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Comment by cianmm | Hacker News Reader

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.

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That internet is not dead, you know? It’s just the the other part grew so massively.

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.

It’s just hard to find. Google returns trash

Try out kagi...they have a filter for "smallweb" posts: https://kagi.com/smallweb

The list of sites is on github: https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb

It's wild to think about how anybody found info back in the day. Forums were probably the big one I guess? There was always something magical about being linked to forum and finding a wealth of info there, and entire domains of knowledge.

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.

webrings, IRC, forums and mailing lists, etc.

Back in the day you got actually useful results from search engines.

Yahoo was originally a text file small enough to fit on a 1.44 floppy disk

When you want that kind of content, you should use a different search engine which makes it easy to find.

https://search.marginalia.nu/

Give me your favorite small web links

I skimmed OPs post, and then read yours, and I'm still a bit confused as to how it's different than just hosting a mishmash of different but related services yourself. If you could not, yes that's fine. But if you could, what really are the advantages?

Presumably the mastadon integration. Think twitter with your profile directly tied to your personal site - except not twitter.

I actually don't really use the social stuff all that much. I already have a mastodon account on a country-specific server, and I'm not much of an IRC/Discord user

This is the classic Dropbox criticism, no?

Moreover, the pleasure has nothing to do with self hosting or not, it’s just a pleasant and whimsical UX while being technically solid.

I think you kind of answered your question, no? Setting up web things, especially when they have a chance to get quite bursty hug-of-death traffic, is hard for most people. I'd prefer to set things up myself but I know that places me in a verrrrry small minority of folks.

I argue with computers for my day job, I don’t want to do that after work hours too. I’m happy to pay somebody else (especially Adam who is just so active with the community) a fairly paltry sum to do it for me.

To be entirely fair (in my situation), what I do at work and what I find fun to do with computers are two different things :P

So true. I reached a point where the tools I fiddle with at home have such an overlap with the ones I use at work, with Python and Ansible being the uncanny leaders. I feared – in vain – losing the ability to enjoy hacking as a hobby. They just don't feel the same, y'know?

Hosting all of this stuff on your own would be a lot of fuss which most people wouldn’t want to bother with.

Just because I can manage a service doesn't mean I want to all the time. I'm a busy guy and already have client infrastructure to manage. At a point in my life where I'm trying to cut down on things I have to tend to.

I suspect that it's simply ease of use. Sure you can use a mish mash of self hosting, online dedicated services, etc, but this looks more simple and cohesive and for $20 a year you don't have to worry about the overhead of all those other things, you just add the content you want and don't worry about the details.

How did you get cian.lol? Why isn't it cian.omg.lol?

You can register domains yourself and set them up, under "Switchboard" --> "External Domain Routes"

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