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1M Users

blog.spacehey.com

131–140 of 191 posts

Re: 1M Users

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(not the founder!) Looks like it's built on ColdFusion

Wait, that still exists / still gets used for new projects today? Wow, I'm feeling teleported back to the 2000s.

I’m working with it every day. It’s pretty capable even today. Server side rendering is in!

Re: 1M Users

#132

First, let me say I admire the successful effort to revive a piece of the 2000s web and wish the project the best. Having said that, I am of the right age to have been on MySpace, and exploring Spacehey gave me a better understanding of why I wasn't on MySpace. 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 sec…

I suspect the world would be a bit better, or at least a bit less toxic, social media kept that primary focus on open expressions of identity rather than only the highlights from a person's work or art or daily life.

Agree - content oriented social media is just advertising.

Re: 1M Users

#133

Whatever you think of the site itself, this is prime HN content. A kid in high school starts a site that scales to 1,000,000 registered users while working on it during nights and weekends in college. If the founder is on here, what tech stack did you use and how long had you been programming before you built it?

He uses "vanilla PHP/HTML/MySQL":

https://x.com/AnTheMaker/status/1530851239310802947

Re: 1M Users

#134
post #100

Nice! Personally I think that the more niche social networks we have the better it is. The big problem with the mainstream networks is that they've evolved from a media to communicate and keep in touch with real people into a platform for influencers and businesses. 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 garbag…

Good post. Have you already took a look into NOSTR?

It permits both private/niche communities and public (global) texts.

Re: 1M Users

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect the world would be a bit better, or at least a bit less toxic, social media kept that primary focus on open expressions of identity rather than only the highlights from a person's work or art or daily life.

my work and art are more important than me

Your work and art are an expression of you. How can you express something effectively that you deem unimportant?

Re: 1M Users

#137
post #76
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I saw this I was like ooh noes not myspace all over again. I feel this style may actually be a hinderance for adopting more users. People really want something more reactive like Discord. Discord is very much disliked, but the software is really good and that is why most people won't abandon it. It is like comparing Slack to Teams. It will be a long time before anything catches immediately up to Slack or Discord…

> Discord is very much disliked, but the software is really good 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 bec…

The disparate experiences people have on the same piece of software is interesting. I'm on a Mac M1 (so definitely a higher end laptop) and have had zero issues with the Discord app. It sits comfortably on my second monitor and I use the Cmd-K shortcut to quickly snap to the correct channel/user when I want to chat. While I wouldn't call the app "blazingly fast", I don't really notice any meaningful latency.

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.

Re: 1M Users

#138

I like the UI. I think the old UI of web is pretty cool. I think making old UI websites with modern backends would be a great design choice.

That's what I have been trying to do with the B3ta site[0]. It is a UK humour site forum that was founded in the very early 2000s. I have been looking after it's backend for about five or so years, trying to modernise what I can and keep it stable and maintainable. I have learnt a lot of respect for people who create a site like Spacehey, it quickly spirals in to a job in itself.

[0]: https://b3ta.com/

Re: 1M Users

#139
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Discord is very much disliked, but the software is really good 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 bec…

Discord's back end is amazing and they've blogged about a lot of it over the years ( https://hn.algolia.com?query=%22How%20Discord%22 ). Not as smooth sailing on the front end though, and unfortunately they threaten to ban accounts using alternative clients, though there have been several ( https://hn.algolia.com?query=Discord%20client ). Discord is good enough for most users and since it was one of the first to full…

Unfortunately, personal account automation like this is also in the reasons for "could get banned". Sigh.

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.

Re: 1M Users

#140
This site is more usable on my phone than 90+% of "mobile sites." It loads instantly, even on a crummy cell connection.

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.

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