Show HN: A social network like Myspace, built on top of Notion | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A social network like Myspace, built on top of Notion

mynotion.space

57 pointsJonovono41 comments

GeoCities v2!! :-)

EDIT: for the younger generation GeoCities was (or seemed like) the place to build your homepage on the WWW on https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_GeoCities .. now they should implement Webrings too! (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring) and page counters and in particular online guestbooks!

The younger generation seems unexpectedly into it:

https://neocities.org

people forget how the older generation - people sentient in the 90s - mostly didn't even know what the internet was, and that those who did and sought to profit from it were rapacious scoundrels. People who made awesome websites and appreciated other ones were always in a tiny subculture minority.

Truth! I treat Olia Lialina as the prime academic expert on this:

https://interfacecritique.net/book/olia-lialina-from-my-to-m...

> There was no time in the history of the Web when building your home was celebrated and acknowledged by opinion leaders. The idea that you should invest time in building your corners of cyberspace was mercilessly suppressed by hosting service providers and “fathers” of the Internet.

haha i used to have a Geocities page, does that make me old? :(

Maybe but angelfire page makes you even older.

Tripod checking in. Open a <noscript> or something after your footer for a cleaner site ;)

If this was open source and federated with activitypub it would be a killer app IMO.

federated apps never really took off imo, maybe because it matters only for a small fraction of people who's concerned about security or selfhosting or whatsoever else tech people care about nowadays

it's sad that in your eyes federated is tied to techie.

You mean it's sad that federation is tied to being a techie? His observation is clearly correct.

What's scary/techie about servers communicating? How to change that and make federation fearless?

Nothings scary about it. The techie thing is that most people simply do not care about it. My mum does not care that email is federated but WhatsApp isn't. She just uses them. If anything federation is worse for the average user because it leads to more spam and ossified protocols (does IRC support images yet?).

fair enough, but how can a 'network' be 'social' if there is only one provider. ('Thou shall not have others before me').

Making means of communication a matter of taste of those who don't care won't yield good results. That's what brought us into that surveillance capitalism mess.

Because there are lots of people on it. I'm not sure what the Bible has to do with any of this.

Completely false. I welcome you to take a look at any well connected fediverse node. We're having a blast.

Definitely not opposed to open sourcing it.

In what sense is this a social network? From examples it looks like personal pages made in notion. But no friends list or commenting on other people's content?

Ya, fair enough. I'm still figuring out how I want to do those features. Plan was to hopefully find some people into the idea from here and riff on some ways to implement those :)

you should consider WebMentions https://indieweb.org/Webmention

Look cool, thanks, i'll check them out!

Wow! Pretty impressive that the whole thing is based on notion! MySpace nostalgia is still very very big. I actually rebuilt the original MySpace last year and called it "SpaceHey" (with blogs, forums, customizable profiles with css, bulletins, etc.) - it has over 550k users already and is still growsing rapidly. Pretty crazy!

Hey An ;p I'm a big fan of what you built with SpaceHey (user #2315). Happy to hear Spacehey has kept growing since I heard about it! I definitely agree the nostalgia is big, and I think just people are into having more customizability.

I was browsing the Notion subreddit and it reminded me so much of Myspace. And then I had the idea to combine the two, so whatever your Notion space looks like, your 'social' page will reflect that.

Will see where it goes, but it was fun little project to build!

Pretty fun hit of nostalgia. I feel like FB/IG/whatever have lost a lot of what made it fun to share things about yourself or personalize your page in a creative way.

Is there a page that explains how it is built? or how it works?

There might be, but I can’t see it on mobile

Not yet, I actually just whipped it up quickly last week after I was browsing the Notion subreddit and it reminded me of myspace.

These are the tools I used:

* BlitzJS (https://github.com/blitz-js/blitz)

* Official Notion API

* React Notion X (https://github.com/NotionX/react-notion-x)

Does the Notion API allow you to access arbitrary pages yet? Last I checked, it only let you access ones you explicitly shared with the app.

They have a authorization flow that lets the user select the pages to expose to the integration (https://developers.notion.com/docs/authorization#standard-in...)

You'll notice I still ask you to make the page public, that's only because the unofficial `getPage` is more complete than Notions right now

Ah, thanks. Sounds like their API is still fairly limited, huh.

Careful, "myspace" is trademarked and it's likely you'll need to come up with a name less confusingly similar, if they decide to enforce their mark.

https://mynotion.space/space/9 first 10!!! Woot woot. Looks fun so far.

Nice! haha thanks for checking it out! I noticed an error in my Duplication template, so I think I was creating too many per user. You are most likely around first 5 users ;p

What is Notion?

It's a text editor app, but it has many built in widgets. So you can embed text, images, photos, figma, spotify and others

https://www.notion.so

So, instead of editing HTML to create your space like you did on Myspace, you can customize it with all the tools Notion has already built.

Notion has a big community, 200k+ on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Notion/

It's a closed note-taking app, so if Notion doesn't like this site, it stops existing. Calling it a text editor hides this fact, I think.

Fair enough, think of this as an MVP of the idea. Ideally I have something similar to Notion, but with widgets built specifically for social.

So it's like confluence?

A fairly robust online note tool, https://technicallychallenged.substack.com/p/notion-can-almo...

a slightly better version of Obsidian for people who don't really like markdown

Hug of HN, it doesnt load anymore.

I dont think 100 people accessing from HN, will crash notion.

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