omg.lol - what?!
I spent $20 last night. I'm just not sure on what, exactly I spent it on - if that makes any kind of sense? Last night, I came across omg.lol, and now before you scoot off and visit the site, I suggest you practise your squinting, or at the very least perhaps put some sunglasses on before you do. The colours on their site are pretty wild, consider yourself warned. So, here's the link. Are you ready? omg.lol.
It's such an array of totally disparate 'stuff' - perhaps the only way to describe it - that they've just bundled together in such a joyous way, that it's hard not to look, or perhaps at the very least take a small peek at. There is so much going on on this website that it's probably transcendental in nature. I think that the best way to describe it, is if someone had been given complete control over a top-level domain (TLD) ie. .lol, had a large quantity of heroin injected directly into their eyeballs, and told to go do whatever they want. It's simultaneously amazingly cool, and totally unexpected. I quite like it.
I'd start off by checking if your username is available, and fortunately mine was. omg.lol calls a username an address, by the way. Unsurprisingly, I choose chilli as my username so I'm now the proud owner of chilli.omg.lol. I noticed a couple of things; you can also have an emoji as a username! I'm saving up for 🌶️ (so please don't take it). There's a whole bunch of cool usernames available; fancy smh.omg.lol? how about fml.omg.lol; yep that's also available too.
###Email Address When you sign-up they will give you an email address, e.g. username@omg.lol, which is forwarded to your main email address, and the necessary DNS wizardry is done automatically when your account is created. Theoretically, 🌶️@omg.lol would work as an email address too. However, both your's and your recipient's email provider "just" needs to support something called Punycode for it to work. If you do go with an emoji, then they will also give you the punycode equivalent email address, which in this case, is a rather snappy: xn--zh8h@omg.lol. They do, in fairness, make this clear to you before sign-up that having an emoji as your username, poses quite some technical challenges.
Then there's a whole bunch of other stuff that you can then do.
Your Profile
I would suggest that you start with creating your profile which bizarrely they call a WebPage. Markdown will be your friend here, whenever you create or update your profile. If you're not sure what markdown is have a look at this markdown cheat sheet. It'll take you about 5-10 mins to learn, it's really not so difficult. Upload a profile picture, if you want to, and you're done. I will also mention this though, if you simply type your email address then the email emoji will magically appear at the start of your email address - snazzy stuff.
/now Page, StatusLog, and WebLog
If you're so inclined, you can create a /now status, a StatusLog, or a WebLog (aka a blog). You can see examples of other's /now pages by looking at now garden to get some inspiration. I'm certainly going to be changing my /now status on this blog, based on some of the lovely stuff that I've seen on now.garden.
StatusLog is just a brief update of perhaps how your day's going, a random thought, or indeed whatever you want as long as it's small and succinct. Have a look at Status updates for some examples. Kind of like Twitter X but without comments. I'm not entirely sure, if there's a character limit or not.
WebLog is a blog function. Again, why they don't just call this a blog rather than WebLog, is simply beyond me. Again you can use markdown, and if you've used bear blog, or any kind of static Website before, then you'll know exactly how that works. As I already have this blog, then I doubt I'll use the omg.lol blog to do anything with. You can assign as many domain names to your blog, using their inbuilt DNS configuration utility as you want to. However, just before we finish this section, let's have a quick think about this for a minute; for $20 a year, you can get yourself a blog, and an emoji email address.
Features
Features cover a multitude of sins. There's an API, DNS configuration utility, Keys (think pgp etc), Pastebin, Picture Sharing, something called Proofs, PURLs, Switchboard, and Terminal Land.
I am not going to talk about the following: APIs, DNS configuration Utility, nor Keys, because quite simply they're quite specialised stuff, so go ahead and read the omg.lol docs if you want to know more about these things in particular.
Pastebin
If you need to keep the structure of some text, usually a piece of code, and need someone else to look at it then pastebin is the answer. You quite simply paste the piece of code in, and it'll appear at yourname.paste.lol. You can make it public or private. I guess the only reason why you'd want to keep it private, is if you're reading websites, and wanting to keep a piece of code for looking at later. I dunno.
Picture Sharing.
Have a cat? Have a photo of your cat? This is where you can share it with others.
Proofs
Own a website, or anything online, then you should use proofs. It's totally unnecessary functionality, but you get a nice official looking certificate proving that you own your domain that you can show your granny. Kudos.
PURLs
PURLs stands for persistent URLs. It's like a permanent redirect in DNS terms. If you want to have chilli.omg.lol/cat pointing to an ever changing collection of cat pictures hosted somewhere else on the internet, then this is the service for you.
Switchboard
Switchboard is where you can manage your omg.lol URL addresses. Want to change your profile, now status etc url to be something different, this is the place to do it.
Terminal Land
Just when you thought their service offerings couldn't get any more abstract, they decide to announce that they're going to be offering a MUD, MUSH, or MOO. A what I hear you cry? It's basically an online text based adventure game, in effect. You know why they want to offer this? because why not. I'm quite looking forward to using this, I have to say.
Community
They have a whole bunch of different ways to join-in with the omg.lol community (all 5000 of ~them~ us) such as an irc server, a discord server, a mastodon server, a discourse forum, Matrix etc. I genuinely like how they wrote the following rule for users: "Just don’t be an asshole and you should be fine." Refreshing.
I know that we've only had a brief foray into omg.lol. They do actually offer a whole bunch of - if I'm being diplomatic - truly eclectic services, which for $20 a year is really good value for money. Community is ultimately what this site is about, I think. With all of their diverse offerings which we've discussed above, it's perhaps community that provides the common thread through much of what they offer. Either through interacting directly with other omg.lol users, to more passive opportunities to read about other users via their /now status, and StatusLog. There's something for everyone. Regarding everything else that they offer which doesn't fit into a community theme, I think quite simply they just thought they had a cool URL that needed to be used. Here's a case in point, this is the actual URL to their system status page: broke.lol. Enough said.
I do however wish that they would call a service what it actually is, rather than talk about creating a profile on their homepage, but then calling it a WebPage once you've signed up. This would certainly lessen some of the culture shock that I've experienced in the last 24 hours. It's genuinely refreshing to see something so different, so 'we're doing our own thing' over here, compared to the rest of the internet, and it's a site with a sense of humour that doesn't take itself too seriously. I do firmly believe that the internet needs much more of this.