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".
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.
Wayback Machine is arguably a more durable archive site than these other two archives, but the fact that it can be archived elsewhere would indicate that the problem is likely to be on archive.org's end of things rather than omg.lol
That kind of sucks :( So much of the "small internet" of the past people talk about in relation to this stuff, is only really preserved in any significant scale by IA. Hope it's not the operator making a big sweeping decision for all users.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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...
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.
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'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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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. :)
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!
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.
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.
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).
[+] [-] httpsterio|2 years ago|reply
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_3815|2 years ago|reply
>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
[+] [-] stcredzero|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] PenguinRevolver|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anjel|2 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] burkaman|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] politelemon|2 years ago|reply
> 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...
[+] [-] graypegg|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] contrarian1234|2 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] blakewatson|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yellow_lead|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shusaku|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cianmm|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nicbou|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NanoYohaneTSU|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stevebmark|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] inamberclad|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] golem14|2 years ago|reply
Not everyone needs their content to reach record # of visitors.
[+] [-] TechSquidTV|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scythe|2 years ago|reply
There's also boardreader.com for finding small communities, although I don't think it really tilts towards Mastodon very much.
[+] [-] 3abiton|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] janandonly|2 years ago|reply
Check out some trending people/topics on Nostr here: https://nostr.band/
[+] [-] hnbad|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jszymborski|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] omginternets|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hiidrew|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] john-radio|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] metabagel|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] damiante|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shermantanktop|2 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] tonymet|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxlin|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Timwi|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] enumjorge|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] latexr|2 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] prmoustache|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] contrarian1234|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kvathupo|2 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] bhasi|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1B05H1N|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] famahar|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benjamim|2 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] rglullis|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] graypegg|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kibwen|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghewgill|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lannisterstark|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lopis|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unshavedyak|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krick|2 years ago|reply