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Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

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Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#71

Post by kibwen »

kvathupo wrote: post #66

I like this. 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?

If you can live without video and images, you could comfortably host even a very large forum (on the order of the top 10% of subreddits by volume) with only a $5/month VPS, as long as you made it serve static pages and were judicious with your tech stack. The cost of hosting text alone wasn't prohibitive 20 years ago, and it's even less so today.

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#72

Post by rambambram »

bovermyer wrote: post #32

I checked out Omg.lol when it first got popular on HN ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34269772 ). 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.

Nice blog you have there! My RSS reader finds a feed on your website, but has problems showing it. It seems to validate as a valid Atom feed, so I was wondering if you ever heard before of external sites not being able to load it?

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#73

Post by cipheredStones »

erxam wrote: post #51
1B05H1N wrote: post #40

Sorry, why would I pay 20/year bucks for this when I have my own website/infra?

Even without taking into account the time investment in maintaining your own infra, it compares favorably with everything else. Even the most dirt-cheap VPS is a few bucks more expensive on a yearly basis by itself, and you still have to buy domains and similar. 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.

It consistently surprises me how much software engineers devalue the effort of software engineering when it comes to their personal lives.

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]?"

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#74

Post by burkaman »

PenguinRevolver wrote: post #34

It's nice, the only problem I got with omg.lol is that Wayback Machine archives are unavailable for all domains. I'm concerned that this part of the internet won't be saved for others to see in the future.

The creator's company website is also excluded: https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://neatnik..... Maybe some philosophical disagreement?

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#75

Post by lucb1e »

burkaman wrote: post #74
PenguinRevolver wrote: post #34

It's nice, the only problem I got with omg.lol is that Wayback Machine archives are unavailable for all domains. I'm concerned that this part of the internet won't be saved for others to see in the future.

The creator's company website is also excluded: https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://neatnik.... . Maybe some philosophical disagreement?

Presumably due to https://neatnik.net/robots.txt

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#76

Post by rsynnott »

lannisterstark wrote: post #10
cianmm wrote: 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?

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

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#77

Post by anjel »

PenguinRevolver wrote: post #34

It's nice, the only problem I got with omg.lol is that Wayback Machine archives are unavailable for all domains. I'm concerned that this part of the internet won't be saved for others to see in the future.

Works with archive.today: https://archive.is/zAbYO Also works with Ghost Archive: https://ghostarchive.org/archive/ValSP

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

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#78

Post by AlexAffe »

dankwizard wrote: post #17

[flagged]

Exactly my thoughts. It feels like campaign, also in light of many of the responses in here. Has some kind of "look what I made; wow, are you selling?" vibes I'm used to from /r/gifs. The really distressing part is: is this even written by humans? Also the comments in here. The first one to your post, saying some BS about pessismism, while being really condescending. Is it real? Or is it some ad company having their goons let GPT write a witty response that comnes across "likeable yet dismissive". We are no longer able to tell. I'm afraid to loose you all. Where are we going to connect and how can we be sure it's us?

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#79

Post by chongli »

damiante wrote: post #65

I love the idea of such smaller communities and the "old web" style of interaction, but for me the issue is one of discoverability. How do I find and follow people? Does anyone still use RSS, or are we relying on Mastodon/ActivityPub? Bavk in the day this was the purpose of search engines, but it seems that now such small pages are scarcely even indexed...

Discoverability and smallness are at odds. This problem isn’t specific to the internet. That quaint, beautiful postcard town does not remain so once it’s been discovered. Eternal September happens everywhere.

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#80

Post by lucb1e »

Retr0id wrote: post #9
shermantanktop wrote: post #6

“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…

Also a pentester here. I find C and PHP to be quite different. Somehow, C applications always have catastrophic issues pop up, sooner or later, where you can make it execute random code at least under some circumstances. PHP applications can be the same if the team is inexperienced or doesn't get the necessary time to apply best practices, but I've also seen plenty of PHP applications where we didn't find significant issues with the server-side aspects.

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).

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