Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

blakewatson.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 388 posts

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#201

Post by frikk »

Ridj48dhsnsh wrote: post #194
inamberclad wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the long-term potential supposed to be? Is Mastodon supposed to replace Twitter, or is it supposed to enhance the lives of people? I'm a member of several small forums that just don't grow. It's the same people each day, and that's fine. It's much closer to how human interactions work in real life. You don't join an ever-expanding pool of people where you strive to maximize your connections (or at least, I do…

Not being indexed by search engines is a fatal flaw in my opinion. There might be some interesting discussions taking place on Mastodon, but I would have no way of knowing.

This is an interesting thought.

As an analogy, there might be some interesting discussions happening at my local Community Center, or my neighbor's house, but I would have no way of knowing. But to discover these discussions, I would need to meet someone with a shared interest who would, in turn, share with me a place that they go to for continued discussions and to hang out with interesting people who share an interest.

So maybe, if done correctly, this is a feature? The good content is one extra network connection away, but easy enough to find if an advocate chooses to highlight content, share a connection, or otherwise create an inbound reference to the community.

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#202

Post by jodrellblank »

tredre3 wrote: post #96
jodrellblank wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> " Even the most dirt-cheap VPS is a few bucks more expensive on a yearly basis by itself " Not if you get a Black Friday special; here[1] was $14.95/year for 40GB SSD, 1GB RAM, 1TB monthly bandwidth, 1CPU core. RackNerd were offering $10.28/year[2] for 10GB SSD storage, 768MB RAM. Hudson Valley offered $8/year[3] for 10GB SSD and 512MB RAM [1] https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/190984/from-14-95-yr-10-gb... [2] http…

So to beat omg.lol's price you have to hunt for a bargain, then hope the price doesn't double in the following year? Oh, and you also need to own a domain already, otherwise it's an extra 10-20 bucks per year.

No, you can get a free Unix account on sdf.org with web hosting and email if you want to build for yourself the kind of thing omg.lol does and don't want a VPS. It's just "Even the most dirt-cheap VPS is a few bucks more [than $20/year]" is outdated, they're available less than half that price and likely only getting cheaper in future. If you really want, you can risk things like the Oracle Cloud Free Tier. If budget is what you want or need, then "hunting" (visiting Lowendbox.com) is something you are probably willing to do.

omg.lol gives a subdomain rather than a domain, right? So do free dynamic DNS providers like noip.com or dyndns.org (not sure if they still do free ones). If you want to register a domain, you also have outdated pricing, if you want cheap don't go for a popular TLD; .de is $4/year after the first year at Porkbun.com, .ovh is £2.99/year after the first year at OVH.com, internet people say .ru is available for $1/year.

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#203

Post by twelvedogs »

maxlin wrote: 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…

subscriptions are most of their income, they don't pay the bills at all

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#204

Post by scythe »

stevebmark wrote: post #170

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.

Discoverability doesn't always have to be so fast. As long as the word eventually gets around, maybe a slower kind of discovery could be good for some communities.

There's also boardreader.com for finding small communities, although I don't think it really tilts towards Mastodon very much.

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#205

Post by VerminOctopus1 »

maxlin wrote: 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…

I thought community notes already existed as bird watch before the takeover?

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#206

Post by patcon »

VerminOctopus1 wrote: post #205
maxlin wrote: 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…

I thought community notes already existed as bird watch before the takeover?

Yeah, Elon just rebranded it, and pushed fwd its full deployment

I was fully bought into the premise of birdwatch due to it being based on a great tool I've worked with for years (Pol.is), but Elon seemed to have loved it for all the wrong reasons, in a way that irked me. He seemingly just wanted to cut the trust & safety teams, and remove onus of creating policy :/

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#209

Post by TheAceOfHearts »

maxlin wrote: 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…

Twitter is dead, long live X. Twitter as it was no longer exists. Regardless of what one may think of Elon's leadership, he's making big changes to the platform.

It's a Ship of Theseus argument. How much does a platformm have to change before it's no longer what it used to be?

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#210

Post by paledot »

p-e-w wrote: post #162
jim-jim-jim wrote: post #154

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…

> The Internet of today is little more than a (distorted) mirror of people's offline lives.

Our offline lives are a distorted mirror of the Internet of today.

Post reply on HN