from Hacker News

Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

by blakewatson on 12/10/23, 8:26 PM with 360 comments

• by httpsterio on 12/11/23, 2:24 AM

  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.

• by PenguinRevolver on 12/10/23, 9:54 PM

  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.

• by shusaku on 12/11/23, 1:53 AM

  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

• by cianmm on 12/10/23, 9:04 PM

  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.

• by nicbou on 12/10/23, 9:57 PM

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

• by stevebmark on 12/11/23, 3:38 AM

  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.

• by damiante on 12/10/23, 10:48 PM

  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...

• by shermantanktop on 12/10/23, 9:16 PM

  “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?

• by tonymet on 12/10/23, 9:06 PM

  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.

• by maxlin on 12/11/23, 4:48 AM

  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.

• by contrarian1234 on 12/10/23, 10:23 PM

  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

• by kvathupo on 12/10/23, 10:55 PM

  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?

• by bhasi on 12/10/23, 10:42 PM

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

• by 1B05H1N on 12/10/23, 10:04 PM

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

• by famahar on 12/11/23, 8:50 AM

  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.

• by benjamim on 12/14/23, 12:11 AM

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

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

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

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

  This is my:

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

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

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

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

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

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

• by rglullis on 12/11/23, 1:07 AM

  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.

• by graypegg on 12/10/23, 9:35 PM

  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. :)

• by kibwen on 12/10/23, 9:12 PM

  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!

• by krick on 12/11/23, 6:52 PM

  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).

• by Tomte on 12/11/23, 12:48 PM

  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.

• by bovermyer on 12/10/23, 9:48 PM

  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.

• by toomuchtodo on 12/10/23, 9:40 PM

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

• by UberFly on 12/11/23, 2:52 AM

  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.

• by umairj on 12/10/23, 10:06 PM

  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 ;)

• by bandrami on 12/11/23, 1:17 PM

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

• by riow on 12/12/23, 4:12 PM

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

• by Ikatza on 12/14/23, 8:37 PM

  Just joined using your referral code. Thanks Blake!

• by dataengineer56 on 12/11/23, 3:31 PM

  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.

• by gdsdfe on 12/11/23, 6:03 AM

  Woah people really hate AI on that mastodon instance

• by mortallywounded on 12/11/23, 5:02 PM

  I'm holding out for omg.lawl

• by rammy1234 on 12/11/23, 1:55 AM

  Is this different from neocities ?

• by tambourine_man on 12/10/23, 10:21 PM

  “omg.lol is unabashedly built with PHP”

  I already like you

• by horsefaceman on 12/11/23, 1:12 AM

  I love this, such a throwback.

• by 101008 on 12/11/23, 2:01 AM

  So like Bravenet but in 2023?

• by bkeating on 12/11/23, 2:29 PM

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

• by crawsome on 12/11/23, 12:59 AM

  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.

• by camdenlock on 12/10/23, 10:15 PM

  > 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…

• by smsm42 on 12/11/23, 6:16 AM

  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.

• by jongjong on 12/11/23, 1:17 AM

  > 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.

• by benignobject on 12/11/23, 12:36 AM

  Great to see a Mississippian on the top of HN