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Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

blakewatson.com

241–250 of 388 posts

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#241

That’s a fun set of features, but I don’t see the connection with the community. You can browse their mastodon feed and it’s just a bunch of vaguely liberal vaguely tech posts? I’d like to see which accounts are using the services for a better community

[flagged]

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#242
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> 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.

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.

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#243
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the shortcoming of every alternative protocol and "indie web" community I've come across. They only attract existing techies and have a weird sheen of forced kindness about them. If you're just chatting with other programmers under American HR communication standards, then how is it any different to work? The true magic of the early web was somebody genius but decidedly untechnical like David Bowie shitposting…

> The true magic of the early web was somebody genius but decidedly untechnical like David Bowie shitposting at his own fans. 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…

This, but also because it was something genuinely new that had never been seen before. Doubly so if you were young then and old now. Everything was novel, and therefore interesting - even the bad things. I’ve seen people expressing nostalgia for blink tags.

Perhaps the medium is just a little played out.

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#244
post #40

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

So that you don't have to worry about outages, updates, bugfixes, certs, permissions, vulnerabilities, ... like you do on your own website/infra?

It's the same infrastructure, with the same outages.

The other points are something for the developers of your software distribution to worry about, same as if you buy a packaged service.

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Section 6.3 We may share personal information in connection with a corporate transaction, like a merger or sale of our company, the sale of most of our assets, or a bankruptcy. >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 discl…

Also not a lawyer, but that sounds more like "if another company acquires us, we will give your info to them" and then separately "Stripe might sell your data; we're not responsible for them". Which is rotally reasonable/expected imho.

Not a lawyer so I might be reading this wrong - but to me this says "We might sell the company to someone else, and they in turn might sell it to anyone", and that's a bit scarier.

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also not a lawyer, but that sounds more like "if another company acquires us, we will give your info to them" and then separately "Stripe might sell your data; we're not responsible for them". Which is rotally reasonable/expected imho.

>... 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. I mean this seems pretty suspect for anyone privacy focused.

Also not legal in Europe where you absolutely are responsible for the actions of your processors

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#247

That’s a fun set of features, but I don’t see the connection with the community. You can browse their mastodon feed and it’s just a bunch of vaguely liberal vaguely tech posts? I’d like to see which accounts are using the services for a better community

> I’d like to see which accounts are using the services for a better community 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…

I on the other hand would happily pay through 2030 to avoid the people you describe on omg.lol. I dislike pretentious tech positivity and HR catladies policing my online life.

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#248
post #221
post #198

When a blog post starts with saying "twitter is dead" it doesn't really make it worth reading further. "Twitter is dead" was said pretty much as numerously as "2 more weeks" but it's off better than ever, with Community Notes having proved themselves and 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. Eventually, with subscription…

> When a blog post starts with saying "twitter is dead" 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…

I wanted to move on from Reddit when all of that was going down, but it's really the only place on the Internet where I could get (just from the memory of the last 24h) a decent range of discussion/advice from real people about pizza stones, indoor plants, descaling a coffee machine, learning piano as an adult, and the answer to the question "TV show where someone sings Chattanooga Choo Choo", all from a single website that isn't heavily polluted by ads. As long as "[query] reddit" makes Google so much better, I can't really consider Reddit dead.

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#249

It takes blog posts to discover these because Mastodon micro communities aren't discoverable and no one knows which ones to sign up for. Mastodon has no long term potential. We're still waiting for the Twitter replacement.

I'm just curious what is the difference between Mastodon and Lemmy. I know they are a decentralized clone of Twitter and Reddit, but at their core 90% similar. Is it just the comment threads?

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#250

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...

have you tried https://search.marginalia.nu ?
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