[dead]
Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet
211–220 of 388 posts
Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Wow, thanks for pointing that out, that made me never want to join omg.lol
Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet
#213It 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.
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…
This argument confuses “everybody hangs out with just a few people” with ”a few people hang out with a few people”. The former is a cool idea, sure, but the latter is just a description of a not-very-successful service. I mean, I like my local pub, but it isn’t HN-worthy.
Social media is valuable, that’s why people use it. It would be nice if we end up coordinating on social media that aren’t toxic or addictive. Unfortunately mastodon may not make that happen, as GP said.
Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet
#214When 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]'s off better than ever
I'd agree that it's hard to take an opinion seriously that pronounces Twitter as dead. As you pointed out, when OpenAI's drama was unfolding, the conversations happened mainly on Twitter. But saying Twitter's current form is the service at its best is also hard to take seriously. I tried to follow said conversation about OpenAI during Altman's ouster and I found the site to be an inconsistently broken mess. To this day, I'm still not sure why I'm able to access certain posts without signing in, but not others. In my experience, the quality of the discussion on the site as a whole has also taken a hit.
And again with the whole freedom of speech. It continues to baffle me how people associate Musk with the first amendment. He brands himself as a free speech absolutist, but his actions have continuously shown him to have no problem silencing critics and playing favorites on the platform.
Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet
#215Earlier 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…
Yeah, in the 90s and 00s I think people published just because they could. Either real identity or not. They (we?) had something to say, to express.
Nowadays people just publish to be seen. There's a huge difference on the type of content this leads to.
Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet
#216It'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.
I think that's great.. archiving should be opt-in not opt-out You can read and access my work/words as I want. And once I don't or change my mind you can't. Once someone posts something, you don't have a right to it in perpetuity .. That's how things should work - but that's just my opinion
In the UK, if you publish a book, magazine or newspaper, by law you have to send a copy to the British Library for archive. A lot of other countries have similar laws. In the UK, legal deposit has expanded to include the web (so long as the person/group creating the content is in the UK), but since many individuals and small businesses are unaware of legal deposit, the UK Web Archive will archive a lot of the web by themselves.
Tom Scott interviewed some people from the British Library, and they explain the importance of archiving:
> The importance of legal deposit not being selective, and being everything, is: we can't decide today what's going to be important in 50 years' time. We want everything, because we don't know what will be important.
He also added his own thoughts:
> I cannot overstate just how useful it is to be able to track down things that never made it online, or to research out of print, forgotten books where there are no other copies available, or to scan through every issue of an obscure local newspaper to track down one reference. This is the raw text of history, as it happened, and someone has to keep it preserved for the future.
Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet
#217“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?
No it is not. Arguably, it never were. I mean yes, PHP had security bugs. So did all other platforms - including, for example, the Java one that led to Equifax compromise, which is as close as "everybody just lost their privacy" as any single break-in can get. I'd argue that PHP's security stance as a platform was never substantially worse than any comparable platform.
However, you get two additional factors: a) it's easy, therefore it attracts beginners and b) it's popular, therefore a lot of software uses it. More various software - more security issues. More software implemented by beginners - a lot more security issues. That was inevitable - any platform that was as low entry barrier and as popular and that appeared in the same time, when the web was exploding, but the understanding of how to manage security on the web was lagging behind - would have absolutely the same going on.
But, blaming the tool because a lot of people didn't use it correctly - and, also, because due to its novelty there weren't proper education and frameworks that made it easy to do the right thing - makes little sense. There's nothing security-challenged in PHP. It's just that PHP was there when security-challenged programmers started to build websites. Most of them grew up now and know how to do it right. Either in PHP or in any other language.
Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet
#218Earlier 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…
As with many other things, I'd advise against picking a VPS plan based on price alone. I've found Vultr to be both affordable and of consistent quality for my modest needs (personal and business web hosting plus IRC bouncing). I pay about $5/mo or $60/year.
That's fine, but the complaint was that a VPS is "a few dollars more [than $20/year]" as if that was an objectionable amount/increase. In that case, money is the main decider and $60 is much worse, and $8 is much better. People fighting for "a few dollars" a year are likely to be expecting (or unhappily tolerate) lower quality.
I've had pretty good experiences of Linux VPSs for around $20/year from several companies.
Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
If you're talking about my personal site https://benovermyer.com , no, I have not heard of problems rendering the RSS for it. If you are having issues I would like as much detail as you can provide.
Yes, I'm talking about your personal site. It might be my homegrown RSS reader, because around 10 to 15 of the 900+ feeds I follow just don't show me the content of the feed items. It also doesn't show the feed's title, the description and - strangely enough - also not your site's favicon (which is outside the scope of the feed itself).
I validated the feed at https://validator.w3.org/feed/check.cgi?url=https%3A%2F%2Fww... and everything seems well (except for some "recommendations" to make it even better).
I now saved your site in my feed reader as a sort of bookmark, so I am reminded by it's existence and will check it from time to time, but it would be cool if it shows up immediately.
I've not researched the problem yet, but one of the possible problems that comes to mind is some server setting at your side that stops my external domain from reaching it. Which probably is strange, because w3.org can reach it without problems.
I'm willing to do a little experiment: if you put online a very simple, handmade testfeed, I can try to reach that. What you think about that?
Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet
#220[flagged]