[HN Gopher] Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet
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Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet
Author : blakewatson
Score : 174 points
Date : 2023-12-10 20:26 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blakewatson.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blakewatson.com)
| cianmm wrote:
| 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.
| lannisterstark wrote:
| I skimmed OPs post, and then read yours, and I'm still a bit
| confused as to how it's different than just hosting a mishmash
| of different but related services yourself. If you could not,
| yes that's fine. But if you could, what really are the
| advantages?
| tw04 wrote:
| Presumably the mastadon integration. Think twitter with your
| profile directly tied to your personal site - except not
| twitter.
| alexeldeib wrote:
| 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.
| graypegg wrote:
| 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.
| cianmm wrote:
| 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.
| lannisterstark wrote:
| 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
| tambourine_man wrote:
| 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.
| tonymet wrote:
| 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.
| kibwen wrote:
| This is exactly what I've been thinking about making recently as
| a response to the enshittification of the web: a single site that
| just collects a small number of useful, simple web apps that I
| could share with other people who are tired of being perversely
| monetized by ads and VCs. Utterly brilliant, thanks for sharing!
| lopis wrote:
| Do it. The more the merrier.
| lannisterstark wrote:
| I just self host stuff on my domain and link them to a Flame
| dashboard for family and friends.
|
| https://github.com/pawelmalak/flame
|
| Dashboard is only accessible by my wireguard network, Which
| they can turn the LAN mode on on, so it doesn't route all their
| traffic, just to the local domain.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| You've got me thinking the same thing. Omg.lol seems as
| interesting as it is enticing me to build a similar thing for
| fun.
| ghewgill wrote:
| There are various similar communities, which don't have to
| compete with one another because the internet is a big place.
| Two that jump to mind are https://tildeverse.org and
| https://disroot.org.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| "omg.lol is unabashedly built with PHP"
|
| PHP is on my mental list of forever-security-challenged tech, but
| it got on that list a long time ago. It's 2023, is that still a
| reasonable concern?
| mattl wrote:
| No, modern PHP frameworks have come a long way.
| Retr0id wrote:
| 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.
| wvenable wrote:
| > 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.
| block_dagger wrote:
| 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).
| wvenable wrote:
| Nope.
|
| PHP itself has also come along way. I don't know if it's
| because of it's reputation that it seems to evolve faster than
| most languages.
|
| I recently used PHP to construct my personal site/blog. I
| didn't use any frameworks but I did use it's statically
| typed/strongly typed features that that is very different from
| how I would have coded in PHP years ago.
| jay-barronville wrote:
| > 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
| reddalo wrote:
| 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.
| joshmanders wrote:
| That's because it tries to not break backwards
| compatibility and spoiler: past web people had horrible
| standards.
| Keyframe wrote:
| That crown belongs to Javascript now.
| jay-barronville wrote:
| Please elaborate.
| graypegg wrote:
| The curse of popularity. Relatively more people using
| something, means higher absolute amounts of garbage being
| made with it. I wouldn't say modern javascript tooling gives
| you some obscenely high number of foot guns to target
| practice with, at least compared to the other web-capable
| options. (PHP, Python, Ruby, etc)
| tambourine_man wrote:
| It was wrongly added to that list I the first place.
| dankwizard wrote:
| Your write up is an extended version of the omg.lol homepage.
|
| Either you're advertising or ran out of content.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| Well assuming for the sake of discussion that this isn't a paid
| advertisement, it's still clearly a glowing endorsement of the
| service, no? Is a glowing endorsement not allowed?
| dankwizard wrote:
| Is an endorsement just running the homepage through ChatGPT
| and wording everything slightly differently?
| unshavedyak wrote:
| If it's your motivation to endorse and you choose to use
| GPT to do so, i'd think so?
|
| Though i'm not clear how the quality of the writing is
| relevant to whether or not this is sincere.
| floren wrote:
| If you can prompt GPT to write a blog post and you feel
| the results adequately represent your views, why not just
| post the prompt? "paste this into chatgpt 4 for the
| expanded version"
| unshavedyak wrote:
| No idea, when i started this discussion i didn't come
| prepared to defend/discuss GPT lol. Don't really have an
| opinion on GPT.
| graypegg wrote:
| The post contains some context about why they were looking
| for something like the service, gives a short review of why
| they like it, what they get for the cost, and the lists
| alternatives at the bottom. It seems quite human to me.
| Humans tend to talk about things they like.
|
| Just shouting "chatGPT wrote this!" isn't really a comment
| on anything. It's just provocative enough to feel like it's
| a criticism while also being both totally unrefutable and
| unprovable.
| jjulius wrote:
| It's odd how, "I don't like the writing" somehow seems to
| mean that people are totally fine assuming ChatGPT wrote
| something. Feels like a dismissal almost as low effort as
| the point you're trying to make.
| dankwizard wrote:
| No - You missed my point.
|
| I was just in a roundabout way saying this article is
| just paraphrasing the homepage of the service, much like
| what ChatGPT does when it writes an answer for you.
| bovermyer wrote:
| I know it's 2023 and we've had a bad few years, but are we so
| overcome by pessimism that we can't stomach a bit of enthusiasm
| for something without assuming it's fake?
| graypegg wrote:
| 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. :)
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Very nice, purchased a handle to support. And passkey support is
| _chef kiss_.
| bovermyer wrote:
| 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.
| bovermyer wrote:
| OK, I bit.
|
| Here's my spot: https://dungeonhack.omg.lol/
|
| I look forward to meeting you!
| jadbox wrote:
| > Now, though, I think I get it.
|
| What do you get now?
| PenguinRevolver wrote:
| It's nice, the only problem I got with omg.lol is that Wayback
| Machine archives are unavailable for all domains. I'm concerned
| that this part of the internet won't be saved for others to see
| in the future.
| yellow_lead wrote:
| Is there a reason for that or they just haven't been archived
| yet?
| Ringz wrote:
| Unlikely. Some people archive every page they visit.
| blakewatson wrote:
| Oh wow, you're right. I wonder what's up with that.
| politelemon wrote:
| 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...
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| 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
| contrarian1234 wrote:
| I think that's great.. archiving should be opt-in not opt-out
|
| You can read and access my work/words as I want. And once I
| don't or change my mind you can't. Once someone posts
| something, you don't have a right to it in perpetuity .. That's
| how things should work - but that's just my opinion
| leononame wrote:
| I Disagree. There's not a big difference between someone
| reading your stuff and saving it versus automatic archiving.
| Being able to delete what you said makes real discourse with
| a bad actor very hard if not impossible. If you change your
| mind, you are always free to rectify, but you shouldn't be
| able to pretend you never said this or that.
|
| I know there's a line to draw somewhere, personal blogs
| aren't our countries' leaders' Twitter accounts or press
| conferences. Copying someone's copyrighted work in form of an
| archive might some legal implications I'm not aware of. But
| keeping things for posteriority is important and I don't
| believe people should be able to choose what part of their
| words and actions will be recorded and which won't.
| echelon wrote:
| 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.
| nicbou wrote:
| If omg.lol is an oasis, this post was a stranger offering you a
| sip. What a refreshingly nice and personal post!
| 1B05H1N wrote:
| Sorry, why would I pay 20/year bucks for this when I have my own
| website/infra?
| james_pm wrote:
| I happily pay $20/year so I don't need to worry about it. Not
| everyone can or wants to run their own infra.
| airstrike wrote:
| So that you don't have to worry about outages, updates,
| bugfixes, certs, permissions, vulnerabilities, ... like you do
| on your own website/infra?
| erxam wrote:
| 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.
| p4bl0 wrote:
| 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 :).
| umairj wrote:
| Thank you. Just bought it as it looks one and partially because
| my initials were available. Kind of a sign :D. Otherwise it will
| be one of many domains I'll have to manage for a year ;)
| camdenlock wrote:
| > 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...
| tambourine_man wrote:
| "omg.lol is unabashedly built with PHP"
|
| I already like you
| contrarian1234 wrote:
| Seems a bit like Github pages but with more of a social angle to
| it. I kinda expected Github to go in this direction eventually -
| but keeping social elements out of Github might have been a smart
| move
| bhasi wrote:
| The "web design in 4 min" linked to at the bottom of the page is
| very interesting.
| bbx wrote:
| 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.
| damiante wrote:
| 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...
| kvathupo wrote:
| 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?
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(page generated 2023-12-10 23:00 UTC)