by kickscondor on 6/23/21, 1:05 AM with 84 comments
by kickscondor on 6/23/21, 1:06 AM
The Web seems to have converged on a color called 'gwalb' - gray with a little blue. We've gone from home pages - which users could dump endless animated gifs and marquees on to - to giving everyone a roughly 680x680 square to put a picture or some unstyled, unlinked text into. We think being on the Web can still be expressive and casual.
Multiverse is a place for creating visual essays and collages - closer to comics or slideshows than to a 'blog' on Medium or Substack or Wordpress - which are very close to essays. You can also design colorful frames for your posts, to increase the sense of identity, beyond a name and an avatar.
We're not trying to go head-to-head with social media here - just offering a new tool that breaks ranks from the other software out there. We know many of you care about the Web - it has a very fun and freewheeling side to it that we want to help foster, as well as standards like RSS and Webmentions that still make sense! And it's still a great place to meet people and make memories. We've spent the past six months on this. We will probably offer a paid plan if it becomes interesting to people. Are we on the right track here?
- glitchyowl & kicks
by overshard on 6/23/21, 3:17 PM
I remember skimming through hundreds of car Geocities sites by enthusiasts who had no clue how to build a website but wanted to show off their rides. It was always a rollercoaster of poor UX and bad quality images but something was also fun about finding the random image that was a link to some internal page that had more random links on it to more and more and more.
Now everyone just posts info on curated pre-designed platforms and blogs like Facebook or Blogger which takes out half of the appeal for me, I instantly don't care about anything posted on Facebook and don't have a Facebook account. There is some good content on Blogger and the likes but there's nothing fun about most of the posts.
I clearly have been visiting the wrong sites and probably could dig up similar content to what I miss. It could also just be me being old and grumpy.
by graphpapa on 6/23/21, 4:28 PM
It seems to be a popular opinion on this site that ‘everyone should have a personal website’.. but I think the options available don’t make it a likely outlet for a lot of people because there is too much friction required for too little expressiveness. Even for technical people.
This project seems like fun, and that’s a great starting point.
I noticed when clicking around that it is set up so that ‘posts’ are always embedded within the multiverse site styling. This makes it have less of a ‘personal space on the internet’ feeling, but it does keep the experience more consistent, compared to if posts filled the whole page.
Was this a deliberate choice to encourage more ‘post-based’ creation and less ‘personal-site’ type creation? I am partial to the ‘personal-site’ approach but ‘post-based’ suggests other interesting options, like being able to ‘reply’ to one page with another page, and generally being a little more social
by lokl on 6/23/21, 3:08 PM
However, for my taste, this feels a little too close to Tumblr, which I don't think achieves "expressive and visual" in a deep sense. I hope that you will continue to explore and find more ways to differentiate yourself.
Misc. feedback:
I like how you present small blocks of text, but large blocks of text seem cramped sometimes, difficult to read.
The backgrounds are killing me. Perhaps, each background could have a solid-color fallback and readers could toggle to only display the solid fallbacks?
"Composed on today" -> "Composed today" (likewise for "yesterday")
I hope this doesn't come across as negative. What you're doing is very interesting to me and I look forward to seeing where it goes. It just hasn't fully achieved your stated goal, yet, in my opinion.
by glitchyowl on 6/23/21, 2:50 PM
we want to make blogging on the web a little more casual expressive than it's been. which is why we've went with a free-form canvas with lots of style customisation options ~*
here's my mic check - https://multiverse.plus/glitchyowl/haiyo-multiverse
by wuz on 6/23/21, 4:16 PM
by onion2k on 6/23/21, 2:46 PM
by k__ on 6/23/21, 3:01 PM
I mostly need code examples (with highlights) and diagrams (potentially with animations) in my articles. Is there something planned for that?
by mschrage on 6/23/21, 7:35 PM
by jiofih on 6/23/21, 9:28 PM
by garagehub on 6/24/21, 5:47 AM
by 20after4 on 6/23/21, 3:40 PM
I like the idea but I dread what people will do with it.
by Uptrenda on 6/24/21, 7:38 AM
by kwhitefoot on 6/24/21, 8:44 AM
by bovermyer on 6/23/21, 2:53 PM
It has the potential to become a new community.
However... I'm confused how to discover groups.
by anyalikhitha on 6/26/21, 3:36 AM
by kickscondor on 6/23/21, 3:49 PM
by quickthrower2 on 6/24/21, 12:20 PM
by DiggyJohnson on 6/23/21, 2:48 PM
Exciting project. Tasteful design.
by monijz on 6/23/21, 3:00 PM
by sudcha on 6/24/21, 8:01 AM
by pharmakom on 6/26/21, 5:53 AM