it even better).

I now saved your site in my feed reader as a sort of bookmark, so I am reminded by it's existence and will check it from time to time, but it would be cool if it shows up immediately.

I've not researched the problem yet, but one of the possible problems that comes to mind is some server setting at your side that stops my external domain from reaching it. Which probably is strange, because w3.org can reach it without problems.

I'm willing to do a little experiment: if you put online a very simple, handmade testfeed, I can try to reach that. What you think about that?

I went through and corrected all the little problems the validator was reporting. Maybe that will fix it.

Can you try again?

Yes, it works! I see a post about a wellness challenge from 2 December as being your latest post. Thanks a lot!

Now, though, I think I get it.

What do you get now?

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

OK, I bit.

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

I look forward to meeting you!

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

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.

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.

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.

You got a big corporation on the same team as you. Doesn't make them the good guys or "better" in any way. The fundamental principles are all broken.

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.

Even if I take your statements at face value: I'm talking about Twitter, not Musk. It would help if you stop conflating the two.

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.

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.

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

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.

Nah, he's just a deeply unlikeable jerk

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?

Does everything have to end with “in my opinion”? Isn’t that implied?

Hey man are you okay?

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.

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 :-)

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

OT, but via the UI design thread on HN, I just bumped into noosphere protocol, which claims to be just like what you describe here.

https://subconscious.substack.com/p/noosphere-a-protocol-for...

Video and images could he links too

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!

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.

Do it. The more the merrier.

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.

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.

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

It's an ad bro

It certainly feels like it.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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...

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

ohh this is cool

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 ;)

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

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.

“omg.lol is unabashedly built with PHP”

I already like you

Is this different from neocities ?

I'm holding out for omg.lawl

I love this, such a throwback.

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. :)

Woah people really hate AI on that mastodon instance

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.

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.

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.

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

Great to see a Mississippian on the top of HN

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

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.

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.

So like Bravenet but in 2023?