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Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

blakewatson.com

11–20 of 388 posts

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#11
post #4

This is exactly what I've been thinking about making recently as a response to the enshittification of the web: a single site that just collects a small number of useful, simple web apps that I could share with other people who are tired of being perversely monetized by ads and VCs. Utterly brilliant, thanks for sharing!

You’ve got me thinking the same thing. Omg.lol seems as interesting as it is enticing me to build a similar thing for fun.

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#12
post #2

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.

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.

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#13
post #2

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.

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?

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.

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#14

“omg.lol is unabashedly built with PHP” 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?

Concerns with PHP are less about security and more about language design, at least that’s my take after 22 years of dealing with it off and on (full-time “on” for several years).

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#15
post #4

This is exactly what I've been thinking about making recently as a response to the enshittification of the web: a single site that just collects a small number of useful, simple web apps that I could share with other people who are tired of being perversely monetized by ads and VCs. Utterly brilliant, thanks for sharing!

There are various similar communities, which don't have to compete with one another because the internet is a big place. Two that jump to mind are https://tildeverse.org and https://disroot.org.

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#16

“omg.lol is unabashedly built with PHP” 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?

Nope.

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.

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#18
post #9

“omg.lol is unabashedly built with PHP” 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?

Speaking as someone who has pentested a few PHP codebases over the years, rather than as a developer, It's a bit like C. That is, it's an absolute footgun in the wrong hands, and a lesser footgun in experienced hands. 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…

> 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.

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#19
post #2

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.

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?

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.

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#20

“omg.lol is unabashedly built with PHP” 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?

> It’s 2023, is that still a reasonable concern?

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

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