Sometimes I miss the old days of the web when I’d randomly stumble across cool, fun, and sometimes useful sites. And that just so happens to be what I was feeling earlier this year when I stumbled across OMG.lol, a cool, fun, and useful IndieWeb playground that also happens to remind me of the old days of the web.

It’s built and maintained by just Adam and a handful of diverse volunteers. Every single tool that OMG.lol provides is there because he wants it to exist, not because he’s looking to get rich at just $20/year. He’s always available, supportive, building or improving something, and standing up to bigots.

There is quite a lot provided, and I don’t even use it all, so here’s a small breakdown of what I do use:

• Social.lol: One of the reasons that I ran into OMG.lol is that I wanted to move to a paid Mastodon server, after having fled a few that felt under-supported and/or under-moderated. Social.lol is neither. It’s a social safe space on the web, and I’m very happy there.
• Some.pics: I stopped posting to Instagram a year ago, but folks still wanted to see my photos, and both my Mastodon and Tumblr presences are a bit noisy for that. With some.pics, I can share my photos and provide an RSS feed that’s just my photos (which I also cross-post to Mastodon with EchoFeed). It reminds me of early photo sharing sites.
• Status.lol: This reminds me of early microblogging. I just pick an emoji and share short text, and folks can follow with RSS or see my cross-posts on Mastodon.
• Profile Pages: The profile page is clean and simple. Mine just has my avatar, some words, links with icons, and latest status and photo.
• URL.town: Speaking of that old web feel, this is right out of the old days of web directories. Before search engines existed, we had searchable link directories that folks managed. Some even got pretty big, like Yahoo! URL.town is a searchable link directory that any OMG.lol member can add to, and I’ve been pretty busy.
• The Community: There’s a vibrant and supportive IRC community (yes, IRC), where folks not only chat about a variety of things, but also watch and sometimes even help Adam work. There’s also a Discourse forum.
• PURLs: It’s a URL redirecting (and I suppose shortening, depending on the original link) service. I have quite a few of these set up. Changing the 1 redirect link’s destination is easier than changing a bunch of links in a bunch of places.
• Paste.lol: There’s even a pastebin service! I haven’t made much public use of it yet, but I have used it to quickly share code from time to time. Those are just the things I use. There’s actually so much more, from a whole blogging platform to sort of a text adventure game.

I would be remiss if I didn’t close by mentioning the generosity of the community. Back in May, a generous community member offered to match most donations, which resulted in the community donating a total of $19,540.54 to causes we cared about. And, until the end of September, Adam is donating half of everything OMG.lol makes (not just half of the profits) to another community member’s fundraiser for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, which has so far raised over $12,000. Many of us have donated as well, so hopefully we can hit our goal of $50,000 in lifetime donations to St. Jude!

If you’re looking for an IndieWeb playground, or even just a taste of the earlier days of the web, check out OMG.lol!