Omg.lol – A lovable web page and email address
home.omg.lol
home.omg.lol
- a webpage
- DNS
- email forwarding
- a statuslog
- url shortener
- a pastebin
- a weblog
- an optional Mastodon account
- optional IRC/Discord
- and probably some more stuff I missed
And all of this stuff is much more configurable than it would typically be on other services. It is ripe for creative integrations. Oh and the whole thing can be interacted with through an API. Pretty cool for $20. Definitely not the same as "just getting your own domain."
I extensively use the API for pastebin and URL shortener. It's very much a selling point for me -- love being able to control things on the command line with a few simple scripts.
Great package of tiny little web apps for a good dollar amount and a great author.
Ah, good point.
All domains are like that, though, even TLDs.
Com could be free as well. The only real difference is choice.
Or to put it differently, you say it doesnt need registration. Well, it does. They require it. So what.
What this means is OP can arbitrarily shutdown their offering at their sole discretion and, as a result, you'll lose access to the eTLD+1 you've purchased (domain, email, all gone). However, if you purchase a gTLD domain through an ICANN accredited registrar, the registrar can't unilaterally do the same (even if the registrar implodes, you still own the domain and you can move it elsewhere).
[1] ICANN Registrants' Benefits and Responsibilities: https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/benefits-2013-09-16-en
[2] ICANN Registrar Compliance Program: https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/registrar-2012-02-25-e...
[3] https://jfhr.me/what-is-an-etld-+-1/
[4] Neatnik LLC (the company behind omg.lol): https://home.omg.lol/info/legal
The entity that you're actually leasing the domain from is the registry operator-- such as Verisign for .com or PIR for .org. And, yes, it's still a lease relationship-- while there are some ICANN-mandated consumer protections around your "purchase" of a domain, if you stop paying your annual renewal (or run out of whatever amount of time you've prepaid), that domain isn't yours any more.
Omg.lol is operating the same way (albeit not under ICANN oversight, as they're not running a gTLD); they've just cut out the middleman and are leasing subdomains directly rather than via third-party registrars.
Not entirely true; I'd argue it's closer to subleasing a part of the property they're currently leasing from an ICANN accredited registrar.
> they've just cut out the middleman
Quite the opposite! They've just introduced themselves as yet another middleman on top of the already existing middleman (there's still a value proposition to this, but it's not the same).
TL;DR: subtenant rights ⊈ tenant rights
Of course, only as long as they can operate the service forever...
At least if you are paying for it you are entering into a contract of service from the provider which gives you a lot of legal recourse and leverage and also supports the business so that they do keep providing you the service.
That said, the billing side wasn't bad.
Plus they frequently develop new useful features, like partnering with Bitwarden and 1Password to generate throwaway email address on the fly at your domain.
That is, until I received an email from my father. I couldn't open it. It was so perplexing that I eventually opened a ticket with support to see what I screwed up. Turns out their "free trial" only worked with other fastmail addresses until verified my account. The only supported method of verification was to create a paid account. Support wouldn't or couldn't help until I verified. I was pretty pissed; felt like I got bait and switched. What good is a trial that only works with a service that (relatively) very few people use? I closed my account, moved to purelymail, and haven't looked back.
I still have no idea what email my dad sent me. They might be a great service otherwise, but this gave me a very sour experience.
That said I switched to using iCloud mail with my own domain as soon as it was available.
It doesn't have to be entirely boring, but less... cute. Also I think that meme language has a high risk of drifting into the cringe zone, and then that will feel bad too. I would have the same problem with lit.lol or yeet.lol.
Am I alone in being willing to pay more for less whimsy? Give me the $30/year plan where I can pick bucket.web or tiny.star or something less of the moment.
I can't find it in the Help docs.
Am I reading that correctly?
Meaning, your profile wouldn't be served from "example.com" but instead, "example.com" would simply do a browser redirect to "omg.lol/example"
So yes you can use your own domain but edit the profile with omg.lol
The founder, Adam, is a genuinely good dude. He just keeps adding more features and the service gets better and better.
And remember: if you’re not paying, you are the product. This seams both very reasonably priced and also priced high enough that if you take a little care at running things well it can be sustainable
I guess you could also be both though, no?
Interesting, how many years would you estimate it's been around?
I see their Mastodon server is pretty new (since last July) and wayback doesn't have the homepage archived at all. Can't think of another way of checking.
From then to now is 3 years 9 months and ~20 days.
As comparison: I've got a two letter GitHub account and joined in late 2009, so 1.5 years after its founding.
I got a lifetime license awhile back and love how it just keeps giving. The shortened email is cool enough, but all the extra goodies are just really tasty icing on the cake. The simple status social media site is fun because it's so low friction, you don't worry about anything other than just creating a stream of little updates.
I'd love to see this entire concept become the new way we web. Like instead of giant conglomerate companies trying to do everything, we have a bunch of smaller little services that interact with each other (a la fediverse or something similar) and they occasionally add a new little set of tools. Feels very "old-web" like. Like a modern BBS.
Great work so far Adam! Keep it up :) Much love from spencer.omg.lol
I factored in the usefulness, uniqueness, and possible untimely-deathness and found the lifetime license worth it. It's nice to support stuff like this.
The idea of curating alternate services together and offering it as a product feels novel - does anyone else do this?
I'd love to see hosting offered for curated open source services that are interoperable. Sort of like all those WordPress hosts of yore (and today!).
Edit: omg.lol, is it AOL?? :D
Edit 2: The price is even the same! $19.95 vs $20
It's a different but related concept: Framasoft in France (https://framasoft.org/fr/). It's a non-profit that provides open-source alternatives to common cloud services. They also teach people how to install and configure these tools on their own server instead of relying on providers reselling their data.
This includes, among other things, PeerTube.
PeerTube is a federated alternative to YouTube.
I love PeerTube. Been running an instance of it of my own for a few weeks.
I currently have only two videos on it so far.
The subject of the videos on my instance are computing and music.
My instance does not allow others to sign up, but I would like to invite other creators to host videos about computing and music on my instance. I tried to reach out to one person that was currently using YouTube and who was making videos about computing to ask them if they wanted to host their videos on my PeerTube instance instead. Didn’t hear back from that person yet.
I would like for about ten to one hundred people who have a history of creating videos about computing or music to join my instance. The goal being that we would be enough people on the instance so that every week there is 1 to 2 new videos posted, while still being few enough people so that we are not flooded with many videos, and while also maintaining a strict focus on videos whose topics are restricted to one or more of the following three:
- computing (by this I mean programming, software engineering, computer science and such)
- music (includes music videos for music created by the person, as well as videos about music theory and videos about music production)
- electronics (meaning things like microcontrollers, soldering, PCB design, etc)
Essentially, to create a small and focused community.
Still not sure how to actually get other people to join though. For now my strategy will be to continue making videos of my own, and occasionally reaching out to others to ask them personally if they want to join the instance when I see someone that makes content of a similar nature as the kind that I host on my instance.
There is also https://librem.one services.
I think Mozilla is trying to do this, although not super successfully.
Same here.. Though the services aren't bad, but the decent API made me feel like there's really some love put in.
The main thing that put me off is the two acronyms that I barely hear anymore.. haven't seen lol in a long time and omg has certainly decreased for me, I'd feel awkward using it. Maybe if they had an additional re-branded version that was less 'hip', I'd be up for it :D
maybe Zoho for business apps?
$19.95 per month vs $20 per year.
edit: now that I revisit it, SDF does appear to provide more services, though probably with less commitment to reliability than omg.lol
I can use my sdf email address for email newsletters and such. I also log in (as another poster mentioned) and use the text mode browser for checking on Web sites from outside my local and national network.
Finally the system is a nice example of netbsd in action.
I have not joined in any of the forums &c yet. I might play with gopher and gemini for lutz
But what’s really amazing about it is that people still host things on there. And on top of that there are active message boards where people actually talk. It’s a weird little corner of the universe.
In a way I wish they had modernized a bit. But also I think if it turned into another PaaS system it would lose its charm. It is better off with the “weird” constraints that it has because it keeps it interesting.
Edit: oh ok i think i found it: SDF.ORG ?
Not sure why an email service from Yahoo or Microsoft - which were not the primary focus of either company's business - would be more likely to persist.
I sense the point of this funny domain is the community, and community is centered on mastodon instance which btw, is not cheap to run as soon as it grows beyond a few hundred people. (I'm including potential moderation costs)
In scenario A you pool people together into 1 big void and everyone gets angry and both sides consider each other wrong.
In scenario B you segregate people into groups of opinions where the moment your opinion differs you’re kicked from that group.
Either way we are long past the time when you could have an educated conversation and debate.
I have no desire to join a void with single opinions and nothing to discuss.
- All clients are straight up bad but this is mostly personal opinion. - I don't want to maintain and pay for a personal instance - On public instances there is always the risk of the admins deciding not to run it anymore without notice. In that case you lose all your followers. - Due to how it's designed; some things are very inconvenient. For example; when I click a link to someone's profile on the internet, I can't see if I follow them or not unless they are on my server. Then I have to copy their url, go to my instance, search and follow. Too much friction for a simple and one of the most important actions of the platform. - With these inconveniences (that are not easy to solve without centralization), it's imho impossible for it to go mainstream. It requires a certain level of tech-saviness. Even the concept of "choosing an instance" is confusing for most people. I don't want to just follow or be followed by techbros and edgy artists. I like having normal converstaions with regular people.
I would be interested in an alternative to Twitter but in its current state, Mastodon isn't that.
I get that is quite a UX/UI problem. However, given what is now known about FAANG and big tech corp, I would rather have my data unreliable and use bad UX/UI for online exchange then to use the mainstream big corp platforms. Personally I don't want to be a product.
The UI/UX problems of Mastodon really are due to the federation model, they aren't inevitable when moving away from a corporate walled garden. Bit of a dead horse on HN, but RSS really does most of what Mastodon does better, throw in WebMentions and you have all the social features too. To the original thread here, it's be very cool to see indieweb support on omg.lol since everyone gets a subdomain and webpage already!
> All clients are straight up bad but this is mostly personal opinion.
There are a _lot_ of new clients in active development right now. I'm on the private alpha of Ivory by Tapbots (who built the popular Tweetbot client), and it's quite good.
> On public instances there is always the risk of the admins deciding not to run it anymore without notice. In that case you lose all your followers.
Agreed that this is an issue, but there are ways around it. I'm a member of a coop-run instance, social.coop.
> Due to how it's designed; some things are very inconvenient. For example; when I click a link to someone's profile on the internet, I can't see if I follow them or not unless they are on my server. Then I have to copy their url, go to my instance, search and follow.
Agreed, but most clients resolve this.
> it's imho impossible for it to go mainstream.
Strong disagree - I think it's already going mainstream, and lots of non-tech people are picking it up every day.
> Even the concept of "choosing an instance" is confusing for most people. I don't want to just follow or be followed by techbros and edgy artists. I like having normal converstaions with regular people.
Agreed, but this is resolved by just picking one of the big, popular instances. I was on universeodon.com first, and was immediately having "normal" conversations with "regular" people.
Again, your comment absolutely rightfully points out that there _is_ friction there. However, I don't think it's at all insurmountable, and I think it will continue to improve and gain traction.
I personally got it for the webpage, to use as an online business card, and have been loving all of the other stuff that surrounds it like the new Weblog feature
Had a mate starting some sort of a pastebin / blog site and it wasn't long before people started posting questionable content and he had to be on top of it so that the hosting provider doesn't suspend his account. That took majority of his time and he basically couldn't get time for anything else and site wasn't bringing enough money from ads to hire staff. On top of that common theme was someone posting adult content and then reporting to Google so that they would block ads.
I guess having paid accounts keep people who are up to no good slightly at bay.
Having to renew is inconvenient, and makes it possible to lose your name.
Though, doing the SomethingAwful approach ($10 one-off membership fee, extremely strict moderation, if you get banned that's another $10) would be an interesting experiment!
He’s just a baby but still needs a unique email for me to create him accounts (eg frequent flyer, global entry) and I had previously been using a +variant on my gmail.
Having a vanity email alias seems more fun.
10-18 years is a long time window, so I felt that purchasing a domain was more appropriate than setting up an address at a service which may or may not still be available in decades.
Thank goodness for services like Purelymail[1] and Forward Email[2] that offer free or cheap forwarding from various domains!
https://home.omg.lol/ is displaying unsafe content from https://social.lol/@adam/109186339855398190/embed
I guess it may not exist or it's called managed hosting and the feature set and complexity is too overwhelming?
Would be a great fit since every user already gets a (sub)domain and homepage!
My gmail account from when I was a kid is still active and working while most of the vanity/foss/privacy focused ones I signed up for have since died.
aka the (postulated) Lindy Effect
I guess registrars can go down too but it seems less likely.
horses for carriage seem to defy that kind of assumption
Gotta love these kind of sayings that have virtually no connection with reality.
If we take the C programming language, and one created last year, which one would you expect to still be used in 10 years? You can do this comparison for any two things where there is no inherent end date.
That's a different thing altogether. Because it does not take in account market adoption. If C was a language on life-support with no major project using it, it could be as old as hell but I would not bet on it to be around and useful 10 years from now.
Also, that saying is stupid because it makes it look like you can predict the future of technologies by using a single factor, while reality a rich, multi-dimensional set of problems.
Given a random sample of any thing at an arbitrary point in time, on average it will be in the middle of its lifetime. Something that is X years old will on average, continue for X more years. Of course, additional information lets you refine that estimate considerably, but it is mathematically sound and surprisingly applicable to everyday life (e.g. using a single serial number on a product to estimate total production).
The thing is, we typically have a lot of context for every technology we discuss, so bringing back this saying that reduces everything to one-dimension is just silly.
If you are truly an expert, you have a fighting chance. As a human, that means you are limited to a tiny number of specific subject matters.
It's unlikely that Gmail will shut down though so there are a lot of reliable exceptions
To be fair, this should be what to expect from any large corporation, but sadly, many don't.
Idk why but why are people getting mad at stuff that literally affects every other type of services online (like the chance of it shutting down)?
20$/year also doesnt sound all that expensive, thats 1.6$ per month! I rarely ever pay for things online, but I know damn well that anyone who pays for this service and then not use it would probably forget that they are paying because its so cheap!
Sigh Hacker News moment I guess. Criticising harshly for something thats suppose to be fun.
Other services can shut down but this type of entrenchment isn't there when my cloud notes shuts down, or when my hosted collaborative kanban shuts down. They can give me my data and I can go elsewhere. I don't have to get the world to update contacts and bookmarks and other stuff like that.
Lurkers are 90%, 10% have accounts, and 10% of those with accounts comment. This was the breakdown of some major subreddits maybe 6 years ago.
Other than hosting a basic web page, the other features are not useful to me.
That it's $20/year is very little but also significantly raising the likelihood it'll stay around for years. The author is also intelligently creating relatively low maintenance but high value services so this actually looks workable in the long term.
The only thing I don't like is the branding. It seems to have some political undertones to it.
I think combining this with a product like crypt pad is a great start towards creating a more independent Google workspace competitor.
(and I'm flagged lol, way to prove my point)
Sooo f*ing tired.
Even pointing this out objectively will get somebody steamrolled.
I find it really interesting what people consider political/apolitical these days, even things that weren't before. If somebody says they like to drink orange juice, that's currently an apolitical statement. If somebody else comes out and says that drinking orange juice is a bad thing to do, and gives a political reason for it, the first person suddenly "becomes political" by virtue of enjoying orange juice and talking about it, even though that wasn't political before. Why should the opinions of dissenters have the power to turn someone's otherwise apolitical statement political?
(Now compare that allegory to somebody who said "Since this is the internet and you cannot see me, please know that I'm a he/him" on a BBS in 1985. That was an apolitical statement. But now, saying it on your social media in 2022 it's political? How come?)
You may be tired, and I may get downvoted, but this is oversimplifying the problem so much that the message itself seems political. First, identifying pronouns is not really opt-in. There is significant peer pressure, and once you're the lone holdout, it's very hard to keep yourself pronoun-less without becoming a social outcast and targeted as a bigot.
I am 100% behind equal rights for trans people, and will call anyone by their preferred pronoun (he or she, on the fence on they, and would probably not go into the neo-pronouns). That said, my wish is that the default mode to address someone is based on observed external sex characteristics, and where people whose external sex characteristics match their traditional pronouns do not communicate their pronouns. My reasons are that at a young age, kids are extremely easy to influence, and I have a strong feeling that many kids identify as another sex to mask other underlying issues. For similar contrarian perspective see the book Irreversible Damage and also Blair White's youtube channel.
It's the left wing equivalent of putting up a bunch of burning crosses and pretending they don't mean anything.
I know exactly how fairly I would be treated in that community and it looks like this: (the flagged and dead comment below this)
Are you colorblind and the colors of the text are hard to read? They weren't very readable on light mode but I wouldn't call that political
Is it the mastodon instance? The overall peppy feel of the page?
Is "burning crosses" over-the-top? Yes, obviously. Does it say, "You're not the kind of social we have in mind," to a sizable portion of potential users? Yes again.
It's nice, playful, and youthful branding.
it's bait
by the way, I posted that link sincerely.
I believe you mean, "agree with me on gender and sexuality". When you take away the tendentious wording, it's a lot less clear that it "should be a given."
(I mean, yes, in the last few years this has been politicised, primarily in the US, by a right wing desperate for a new wedge issue, but you'd have to be fairly gullible to fall for that...)
Acknowledging the existence of obvious branding or political affiliation means subjecting yourself to an inquisition where 30 people take turns trying to pigeonhole you as a bigot.
again the message is clear "you're not welcome"
As it happens, though, I don't see myself as a victim. I don't mind in the least people reacting to my opinions. But I also feel perfectly comfortable pointing out the nature of the reaction, which is generally not to engage with content but to turn it into a question of character. Which you have done.
But if it does then you can just migrate almost everything over (was something left behind that I cannot remember, but everything important is moved over).
I hope this works out for you and your users.
The eTLD stuff they mention are interesting, still trying to understand what it actually means though. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Suffix_List
$20/year is actually a bargain as it would likely cost you more than that each month to run all of that yourself
What wouldn't be table stakes, would be if each of these was its own Mastodon instance, or something else like that that actually had an OpEx cost.
"Pay 20usd/y for your social account in our mastodon instance and get free subdomain, webpage and email forwarding"
I would find this totally acceptable, considering the potential costs of actually running a mastodon instance.
If I liked the omg.lol domain name a ton, I'd pay for this.
And if they shut down and let the omg.lol lapse or sell it, someone could then redirect all the subdomains to who knows what.
Another reason might be domain trust? If spammers use omg.lol subdomains the entire thing might be blacklisted for email.
Domains are easier to resell. I don't think there will be a secondary market for omg.lol and if you sell you business based on an omg.lol it will be a red flag vs. a top level domain.
On the other hand if you intent is a personal CV / bio type page, with email (you need fastmail too) and so on, the $20 is a great deal.
But I would rather just use a xyz.netlify.com for such a project, then couple that with a free email service.
I think that them being on the https://wiki.mozilla.org/Public_Suffix_List makes that unlikely. (a Public Suffix is a thing like .co.uk — would it make sense to blacklist .co.uk? Not unless you're the type of postmaster who is willing to blacklist entire TLDs like .biz as well.)
I think the requirements to run a top level domain, like .lol itself are pretty onerous? But I wonder if it is easier to get your subdomain added to the public suffix list, and I wonder what legal guarantees are afforded to someone who registers such a domain.
- 3.2: "We may change, suspend, or discontinue any of our Services." [...] "We make no representation, warranty or condition regarding the availability or operability of the Services at any time." This means you effectively have no ownership of the subdomain and no control over the availability of the services. Your website, email address, Mastodon instance, etc., may become permanently nonfunctional at any moment, without any recourse.
This might be a super interesting case study, because if I had to bet, it's that 80%+ of the hate on this thread comes from the DNS feature omg.lol added --- a feature not common among other content hosting services, and that probably doesn't need to be there at all for omg.lol's market. They made a feature for nerds, not realizing that you have to be super careful about nerds or they'll bite your head off for trying to appeal to them the wrong way. Third-level domains! The gall!
I think the one thing that would stop me from taking up on a service like this would be the "omg.lol" - it's just a little too off-brand for a guy who wears all black and hates texting. But I can see how a lot of people might be into it.
I do like the idea of not just a landing page and email, but a little identity package that's not part of a social network.
I'm in the boat with style but I threw 20$ at it because I know I'll get a few interesting looks. Might even add it to my "recruiter" resume.
Edit: OK, on actually reading the comments I agree. Something weird. Hmm.
For me it could be worth it just to explore what's available, how it works.
If you live in poverty then it might be too steep. I'd recommend checking out eu.org for free domains.
I think that some people may be able to get behind the service by virtue of its usefulness alone, and either are unbothered by the branding or are even attracted to it.
And then there are some people who are totally put off by the branding for various reasons, be it because they perceive certain political/ideological undertones behind it or just think that it’s immature and are even aghast that other HN users (who are predominantly middle-aged men, presumably) find it appealing.
To criticize the branding, puts one’s self in a position where one can either make a statement that can either be perceived as “politically incorrect” or insensitive, or reconciliatory (“I understand why people like it, but it’s not for me, I should’ve kept my opinions to myself and let people have their fun.”)
Making it free would have missed out on the probably 2 dozen people that converted from this post.
This is also similar to about.me links people were posting from a couple of years ago.
It’s not what the 37 Signals guys are saying…