Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet
blakewatson.com
blakewatson.com
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.
>Section 6.5 Except where explicitly stated to the contrary in this Policy, in some cases, particularly given the limited amount and type of information and data collected through omg.lol, we have not restricted contractors’ own use or disclosure of that information or data. We are not responsible for the conduct or policies of Stripe, or other contractors.
INAL but that seems pretty cookie-cutter "Company is not ruling-out selling your data to others".
Which is rotally reasonable/expected imho.
I mean this seems pretty suspect for anyone privacy focused.
> Part b. omg.lol does not believe its processing of limited personal data of those outside the United States (if any) brings it within the jurisdiction of these laws.
That's a hard disclaimer if there's any.
I read that as: if you're a European user, we do not believe you can legally enforce us to honor your rights, even though we operate within the EEA.
> Article 3.2 goes even further and applies the law to organizations that are not in the EU if two conditions are met: the organization offers goods or services to people in the EU, or the organization monitors their online behavior. (Article 3.3 refers to more unusual scenarios, such as in EU embassies.)
https://gdpr.eu/companies-outside-of-europe/
Which is pretty much what happens given that they allow EU citizens to buy a 20 USD subscription.
If enough people do it they will act.
https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/r...
If one does not like EU law, one should just not do business here.
This is largely a moot point as long as omg.lol remains some guy's side project but given that the ToS explicitly mentions the possibility of a merger or buyout, this feels like it's poisoning the well a bit. If there's any upside to this, it's that this makes a buyout far less likely because he's essentially saying "yeah, we collect a ton of personal information but we don't have the legal consent for any of it and explicitly told users we're not complying with their regional data protection laws when it comes to gathering, processing or storing their personal information". Fair enough for the MySpace era of Web 2.0 privacy abuse but no longer workable in a world with the GDPR and its many regional equivalents.
Oh dear. That is definitely not correct. The only way for omg.lol to not fall under the jurisdiction of the GDPR is to not offer their services to people living where it applies.
How did we get here? To where If I spin up a webserver and charge for access now I'm suddenly forced to lick your middle finger because you have laws in your country saying so?
If I surf over to another (Internet surfing) country because the server is physically located in that country, I again am forced to follow the laws that apply there.
It does seem illogical to have such setup especially since physical I haven't moved.
Now it seems that I can take my laws with me when I visit a server in another country. Making everything even more confusing.
Unfortunately that does not apply to physically traveling to another country: that country doesn't care two bobs for my countries laws.
Edit: INAL.
on the other hand if you go set up a business that sells to citizens of that other country do you have to follow rules to be allowed to sell stuff there? You see how the analogy is a little closer aligned?
Same kind of deal, omg.lol have my servers located in the United States, payment processing happens in the United States, in United States Dollars. In no way is omg.lol making a special usecase to handle European customers.
Now, Europe is free to attempt to excise their laws againt omg.lol, however they wouldn't get much further than "you're blocked in the EU" and having to get ISPs and transit networks to blocke their traffic, and payment networks to stop serving EU customers for that particular merchant ID.
Is this usually followed in small scale shops? Almost never in my experience, though if the shop gets big enough or if the business is sold those tax liabilities are still technically owed. Many countries do have a minimum revenue before you have to pay taxes, and some have a minimum before you're supposed to report sales via tax filings even if you don't owe, but you better keep the operation small if you never plan to pay foreign sales tax.
That's the situation with privacy protection laws: the user brings the laws with them.
If you scam people in country A from country B, you're criminally liable to country A even if it's not a crime in country B. Same if it's espionage (cf. Assange), piracy (cf. TPB) and so on. Why should infringing on privacy rights be any different?
There are plenty of sites that only cater to US users and have signup forms requiring data like postal addresses or payment methods that contain regional information. Heck, some US sites even exclude users from certain states for various reasons. This service costs money so they need the user's billing address anyway. Just restrict access there and then like the rest.
The guy who created omg.lol did not "spin up a webserver and charge for access", they run a company that collects, stores and processes their users' behavioral data and personally identifiable information. It's more like a hosting company except it's apparently cobbled together from various third parties without any due diligence about how they operate. And it even uses the phrase "privacy-focused" in various parts of its claims. Yeah, I'd say it's reasonable to expect a company like that to provide basic information like what data it collects, how it ensures that data is protected and how a data subject can get that data deleted or corrected.
We have laws preventing corporations from selling products that are unfit for purpose or food that is blatantly toxic and we have laws preventing corporations from offering you contracts that demand personal harm or indentured servitude. In places like the EU we also have laws that prevent companies from using your data without consent and making sure you follow the best current practices when handling that data. And yeah, if you want to make a service that collects all data and monetizes the ever living fuck out of it you can still do that, you just need to ask your users for consent and allow them to opt-out if it isn't essential to doing what the users would want to use the service for (i.e. no bait and switch).
I don't know why some people find it so hard to understand the idea of informed and non-coerced consent.
You do business somewhere, you have to abide by the laws of that somewhere.
As to how did we got here? I don't know. It probably happened sometime around year 500 BC?
If omg.lol does not have any business in EU it is probably not going to actually be a problem for them because EU is unlikely to go to U.S court to try to get money - also because I believe that probably wouldn't work.
However
1. if they are trying to get purchased by someone they probably should consider potential buyers probably don't want to buy a bunch of EU liability.
2. they should probably refrain from any sort of ambition that would give them such a business in the future because regulators can be really mean when someone does this kind of funny stuff.
3. if they don't pay if called on it maybe there would be a situation where they would get blocked - not sure about that but seems reasonable reaction.
Couldn't you simply codify in the ToS that PII or even most/all historical metadata would be scrubbed upon the sale of the company? IANAL, but I would assume that a company could commit themselves in the user agreement in such a way that it guarantees some protection against this kind of concern.
And things like email addresses are "PII", and maybe some more things that are required to actually run this business. So "scrub all PII" isn't really a very feasible thing to do in the first place.
(Where the new buyer would breach the contract if passing data on.)
1) Don't sell the company 2) Sell the company sans data (destroy it first)
And no one is going to buy a company stripped of all customer data.
This is just not realistic. Any company or website that lives long enough will change hands eventually, whether it's "selling" or handing it to your first-born son, or whatever, for any number of reasons, and when that happens you lose control. The best you can do is hand it over to someone you trust (if that's possible), but nothing is fool-proof.
After all, if your data can be transferred at will to another entity due to a change of ownership and the agreement you made can then be annulled (because the new owners don't care about your privacy as much as the previous ones) then that's an end-run around the whole principle.
The way I see the current day situation, re: Elon Musk's freedom of speech contingency tree -- If X/Twitter and other social media prospers, it's good for him and he wins. If those die and people rediscover, "people creating their own space instead of living on closed platforms," he wins as well.
> 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...
You can always run your own crawls with grab site: https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/grab-site
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
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.
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.
Maybe they'll get to see t-rexes in their natural habitat, visit lost 90s websites, and feel what taking the organic chemistry final was like.
The first time I tripped acid - I remember writing a page of notes on how sad I felt that I would never get to experience the exact way a memory occurred to me in the past.
What’s even more saddening is that with tech like Rewind, and what’ll be the future of Rewind in 10-20 years, by 2040, I fully expect all memories/events ever produced to be logged in an almost endless database of all human experience.
But - because time is linear, we wouldn’t ever fully be able to simulate the past of say everything before 2030? And that’s just so sad.
> Once someone posts something, you don't have a right to it in perpetuity
On the contrary, once someone posts something, they don't have control over it anymore. You can't make me unsee what you wrote, or unhear what you said. You have no right to stop me from writing it down, and even if you can stop me from republishing it verbatim right now, you generally don't have the right to do it indefinitely.
> And once I don't or change my mind you can't.
To be clear, I'm not dogmatically firm about it, but I believe that a word in which you get to distance yourself from past views, or mark them mistaken, and people accept it, would be much better than the world in which you're free to gaslight everyone else by pretending that something never happened, even though it did.
(All that on top of the usual point that it's neither the author nor their audience that can judge what's archive-worthy - only future people can.)
If you create something physical, say a popup art installation, it's trivial to dismantle it and it stops existing (other maybe in some photos or video). When it comes to text the same isn't as simple and it requires a social compact (ie laws)
As for gaslighting, you can archive things without redistributing them. You can just publish hashes of what people published and only redistribute/republish in the context of proving someone said something
If you publish something publicly, it should be available for all time.
If you change your mind, it's on you to make that known.
Plus, if everyone can delete their mistakes, we’ll live in a world where it looks like nobody makes mistakes, and so we’ll be less tolerant of mistakes.
That’s really weird. If someone posts a sign on their store window, and I take a picture of it, should I be required to delete the picture when they remove the sign?
Tom Scott interviewed some people from the British Library, and they explain the importance of archiving:
> The importance of legal deposit not being selective, and being everything, is: we can't decide today what's going to be important in 50 years' time. We want everything, because we don't know what will be important.
He also added his own thoughts:
> I cannot overstate just how useful it is to be able to track down things that never made it online, or to research out of print, forgotten books where there are no other copies available, or to scan through every issue of an obscure local newspaper to track down one reference. This is the raw text of history, as it happened, and someone has to keep it preserved for the future.
Trying to see the limits of this logic. Would you say that if you paint a painting , you should have no right to shred it ?
Text is just trivial to copy perfectly and doesn't have the intrinsic protection of other mediums
If things were archived in a artic vault to be opened in 1000 years maybe I'd respect the arguments for archiving better
Current "archiving" is steal and rehosting other people's work/labor
> You can read and access my work/words as I want. And once I don't or change my mind you can't.
That's not reasonable.
> Disallow: /
Denied!
I would agree with you if they automatically set this for everyone. I'm not sure how come that other sites aren't showing up in the archive. (I'm not a customer of theirs or anything, I'm already hosting my own stuff)
Wayback Machine is arguably a more durable archive site than these other two archives, but the fact that it can be archived elsewhere would indicate that the problem is likely to be on archive.org's end of things rather than omg.lol
Our interactions having a fleeting nature makes them more special and forces us to be more emotionally involved.
Just an alternative take, no a statment of my personal opinion.
The true magic of the early web was somebody genius but decidedly untechnical like David Bowie shitposting at his own fans. There's no special line of code that's going to foster that. You have to ruthlessly curate a community to avoid a critical mass of sensitive nerds, but guess who the early colonizers of these alt platforms are. None of these communities will attract today or tomorrow's David Bowies.
No, the magic of the early web was that people treated their online identities as a secret alternative life, rather than a resume for recruiters, friends, potential partners, and other real-world acquaintances to look at.
The Internet of today is little more than a (distorted) mirror of people's offline lives. That's why the problems of today's Internet are the same as the problems of the real world. By contrast, the Internet of the 90s was an exciting world of its own, with rules that were dramatically different from those of everyday life.
Our offline lives are a distorted mirror of the Internet of today.
Nowadays people just publish to be seen. There's a huge difference on the type of content this leads to.
Perhaps the medium is just a little played out.
I kind of get what you're saying but I'm tired of people who act like "shitposting skills" are a useful quality trait. Similarly people who just can't not let something be.
I kind of dislike "forced kindness" as a community philosophy (I've met way too many people IRL who have a net persona of "super kind" and turn out to be, glibly, sociopaths), but "please don't be insufferable" is a nice rule of thumb for communities. Plenty of cool stuff made by people who are merely a little annoying. Meanwhile too many places have "those people" who just won't let something go. Let people keep their honor!
> If you're just chatting with other programmers under American HR communication standards, then how is it any different to work?
> There's no special line of code that's going to foster that.
> you have to ruthlessly curate a community to avoid a critical mass of sensitive nerds, but guess who the early colonizers of these alt platforms are
Great comment. Aligns with my own observations. On the note of "American HR Communication standards & work" I think most of us don't have experience participating in, let alone, organizing real communities[1]. Since most internet communities are awful, imaginary, transient etc, we default to the only actual experience we have semi-happily working with strangers: our jobs. Adding on top how internet comments are forever, cancelations is right around the corner, and careers hang in the balance, and you get a Bay Area photocopied dialogue.
The early web was mostly nerds, but not just tech nerds. I made my first site in 1997 and I linked to all sorts of things about TV shows, music and games that had been made by fans of things. If someone loved the X-Files and wanted to contribute to a site about it the only option was to get a book about HTML from the library and learn to use FTP. It thrived because it was just a group of people enthusiastic about things. Few people wanted to criticise because the only response you'd get was "well you make a better website then!". And when that happened people did. There were rivalries that worked like a feedback loop to improve things. That's missing today. People just criticise and don't try to do better. I blame the rise of guestbooks.
Sorry - what is "colonizer" here? Do you mean users?
Not a single other person(‘s content) in sight though.
It’s more like after you use it for a little while you look up and suddenly realize you’re in a new but familiar feeling community. It definitely skews developer/blogger/liberal, is openly inclusive and mindful of accessibility (not perfect, but always trying), there's a lot of overlap with various micro.blog/IndieWeb/fediverse communities, a lot of folks with active GitHub accounts doing interesting stuff, a strong photographer contingent, an overarching “positive vibe” as the kids say, and a clear sense that you don’t have to remind the kind of folks who enjoy using omg.lol that there’s a person on the other side of the keyboard.
Maybe that still doesn’t make much sense to you, but while I’m happy to pay for cool stuff people make on the internet, I’m paid up with omg.lol through 2030, which just isn’t something I would do anywhere else.
It's a nice place to hang out because there aren’t many folks… misusing words like pretentious and claiming literally anyone is policing their life except, you know, the police.
Toxic positivity, it's incredibly tiring and alienating. I think the whole world is done with it.
Moreover, the pleasure has nothing to do with self hosting or not, it’s just a pleasant and whimsical UX while being technically solid.
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.
The list of sites is on github: https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb
FWIW stuff linked from HN & friends is not always the best, but I am pretty agressive about sticking RSS feeds from blogs that get linked here. That gives an inflow of interesting stuff people find. It's not a thing you can do in one go, but after a while you have a lot of neat stuff from people who cared enough to post it.
Not everyone needs their content to reach record # of visitors.
Or maybe I'm just misunderstanding the whole design.
As an analogy, there might be some interesting discussions happening at my local Community Center, or my neighbor's house, but I would have no way of knowing. But to discover these discussions, I would need to meet someone with a shared interest who would, in turn, share with me a place that they go to for continued discussions and to hang out with interesting people who share an interest.
So maybe, if done correctly, this is a feature? The good content is one extra network connection away, but easy enough to find if an advocate chooses to highlight content, share a connection, or otherwise create an inbound reference to the community.
If you had a way to search like "hey there's an interesting conversation going on at my local community center, maybe I will go and join their next session."
wouldn't you?
Social media is valuable, that’s why people use it. It would be nice if we end up coordinating on social media that aren’t toxic or addictive. Unfortunately mastodon may not make that happen, as GP said.
That doesn't follow. Neither of those two statements seems self-evident.
People typically follow social media for a number of reasons and to my mind novelty and the pretense of a sense of community are the biggest one. But the latter is usually just paper thin. In "successful social media" most social interactions are either fleeting or superficial. You argue on the Internet with strangers and you pigeonhole them to fit your biases. The entire focus for social media is to drive up "engagement" because clicks and views mean more ad revenue and a bigger "audience". And as the effort of providing something genuinely interesting is a lot higher than something provocative (which has the benefit of being able to simply be an outright lie), that's where social media inevitably trends towards.
Pre-social media spaces were a lot more social in the sense of being communal: IRC chat rooms would have old guard regulars, often lurking around in case something interesting pops up; moderation would happen very bluntly and immediately to set clear house rules about what is or isn't acceptable behavior. Forums had a much lower frequency but followed similar patterns. There was a clear sense of a shared culture if you stuck around long enough and people would actually avoid hanging around in the extremely large forums or chat rooms because they were "too noisy" to have a conversation. It would usually be where you'd go to seek advice or help you couldn't find elsewhere and any follow-up would usually happen in a more confined space like DMs.
What social media has effectively done is looked at the extremely large and noisy spaces and decided that this is what everything should be like by default and then bolted on some ways to keep track of what conversations you were having while mixing the ideas of "people that seem interesting/nice" and "accounts that post interesting content", productizing and transactionalizing all social interactions. Even Mastodon is guilty of this but on the smaller instances at least the scale is limited by default.
The problem with social media being the "marketplace of ideas" is that you normally go to the market to get new things and then you go to work, go home or go to your "third place" (e.g. your peer group, your pub, your club house) where you can all show each other what you got. Social media wants to be all of those places but because the marketplace is the only part that makes money, that's all it delivers.
Twitter, for example, aimed to be a single, universal town square. Mastodon follows much closer to forums where you find yourself in smaller, potentially more tightknit communities
Both have pros and cons. I don't expect Mastodon will give people the same value as social media, but it won't have some of the downsides either. Similarly, I don't expect social media will ever be sustainable as a coordination platform without toxicity and doom scrolling.
There's also boardreader.com for finding small communities, although I don't think it really tilts towards Mastodon very much.
Check out some trending people/topics on Nostr here: https://nostr.band/
Federation means we have numerous copies of every single post ever shared floating around somewhere, that's a massive waste of resources IMO. Similarly, the amount of network traffic grows exponentially as the number of full nodes grows and again wastes a ton of resources. Those kinds of issues could be mitigated by limiting the number of full nodes on the network, but then you are driving towards a centralized system again.
Federation works really well when the different groups are infrequently interacting. Sure there could be a mechanism to jump into another circle, but if federation means multiple servers needing to know the entire state of the world the scaling and coordination problems just don't seem worth it.
I don't think it's really that big of a waste..
Mastodon exists and it is good at being a federated microblogging service. Threads exists and it is good at the metrics it's built to deliver. Bluesky exists and it is good at being its own little club house. Truth Social exists and it is good at being Trump's soapbox. Gab exists and it is good at being whatever it is.
Twitter hit a magic sweet spot that can't be replicated. It was also a terrible place even before the cultural shifts (including those prior to the leveraged buyout). It was the place celebrities would show their entire ass to journalists and everyone could tag along to tell them how terrible they were. It was also the most readily accessible source for "citizen journalism" with unfiltered live coverage of major tragedies and other "breaking news" - but this has now become impossible as it has also become easily accessible to spread falsehoods that overwhelm any attempt at fact checking.
X's "revenue sharing" mechanism that effectively monetizes outrage bait may be what's killing Twitter for good but even prior to that Twitter was already dead. Heck, Twitter was always bad even when it was useful. At times the up sides just outweighed the down sides if you knew how to use it. For many this involved "not being political" (which is already not an option if your identity deviates from the "norm" in obvious ways, e.g. being a woman) and sticking to specific niches. But the discoverability of these niches is also what made them prone to the inevitable Twitter drama.
Is it really true on the internet though? omg.lol could presumably stay "small-appearing" and "quaint" and have millions of users. How could you really tell the difference?
If it were all indexed you could drill down and find people who share your interests, that doesn't necessarily ruin the website, yeah?
The other downside of mass-popularity is that above a certain scale, your community becomes a target. Both for individual bad actors (spammers, vandals, etc.) and for the apex predators of the small community world, commercial interests. Look at Maker Fair transitioning from a relatively niche convention of people showing off their cool stuff they made, and some miscellaneous sponsors and vendors looking to appeal to those people, to an over-commercialized affair with a thousand people trying to sell you a 3D printer, because that's the big moneymaker.
Community norms are what makes spaces worth inhabiting, and they just don't scale well.
Things could continue to be small and niche, we just a way to find them.
I used webcrawler at the very beginning and I'm probably looking that things through rose lenses but I found what I wanted back then. I think back then in some ways it was easier to find your community because SRO and the like wasn't a thing back then.
The years where I found my niche forums benefited me much more than my college days.
Could it possibly preserve that "old web" style of interaction, if it becomes a global phenomenon that everyone uses? Or does this only work as long as it stays a little hidden niche, that most people don't know about, and will never find?
Or in other words - can something feel like "the old web" (which was early adopters and enthusiasts only) - if it's frequented by everyone?
You love the idea of smaller communities - but how can they stay small?
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?
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.
I don't think that's necessarily true -- a lot of features have been deprecated and removed.
The former was notoriously insecure, as what it did was promote anything passed in as a cookie, GET, or POST variable into a global-scoped variable inside your script. Since PHP didn't require any sort of declaring-your-variables-before-using-them, it was pretty easy to wind up with scripts written in a way that would allow this an unwise amount of access to the script's internals.
The latter automatically escaped special characters with backslashes in all the aforementioned user-provided variables so you could pass them straight into mysql queries. It was, however, optional and so caused errors because code got written relying on it and then ran on servers with it disabled, allowing SQL injection attacks... or double-escaping things in code written the other way around.
But these days are long behind us!
PHP applications are fun to test because most teams found another set of solutions to the same problems (it has so much history that wheels have been reinvented a lot), so you get to see new things. They're also typically larger than newer and new-style services written in a shiny new language, which haven't had time to accumulate as many features and are often written as a microservice (smaller components where one/each dev can know all the ins and outs, allowing to have a total overview so that security controls can much more easily be implemented in a unified way).
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.
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
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.
Re Taylor, if I was a billionaire (or at the very least, extremely wealthy), he’s one of those folks I’d write a no-strings-attached blank check to go build anything he wants—just a brilliant and overall great human. I used to be very active in the Laravel community many years ago, and even way back then, before Laravel was super famous (first Laracon days), I remember meeting Taylor and being thoroughly impressed. Over the years, on multiple occasions, I’ve heard folks at relatively large organizations say they adopted PHP solely because of Taylor and Laravel. Recently, when I saw someone mention in a post that Taylor has a Lambo now, I was so happy for him—it feels great to see him thrive after making the type of impact that he has.
Unfortunately, not so much. They still follow PHP 5-days style, for example they still haven't adopted the short array syntax [], they always use array() which is horrible in my opinion.
The code base is horrible, but the front-facing experience is not so bad (unless you start installing lots of plugins, which tend to add different interface styles and lots of banners everywhere in the admin panel).
Presumably you can still write bad code in PHP. But the mysql library that was sql injection heaven is now truly dead.
However, you get two additional factors: a) it's easy, therefore it attracts beginners and b) it's popular, therefore a lot of software uses it. More various software - more security issues. More software implemented by beginners - a lot more security issues. That was inevitable - any platform that was as low entry barrier and as popular and that appeared in the same time, when the web was exploding, but the understanding of how to manage security on the web was lagging behind - would have absolutely the same going on.
But, blaming the tool because a lot of people didn't use it correctly - and, also, because due to its novelty there weren't proper education and frameworks that made it easy to do the right thing - makes little sense. There's nothing security-challenged in PHP. It's just that PHP was there when security-challenged programmers started to build websites. Most of them grew up now and know how to do it right. Either in PHP or in any other language.
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.
I was fully bought into the premise of birdwatch due to it being based on a great tool I've worked with for years (Pol.is), but Elon seemed to have loved it for all the wrong reasons, in a way that irked me. He seemingly just wanted to cut the trust & safety teams, and remove onus of creating policy :/
What? It sounds like you don't actually support the basis of Community Notes and were looking for it to be used selectively. No. Power to the people. Not power to the the bloated team that was on rails to destroy Twitter. I fucking loved the "print your code from the last 30 days" imitative in its crude efficiency. With that team, Twitter/X wouldn't exist in any form anymore even without the takeover.
It's a Ship of Theseus argument. How much does a platformm have to change before it's no longer what it used to be?
I'd agree that it's hard to take an opinion seriously that pronounces Twitter as dead. As you pointed out, when OpenAI's drama was unfolding, the conversations happened mainly on Twitter. But saying Twitter's current form is the service at its best is also hard to take seriously. I tried to follow said conversation about OpenAI during Altman's ouster and I found the site to be an inconsistently broken mess. To this day, I'm still not sure why I'm able to access certain posts without signing in, but not others. In my experience, the quality of the discussion on the site as a whole has also taken a hit.
And again with the whole freedom of speech. It continues to baffle me how people associate Musk with the first amendment. He brands himself as a free speech absolutist, but his actions have continuously shown him to have no problem silencing critics and playing favorites on the platform.
You're the first one to bring up First Amendment. We are not talking about it. Note that "Freedom of Speech" and "First amendment" are different things. Freedom of Speech can mean laws (and there are other nations but just USA) but it also means an idea, an ideal. Crudely, an environment that acknowledges the old saying of "sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me".
If you see the forest from the trees you'd see Elon actually runs a platform that favors Freedom of Speech more than any other platform by a country mile. On X any violations of it are exceptions (the ones you're talking about), NOT the modus operandi.
It is missing the whole while looking at details. Losing the big picture. Not properly managing one's preference for detail autism, for the tech business/lead spectrum types.
EDIT: Noted your fix was a sematic one. Ok. For how I often see written, and what also logically makes sense, the sentences are identical. "For" replacing "Because of" isn't that uncommon and is usually readable.
That's not what they said. They said “it’s the day that, for me, Twitter died.” I read that as meaning “I personally don't want to use Twitter anymore.”
I personally feel the same about Reddit. I was a very regular reader and contributor, but since the big brouha about third-party apps I decided that it's dead to me. I'm no longer using it. That doesn't mean it has died as a platform, but it does mean that I personally have moved on from it.
Reddit was by far the most common platform for me to visit. Overall community there has degraded over the years (more than in places like HN!), not helped by moderation being seemingly all over the place nowadays, possibly affected by the culling. I reported someone for a relatively minor but reportable infraction and their 10 year account got instantly permabanned. All while I had to send appeals 15 days continuously to get my alternate account and subreddit unbanned, with a very reasonable plea that my subreddit is doing the same as another one that has existed for ~7 years, after which it got unbanned for one day of no action.
And Twitter definitely doesn’t have free speech. People still get banned, or have their posts artificially limited, but they do allow more hate speech.
Nearly everyone I followed on Twitter is on Mastodon now. It works great. Conversations still happen there on news topics.
I deleted my Twitter account a while back because my feed stopped being people I followed and became people promoting conspiracy theories. The site doesn’t even work properly anymore. People link to threads of tweets but only the first tweet displays. And profiles never show latest tweets. (I think these might work when logged in? But also don’t show any errors when logged out? I don’t know as I’ll never login again)
X does have the best model of Free Speech. Nothing can be perfect but they're the F1 car of the effort when others are oxcarts on rails. Yes conversations happen even on Facebook, I have frequented it this month. Doesn't mean they are that meaningful or capable of actually working as the critically-needed Town Square.
X requires login for many things, as it did during the Twitter times. Congratulations for shooting yourself in the foot by impulsively deleting your account I guess? Like, what in earth would that benefit you instead of just having a pause ...
But eventually I hope it will. Being dependent on advertisers is kryptonite for platforms of user speech, regardless if it's YouTube or X.
Also it is funny that for a lot of people including me, slashdot, digg, twitter and reddit are already a thing of the past while we are still visiting regular old forums.
X will have some trouble shedding some of Twitter's old behaviors and such though, and it can't really scale down to a boutique-level platform like HN. But these are fundamentally different types of platforms due to the kind of people they attract.
That is not what it says. Please don’t straw man and misquote.
> it's off better than ever
By which metric? Certainly not financial.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/15/business/twitter-cash-flow-el...
> 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.
Those conversations happened all around. There was nothing special about Twitter.
> Eventually, with subscriptions paying most of the bills
That’s an astronomical assumption.
> X does have pretty much everything it needs, and will only grow with time.
So does it have everything it needs, or will it grow? Those don’t make sense at the same time.
> You can't put a price on Freedom of Speech.
If you’re a free speech absolutist, Twitter is definitely not the platform for you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ElonJet
https://slate.com/technology/2023/05/elon-musk-turkey-twitte...
https://thewire.in/tech/musk-twitter-takedown-government-com...
Other parts can only be considered incorrect if you lose sight of the big picture! As I said, you can't put a price on Freedom Of Speech. And considering the platform is technically very operational, it is being protected.
Your other points like "subscriptions will NEVER pay for everything!" are only the kinds of things that do actually end up turning true to unique tech companies, which X absolutely is like now.
>> X does have pretty much everything it needs, and will only grow with time.
>So does it have everything it needs, or will it grow? Those don’t make sense at the same time.
Wrong. It has everything it needs to function, and will eventually grow. Like with anything, usually the prerequisite for growth is sustainability in a stable state.
If you're a free speech absolutist, and not a total idiot who doesn't see forest from the trees, Twitter for sure wasn't the platform for you, but X is pretty much the only one due to its popularity and successfully driven iniatives to protect it. Pointing out things like ElonJet (of whose handling was reasonable anyway due to security), or some Twitter's old behaviours not being handled yet due to international complications is not seeing the forest.
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?
https://subconscious.substack.com/p/noosphere-a-protocol-for...
I would say, a page that is usable without scripts. ;)
The other points are something for the developers of your software distribution to worry about, same as if you buy a packaged service.
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.
If you're a SWE in an English-speaking country, you almost certainly make $20 post-tax for at most one hour of work - 30m at SV salaries, as little as 15m if you're at a FAANG-ish company. Is it conceivable that you would spend less than an hour a year maintaining something like this if you were to do it yourself? I don't think so.
Most people can't earn money in increments of one additional hour, of course, but it still sounds strange to hear people say "why should I spend [the amount of money I earn in half an hour] per year when I could just do it myself [with an amount of professional effort I would expect to be paid 20x as much for]?"
Is it conceivable that that you would spend much more than an hour maintaining this? Including making your stuff fit the mold, working around the limitations, and, inevitably, moving your stuff to a new service when this one fails, as they do?
Also: a VPS replaces quite a few of these services. Maintenance beyond initial setup and occasional update is rarely needed if you are the only user. People tend to overestimate these things.
Not if you get a Black Friday special; here[1] was $14.95/year for 40GB SSD, 1GB RAM, 1TB monthly bandwidth, 1CPU core.
RackNerd were offering $10.28/year[2] for 10GB SSD storage, 768MB RAM.
Hudson Valley offered $8/year[3] for 10GB SSD and 512MB RAM
[1] https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/190984/from-14-95-yr-10-gb...
[2] https://lowendbox.com/best-cheap-vps-hosting-updated-2020/ (sold out)
[3] https://lowendbox.com/blog/are-you-serious-hudson-valley-hos...
I've found Vultr to be both affordable and of consistent quality for my modest needs (personal and business web hosting plus IRC bouncing). I pay about $5/mo or $60/year.
I've had pretty good experiences of Linux VPSs for around $20/year from several companies.
Oh, and you also need to own a domain already, otherwise it's an extra 10-20 bucks per year.
omg.lol gives a subdomain rather than a domain, right? So do free dynamic DNS providers like noip.com or dyndns.org (not sure if they still do free ones). If you want to register a domain, you also have outdated pricing, if you want cheap don't go for a popular TLD; .de is $4/year after the first year at Porkbun.com, .ovh is £2.99/year after the first year at OVH.com, internet people say .ru is available for $1/year.
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 :).
That's already more than half the features you get with this, and you get to be on the actual internet, not some dude's silo.
As the post's age goes on, I see more criticism, and less positive reactions.
"the actual internet" ??
Microsoft's silo, they mean.
It's just someone else trying to do what Zuckerberg failed at.
You're paying $20 to go a level-deeper into complexity on someone else's proprietary platform. It's not only going to fail, but it's a bad idea.
Anyone can start their own omg.lol with a $10/yr domain name, and charge others for OSS and basic features you can find elsewhere for free. It's a scam to those who criticize it, and it's a privileged club to those who pay the money.
But the social circle is polluted with brains who think this is a good deal, so it's not the kind of network I'd even want to be on.
Why did you pay 5x the price of ingredients?
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)
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.
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.
Mastodon totally doesn't interest me, it turned out, that was a big argument for joining omg.lol back then.
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.
Here's my spot: https://dungeonhack.omg.lol/
I look forward to meeting you!
What do you get now?
If you are having issues I would like as much detail as you can provide.
I validated the feed at https://validator.w3.org/feed/check.cgi?url=https%3A%2F%2Fww... and everything seems well (except for some "recommendations" to make it even better).
I now saved your site in my feed reader as a sort of bookmark, so I am reminded by it's existence and will check it from time to time, but it would be cool if it shows up immediately.
I've not researched the problem yet, but one of the possible problems that comes to mind is some server setting at your side that stops my external domain from reaching it. Which probably is strange, because w3.org can reach it without problems.
I'm willing to do a little experiment: if you put online a very simple, handmade testfeed, I can try to reach that. What you think about that?
Can you try again?
I already like you
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.
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…
I don't thing having or loosing my respect would matter to him if he knew about it though :-)
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.
https://social.lol/public/local
I had to scroll through over 24 hours of posts before hitting anything political, an article about abortion in Texas. Definitely not the majority of the content and it took way more scrolling than a couple of screens. I still haven't seen anything else on your list yet.
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.
Read the text you quoted again. The author doesn't say anything about wanting Musk to fail.
> I stopped reading there.
That's a shame. You missed out on a fun blog post.
- jacking up the price of the API
- Removing chronological timeline completely, to the point that one can not simply get a list of one's tweets by going to their profile
- his vision of the "everything app".
- the "pay to play" aspect of the blue check.
Are more than enough reason for me to want Twitter to fail.
I do not want a social media that favors those who are paying, and I do not want a company that started a simple communications platform to become even more of an ubiquitous device for Surveillance Capitalism.
Looking back over the past few years, it should be clear that the purpose of censorship was to suppress alternative (often correct) information about COVID policies.
Anyone who thinks Elon Musk is a proponent of free speech has not been paying attention.
I don't know wtf "ESG nonsense" is but the person who made the post is not the person who makes the product. That said, omg.lol is probably not the right place for you so by all means please stay away.