The Midnight Pub
midnight.pubI am honestly surprised at the lack of abuse this service is getting, as a recent post to HN about a similar service offered an email-to-post service, was stuffed full of spam posts.
I love the URL-as-a-real-place concept too, makes me think back to old Geocities URLs.
I assume the posts are manually vetted.
Don't jinx them haha!
I really miss the mid-1990s when I used to browse the web via a Lynx client on the local Freenet using my $20 turbo XT. Much simpler times!
What's a "turbo XT"? A IBM XT was, what, a 8088 CPU? On which kind of OS was lynx running on a 8088?
I remember running Lynx on Linux using slow modems but these were 386 and 486 PCs. I wonder what was that "turbo XT".
Counterintuitively, a button on i-286 through i-486 processor systems which when activated slowed the CPU clock.
It had a Turbo button and we made sure it was always on. As to what it did, none of us really knew. But it was on, and there was a problem if it was off. So even if it wasn't connected to anything inside the beige tower it still made things better.
If the turbo button is off, the PC is clocked to run slower. Video:
Maybe it worked like the Magic Switch:
The NEC V20 and other 8088 compatibles could run at 8 or 10 MHz as opposed to the standard 4.77 MHz. I guess it had one of those.
Most likely, they were running a terminal emulator on the XT, and dialed in to a multiuser Unix system running lynx.
This is using Gemini as the primary protocol, in case anyone missed it: https://midnight.pub/manual
> Just head over to your account page, and click the "Theme" link. Feel free to inject any CSS you'd like in there.
This reminds me of the MySpace era :)
Aw, I spent a bit of time composing a reply and got a Forbidden page.
Feature request: Hide the reply box if I should not be able to reply =)
At first I thought this was some sort of collaborative fiction world building thing then got a little sad when I saw it was basically any random blog posts people want to write.
I love this idea — a sort of virtual location that takes the place of cafes and bookstores that no longer exist in the real world.
I've given some thought as to how VR could be applied to something like this and, furthermore, how an IRC-esq protocol for VR rooms and characters could work. I'm waiting for WebXR to advance a bit more before trying to implement it myself, but I'd be really interested in community discussion of the idea.
I’m very interested in this space also. Especially living remotely, I find HN to be my primary place for meeting like minded people.
Even when I go to cities, intentional spaces for people to openly discuss ideas and collaborate aren’t really promoted. The layout of venues doesn’t really encourage this either.
Absolutely. Do you work in a relevant area?
I’m a freelance software/web dev. Have no experience with VR/AR/MR, mainly because I’ve not felt it to be quite there yet. That may be changing though. How about you?
This reminds me of a USENET newsgroup (can't remember the name) that I frequented decades ago. It was a bar/pub/dive of some sort. Patrons adopted an appropriate personae and sat around musing over their adult beverage of choice about the world. Everything old is new again...
As it should!
I visited this site last year and it had a completely different look and feel. I almost thought maybe some CSS or JS wasn't loading and I was seeing an unenhanced version, but it's been rebuilt on a new platform. Had not really heard about gemini before....
Gemini is a small and human world. Human in the sense of hand crafted.
this is an amazing concept imo.
this virtual city they created made me feel very nostalgic about the early days of the web.
Very neat. ("The Midnight Pub resides in A Small Alley on Main Street in Nightfall City: https://main-street.nightfall.city/small-alley/")
there is also [0] which you can also view using a gemini client
It reminds me more of BBS days, Usenet, gopher, and a touch of Infocom.
Loved it
For instance posts by "torpor"
This is neat.
There is a whole small internet build on Gemini.
I host a site for free with a random French at “unbon.cafe”, I sent him a ssh key and now I can push file in folder; that it. I have a Gemini site up and running.
The whole thing is manual , Simple and quaint.