1M Users
blog.spacehey.com
blog.spacehey.com
Lucee: A light-weight dynamic CFML scripting language for the JVM - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41409434 - Aug 2024 (37 comments)
Edit: I said this because he's using PHP, MySQL, and I assumed Apache. But now I see in another comment that he's using ColdFusion, and indeed the server returns an X-Powered-By ColdFusion header. So now I'm confused. PHP on ColdFusion? Or maybe he’s just having the server return a bogus ColdFusion header as a nod to MySpace?
* https://spacehey.com/index.php
* https://spacehey.com/browse.php
* https://spacehey.com/reset.php
Here you can see that /help/ is a directory on the filesystem, as it appends a slash at the end:
* https://spacehey.com/help -> goes to https://spacehey.com/help/
and can also be confirmed by trying index.php at that path:
Show HN: I rebuilt MySpace from 2007 (2 year update) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33792956 - Nov 2022 (9 comments)
Spacehey: A Space for Friends - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28770637 - Oct 2021 (15 comments)
Show HN: I Rebuilt MySpace from 2007 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25245740 - Nov 2020 (290 comments)
The focus of the site is on you and who you are. It's about presenting your many overlapping identities with style. Your interests and creative output are secondary. Interests serve as more of a way to categorize yourself along standard dimensions (favorite movies, books, etc.). I don't think I want this! It's okay if you do, but it really isn't for me. It seems so optimized for legibility, in the late James C. Scott sense. I feel like all the CSS in the world won't help if this is how you must present yourself. Let me hide in my shell [1] and put forth my work. You'll get a better idea of who I am when I write something or if we talk.
GeoCities, LiveJournal, DeviantArt, and Tumblr all seemed less like this, though I also wasn't active on any of them in their heyday. People may think Tumblr is about the user's identity, but identity isn't at the core of the site design. The site design is about tagged posts. Where you might want to push for legibility is on a dating site. I am sure MySpace served as one for quite a few people. :-)
[1] I have realized this is a pun because I like pubnixes.
Imagine art critics studying your art - they would be asking what was your history, context, what happened to you and what was going through your head that made you do this. It's always about you, even - maybe especially, considering that defeating one's ego is still noteworthy - if you don't want it to be about you.
Making art that's not about the artist is reserved to LLM... At least for now.
Second, the idea of "your work and art are an expression of you" is dangerously self-centered, in that it can limit your growth by pushing you conform to acceptance over aspiration.
The masses were given a means to make a page that encapsulated their identity and connect it with others, during a time where it was suddenly made possible for everyone to express themselves, but still difficult to produce meaningful online content. I think Tumblr eventually ended up capturing a lot of that, but I also feel that there is a sense of pressure around having a space where the purpose is to publish content (even if just reblogging). It was really meaningful to a lot of people that they could have a simple space to express themselves through custom mouse cursors, cringey quotes, and autoplaying emo music.
Nowadays, this expression of identity for younger audiences seems to be driven by being a part of online communities with common interests, expressing oneself through content (now that it's so easy to make and share). But I think MySpace was there for people at the right time.
It was a virtual hosting platform where you can insert scripts.
You really did miss out unfortunately, it was great.
Promotes a smaller, more tightly knit community.
One person's X is another's Y.
I avoided it because when when a ding occurred there is no indication which channel had just donged, just left me confused as to what was happening
You can usually get most of your notifications with Ctrl+[T or K] and then going through the menu here, but for reasons I've yet to figure out sometimes DMs don't show up here even when they have unread messages. I think there is some incorrect logic that kicks in when you have a high number of unread channels and it can't show as many "previous channels" as it wants to.
None of this is to defend Discord, I think their UI is bad and I've hated the way DMs function since day 1, and every single part of their app that relies on frecency (or doesn't but should) is abysmal (reaction autocomplete, the reaction pop-up menu, ctrl+T when you start typing something, the mention autocomplete behavior in any channel)
But once you learn the poorly-documented navigation flow of ctrl+T and then using @, #, or * to filter users/channels/servers it gets easier to use. My current biggest complaint is lack of a "previous channel within this server" hotkey, "previous channel that you visited globally" exists but you can't restrict it within one server, and it makes navigating some of my servers an absolute nightmare.
I dislike every single one of discord's design decisions, I think the software is garbage, and it is riddled with security problems. Their customer service is a nightmare, a hacker got one of my friends accounts and even though he'd paid up for some kind of Discord extra service for more than 2 years in advance they wouldn't refund him or give him his account back. The API is bad too.
I use it purely because of the network effect. The people I want to communicate with use it, and the instant that changes if Discord isn't better then I'm out.
Having customer service would be a step up.
>>We banned your account for illegal activity.
>But I just signed up and tried logging in?
>>After review we have banned your IP forever for illegal activity.
Most IP connections are dynamic, and always were. Assuming that a person is synonymous with an IP connection makes no sense to me.
Sure, 'serious' attackers have botnets of home users' PCs and insecure IoT devices and whatnot. But because Tor exit nodes are easily used by even unsophisticated attackers, they quickly get flagged as sources of abuse.
Learning to program as a kid in the 90s and getting that 28.8k modem with direct chat access to adults at Apple and later Sun/Java was amazing.
Citation needed :) This feels like you are parroting either your own preference or something you have heard other people state as fact.
Discord as a text chat app is appalling. Whether on mobile, chromebook or desktop PC it's slow and janky to transition between channels. It is a measurably worse user experience than using IRC on a computer from twenty years ago with 1,000x less raw MIPS.
Maybe it has some advantages for voice chat, but to me it's a lowest common denominator we use because of the people and despite the software.
You can press ctrl + K to jump to any channel from anywhere. Feels snappy.
I wonder if this is just everyone else using it on massive gamer PCs and me using it on mobile/chromebook, but .. no. It it is not snappy. The process of fetching all the new messages and rendering them takes up to a second.
I don't understand why people who insist on 60fps games are happy with a 1fps chat app, but I guess they don't have that experience.
Do you even have slow performance when switching between two channels that are "loaded"?
Discord is good enough for most users and since it was one of the first to fully leverage WebRTC in-browser for voice chat (without requiring an account), the network effect is almost impossible to overcome at this point. This is incredibly unfortunate as closed chat ecosystems are an information black hole (except possibly when user generated content is licensed to the highest bidder for LLM training, what a gold mine!)
PS. It's worth mentioning in any Discord discussion with the (though the usual "could get banned" caveat applies): it is possible to export from Discord using https://github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter
I thought about building a scraper using something simplistic like Puppeteer to login to my account since the Discord browser experience is basically the same as the Discord app (which makes sense since its Electron). It would just issue a command to scroll arbitrarily up on a given channel/etc. until a certain earliest date was reached, and scrape all the data.
But.... again I'm sure that they have all sorts of mechanisms to detect unusual user behavior, so this might be JUST as vulnerable to detection as the aforementioned DiscordChatExporter.
Even leviathan walled gardens like Google let you export your data in a reasonable fashion (Google Takeout) - this is probably my biggest issue. On the other hand even if I could find an equivalent user-friendly platform, I'd never be able to convince all my contacts to migrate off Discord.
[0] https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360004027692-R...
I mean it's not like it's a low-level ASIO driver for pete's sake.
Memory usage is also reasonable. Continuous uptime is over 4 days now, and combined real mem shows it's using about ~400mb which honestly is about what I would have expected from an Electron app.
I think some of it comes down to user expectations. When I'm playing a game, we're primed to look/notice choppiness and dropped frames particularly since the graphics are constantly animated. When I'm using my DAW, I'm primed to hear latency between my interacting with a midi controller and the audio output. I don't have any such expectations when I'm using a glorified text messaging platform, so while there might indeed be some latency, it would have to be significant for me to notice.
That being said, I'm not a fan of the Android app - the UI/UX experience is rather rough.
This probably comes as a surprise to Discord users, but it really is a niche social network.
We're talking fractions of a percent of users compared to existing social networks.
People don't really want something like Discord - the downsides by far outweigh any upside of "a closed-off private network of people", biggest one being lack of visibility and consistency.
Not sure I care about another SM platform but I was very happy to see a snappy site on a Monday morning. A good reminder to put care in my work this week.
During the weekend, I had to fight the urge not to implement a tiny client for interacting with my bank. A company making loads of profit but can't fix their online banking platform. Every page takes not less than a minute to open. No form of caching user details, API calls are made and take same response time not matter how many times you navigate to a screen.
The common complaint I hear about instagram for example is that every second connection of yours would try to sell/teach something and that's just garbage if all you need is to keep in touch with your friends.
The main problems to tackle imo are:
- information propagation speed. This is good in case you want to get a quick update but it also a double edged sword, since this allows information attacks, trolls etc
- Scale. Anything of big scale becomes a problem by itself since it becomes economically viable to target the platform with bots, scam etc.
- Incentives. I think we should get to the point where social networks are being run by non profits
I've posted the link a couple of time, I'm working on my personal take on this problem[0]. My approach is the following:
- Slow down information propagation. Every post is visible to the direct connections, to their connections if you allow it, but no further
- No way to get a connection request from a stranger. Either you specifically allow it, or it's introduced by your direct connections
- No federation, since my idea was to have small communities
- Fully open in the sense of data formats, import/export etc. Migrating between instances is as easy exporting posts in bulk, creating an account on another instance and doing the import. You could do the bulk updates the same way
Also, it's all go + htmx just in case anyone else is also tired of modern frontend mess. I have a couple of videos on the feautures[1], if you like. The design is not great, since I wanted to focus on the idea itself
[0]: https://github.com/can3p/pcom
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLa5K-kCUS-FozB6Cw7rJL...
It permits both private/niche communities and public (global) texts.
More or less like in real life, where you chat a lot with your friends, but necessarily with some of their friends you don't know that well. In this case you would ask your friends for the introduction and that what I've tried to model.
One other feature I've been thinking about was to make the moderation automatic in a sense of making signups possible only via invitation and putting some weight on it. Basically if you invite somebody who's misbehaving on the platform and they get flagged, you get penalized as well unless you do it first. My theory is that it should make users care about their digital surroundings.
What you mention could be achieved with the a nostr relay. Just permit inside who you want, but anyone can keep participating on internet at large with exactly the same account.
But if you want to moderate everything inside, then likely mastodon or a traditional web forum might be more suited.
A lot of these problems go away with a decentralized/open-source private model. If your posts aren't public then there is no spam. If everyone runs their own node of open-source (or better yet: open-protocol, ie RSS) software, then there is no centralized entity able to have incentives of profiting off the platform.
Information propagation speed is a good call-out as dangerous. Even with all the spam/shilling/trills removed, it still leads to the girl who's having a great time on her snowboarding trip until she posts pictures on Instagram and drops into a foul mood because not enough people immediately liked her posts.
I'd love to connect and share thoughts, feel free to reach out[2]/
I'm not on X, so I don't know, but IME on every other place on the internet since forever is that the loudest, dumbest users ARE the advertisers.
An environment that monetarily rewards users pushing their message into other peoples faces performs an environmental selection to make the advertisers the loudest and dumbest users.
Is it? Last time I heard about it advertisers were going away because Musk is focusing on what loudest users want (being able to speak loudly) and not what advertisers want (moderation)
Hence getting banned in Brazil. I guarantee that is not an outcome any advertiser wanted.
The secret, always is - follow new people in small increments and generously unfollow at the slightest annoyance. There are still lots of interesting people to find!
You'll discover there's people on both sides of political issues who can make their points and not be annoying about it but these are maybe 1-3% of political people. You can also completely ignore politics by being judicious with your unfollows.
Can't wait for IRC to become popular again. I'll still be there, waiting.
But people's need to connect in this way — just updates from those who they chose to follow, displayed chronologically, and no other content whatsoever — has not gone anywhere. That's why I'm also working on my own project that implements this type of social network with ActivityPub support: https://github.com/grishka/Smithereen
It's beta quality for now and I'm not promoting it much yet, but I hope to bring it to 1.0 by the end of this year.
In the meantime, here it is live on my server: https://friends.grishka.me/
> I've stopped myself from working on any new features in the past months, but rather improve the existing ones and make SpaceHey overall a bit smoother.
Wise. Not everyone is willing to do the hard word of slogging behind the scenes with little or no visible changes to users, but it makes a huge difference. Kudos.
[0]: https://b3ta.com/
Thank you for your service :)
In essence, how big is the community versus how many people have stepped in the front door once.
So that's around 315 Online users in Europe during the day. My guess is that during US daytime numbers will be higher. Maybe someone in the US can do a check in a few hours? :)
[0] https://spacehey.com/browse?view=online [1] https://spacehey.com/browse?page=7&view=online
FB was great in about 2010, but is now ridiculous and basically unusable. My wife is addicted to IG, and spends multiple hours each day scrolling the feed. My social life revolves around WA groups. I tried moving people to Signal but got few takers.
I'm enjoying Mastodon at the moment.
I'm scared that if I install TikTok I'll get addicted. I've seen it happen to friends.
I would like to return to email, circa 2000, that was fun.
We all know people who are truly tired of social media, we're not going to hear from them here.
There's no ad divs that load 5 seconds after everything else and screw with the layout while you're reading something. There's no attempt at "infinite scroll," which universally results in stuttery scrolling and a generally sluggish experience. No fake modals with infuriatingly small close buttons, heckling you for your email address.
The WWW has become stuffy and stale, and this site is truly a breath of fresh air.
As its name suggests, it was inspired, in part, by Geocities.
I feel like anything I'd post on this platform, would get lost in giant noise of generated feces.
Maybe it's just, the unknown world of "artsy" people is what is really so off-putting. Maybe I am just getting old and don't understand this joy of childish expression anymore. But the other, most popular platforms, seem to have more appeal for followong reasons: - Facebook works around ads (pages) & groups about my (technical) interests, there isn't really a reason for AI spam. If any would appearx it is easy to make them disappear. You get some ads here & there, but content generating bots are often named bots & post content we've agreed to. - Discord gives you high walled gardens for every topic you are interested in. So, one really needs to get out of their way to get content they are not interested in right now. Plus, everything feels like a DM, even the public chats are all just quick chats. - X is literally a politics platform, so I am not expecting AI content from verified account of a diplomat, or media person.
Heh good joke. Facebook is full of spam bots, phishing etc. Using following template, hack legitimate account, buy ADs for your phishing campaign with stolen CCs, phish people, rinse and repeat.
And quantity of phishing/spam is so huge, Meta is basically unable to fight this.
It was an altered state that felt like the leading edge of... something
That are people for you. Most of the time, we are uninteresting, predictable, and unoriginal. Especially when you got used to some subset, like HN, where there is a bit if self reinforcement, through the voting system.
> One million people from all over the world have used SpaceHey so far - an independently run platform that does not track you and does not show you personalized feeds nor ads.
Does anyone here know how it’s funded or what this would cost to host?
And of course this is the only platform applauding the site for its underlying infrastructure. :)
On the blog [0]:
6 Best Self-Hosted Status Pages
0. Instatus
Instatus isn't self-hosted, but you can use it to get a quick & beautiful status page that's free forever.
Way to go to pollute search results when looking for a self-hosted status page.
Almost everything should have MFA, but it's not a solved problem. The overhead is to high and if you force it upon users you'll lose many of them.
Not having MFA opens it up to potential data breaches causing havoc.
We did a MFA reset for a remote coworker a few weeks ago, the about of validation and procedures we had to go through was insane, but also the only way to ensure that this is a correct reset.
MFA is really really important, but there's no good solutions for it yet.
(Does every comment need a "report comment" hyperlink? I like how HN does it, timestamps are permalinks, permalinked page has additional options to flag and favorite.)
(edit: timestamps are permalinks, at least)
(Edit edit omg people customize their profile markup like it's 2006 again)