See the Harrison Ford vid linked at the end of the original article. Billy Dee Williams also gets inserted. There’s no doubt that this technique will defeat CGI Youngface.
This has been my experience over the past several years as well. My particular issues have been with the Canvas element and with SVG support (which is insanely buggy - even the dev tools are bugged) but there are also occasional layout issues.
> and with SVG support (which is insanely buggy - even the dev tools are bugged)
I ran into this on a project a year ago, where our app was completely and critically fucked on Safari with no obvious path to fixing it, short of tearing out a ton of custom data visualisation stuff based on SVG and rewriting it from scratch to use a whole different approach like canvas.
It's one thing to have a rendering bug like Chrome had with flex box a while back where it would stretch elements vertically in certain situations against the spec, there's enough ways to do things in CSS that that can be worked around with a bit of tinkering. But when you've got a rendering bug and the dev tools doesn't accurately represent what's being rendered, it leaves the developer in a terrible situation where they're stuck with a black box with a broken interface so they can't even tell what the true result is, let alone see the inner workings.
I was lucky we only had 5-10 people trying to use it on Safari and I could just say sorry and recommend Chrome. But I can't imagine how frustrating a similar situation would be with a large number of users.
If you're interested in furthering RSS (and Atom, JSON Feed) - one way to help this along is to continue extending it to bring it modern. For instance, I've documented an extension for adding temporary 'status' to the feed - useful for pinned posts or broadcasting that a livestream is beginning.
It feels like there is still a lot of room to extend these formats - part of the advantage to them is how easily they can be extended. The media enclosure extension is the reason they've been so useful for podcast subscriptions.
Is there any implementation that doesn't require a server-side component? One big appeal of RSS is it's plain old XML that can come from anything over HTTP.
ActivityPub is the part that requires server-side logic. ActivityStreams is a more basic layer that can be entirely static or even serverless, and ActivityPub is built on it.
I don’t enjoy ActivityPub related specs - they give me SOAP vibes - and I’ve struggled with interoperability. (Tried to make my blog act kind of like a Mastodon instance and the learning curve was just way too out there. I’m happy with feeds.)
Well it's dangerous to give people the tools to design themselves - it's a rare skill and very difficult to blend it all together into a cohesive community! I think many startups of the 2010s saw Myspace design as a disaster.
We're hoping that by having some default color palettes and some common patterns and fonts - as well as limits to paddings, margins and border sizes - that it helps people stay in the ballpark of what a Multiverse post looks like. (Kind of like how you can spot something made with LEGOs from a distance.)
But whatever - creating ugly things should be part of the world. Looking forward to the future of 'ugly', 'bad', 'shoddy' design on the Internet. <3
> Well it's dangerous to give people the tools to design themselves
Having built a site builder before, I think you are on the right track. I think you're right to limit the design scope people have access to in order to manage Multiverses' brand image, I wouldn't recommend otherwise. What you've got is much more platform than blog/site builder, the network effect is going to rely on people wanting a "Multiverse" site and that's going to be a particular aesthetic.
In general though, there is a saying in music when someone makes a mistake: "It's only music, nobody died". I think the same could be applied to the web in general, and personal sites especially. Things got reaaaally boring after the "Flat design" trend of the 2010s powerwashed the web of anything remotely interesting, and as much as it brought in good UX and design patterns it also stripped out a lot of character. It'll be nice to see people try on their design pants again.
Wow - this is a very encouraging post. Thank you! If you happen to still be reading - what was the site builder you worked on? Have you written anywhere about your experience on that project?
Absolutely agree with you as well. I do think it’s “dangerous” - or perhaps it’s better to just call it a “tradeoff” - because you give people greater power over the design of the site. But obviously a tradeoff we’re all willing to make.
This comes down to the fact that learning design, UI, and UX is far harder than learning to code. And that nobody who uses a tool cares how good or bad the code is if it works okay.
Whenever I have looked into learning the design side, I've found it far more difficult to find a good set of resources to go by.
I can totally see this perspective, lokl! We are very uncertain that we're achieving our goals. I think I agree with you that Multiverse doesn't go too far off from Tumblr - and that's deliberate - we wanted to see if we could offer a stepping stone. Start at a familiar place but move in a different direction.
I'd be interested to hear more about achieving expressiveness in a "deep sense" - don't know if you mean offering more hypertext features - something more in the way of Roam or Notion. For us, aesthetics are rather deep - and offering design tools for fleshing out posts and designing frames seemed like something that had gone neglected. I think the posts that are being published so far show a lot of promise. Perhaps we can offer further stepping stones from here, to build more elaborate hypertext.
Really great question - this is exactly what we talk about between each other as well. Thank you for all of the feedback as well. Very much appreciated.
Hey, thanks for the quick response. So I still don't have any emails, and I couldn't find any other Log-in / Create Account functionality on the home page. In other words: I couldn't find any other way to create an account that wouldn't result in me using the form on /signin.
Maybe I'm being a dummy, let me know if you have any additional suggestion otherwise I will get in touch with the email you provided. This is a really cool project, and I hate to admit some of the unfinished amateur hobby projects I've created towards similar ideas to multiverse.plus.
So we are glitchyowl and kickscondor - this is a collaboration between us - an attempt to make 'blogging' more expressive and visual, possibly to break a piece off and reboot it, now that it's fallen out of fashion.
The Web seems to have converged on a color called 'gwalb' - gray with a little blue. We've gone from home pages - which users could dump endless animated gifs and marquees on to - to giving everyone a roughly 680x680 square to put a picture or some unstyled, unlinked text into. We think being on the Web can still be expressive and casual.
Multiverse is a place for creating visual essays and collages - closer to comics or slideshows than to a 'blog' on Medium or Substack or Wordpress - which are very close to essays. You can also design colorful frames for your posts, to increase the sense of identity, beyond a name and an avatar.
We're not trying to go head-to-head with social media here - just offering a new tool that breaks ranks from the other software out there. We know many of you care about the Web - it has a very fun and freewheeling side to it that we want to help foster, as well as standards like RSS and Webmentions that still make sense! And it's still a great place to meet people and make memories. We've spent the past six months on this. We will probably offer a paid plan if it becomes interesting to people. Are we on the right track here?
You probably mean on an intellectual level, not in terms of user adoption.
The lack of specificity about who your audience is the toughest part, intellectually, about what you’re doing. First let’s assume it’s the Everyman.
Why do people like a 680x680 picture / selfie of themselves? One reason Instagram has demographics much closer to the real world than Medium does: people already know how to express themselves and define an identity using their bodies.
The average person - who might have a 2 year college education, or read fewer than 10 books a year, or who uses fewer than 4 third party apps and websites on their phone - has a more intuitive grasp of fashion, makeup, what their hair color and race and jewelry and the setting and etc. says about them than if they tried to write something down.
What about people who like internet nostalgia? Nostalgia is kind of toxic for trying new things. That same audience also would pick a Star Wars movie over an indie movie every time. Nostalgia is the antagonist of new voices, not the friend. People think nostalgia is superficial, that it’s GIFs in the frame, but it’s defining an audience that wants the same stories, the same characters, and to stay in a middle to high school comfort zone. Kind of the opposite of what you want for someone’s crunchy blogs or wonky essays.
Otherwise, can someone have an argument about what’s the best visual design language? It’s very subjective. Websites had their moment as a medium, and now they’re out of the way in terms of delivering what a visitor came to see. People who express themselves outside their bodies, like writers, musicians, political activists, etc get a lot from the gwalb getting out of the way. Because so much is just getting your voice heard, weird websites turn off visitors far more often than it entices them. Not a very exciting opinion though.
> Nostalgia is the antagonist of new voices, not the friend.
There are negatives to nostalgia - but this isn't necessarily one of them. I would use vaporwave as a counterpoint. (Or any resurgence of a genre.) The nostalgic element is the familiar part; the artist might then be unfamiliar. I personally discover new artists all the time in these nostalgic genres.
Not arguing against your general points about writing vs fashion. (And you make a lot of fun points!) But I don't think a rebirth of hypertext styling is dead in the water. Podcasts were originally seen as just the rebirth of AM radio. And they were - but it turned out to be time for that - and enough innovation transpired that they stuck.
It’s been fun to see everyone’s personality come through in how they style posts, and creating blogs in a canvas environment is fun. Multiverse has so much character in it. I can’t wait to see what blog, comic, tutorial, narratives emerge.
Hey there! First off, thanks for the submission. It's a refreshing take on the homepages we knew and loved. I'm curious what you plan to have in the paid tier. Can you detail some of your ideas with regard to that? Also, is there an engineering blog that goes into some of the design decisions and mechanics behind the scenes? Very much looking forward to what you two come up with.
Hello! I've been a fan of the work both of you do for a while (fraidycat, etc.) and have been pretty excited about multiverse ever since you first started talking about it. However, one thing that has always rubbed me sort of wrong about your stuff is that, as far as I understand, you're employed by Facebook Labs (https://usesthis.com/interviews/kicks.condor/). This interview was the only place I've ever seen that mentioned (and granted it was Nov of last year), so it may no longer be true, but I've always found myself reticent to engage with some of your social experiments because they may be a veiled Facebook R+D project/something that FB would take over if it ever got "too" popular.
I'm hoping you could clear up your relationship to Facebook here and the stuff kicks does - I do truly love all the things you two come up with, but want some peace of mind that I'm not directly helping Facebook build it's roadmap. Thanks!
Yes it's true that I was invented by Facebook and that my website was shutdown by Disney (and then the FBI - as the other commenter points out - for the Disney shutdown turned out to have been a hoax.)
This is all terrible and I hate my origin story - I agree completely. I understand if you need to bow out on this one. I rub myself the wrong way a lot of the time.
Multiverse.plus is a personal project (of glitchyowl and mine.) And I am a personal project of Facebook Labs.
Or possibly the CIA? I get email from two agents who claim to be my handlers and to "come home already". But I don't really know whose story to believe. Can't just look in the mirror to find out.
Ok wow - I am rubbing myself the right direction now!
Afaict from the GP link, kicks condor isn't a person, but rather a brother and sister playing a person that also wraps up all the relevant attendant lawyers or other roles that go into maintaining the character.
Seems like a persona, created as the amalgamation of personalities, yet self aware of the digital/ephemeral representation of the character.
Feels high-concept and interesting to me, but definitely confusing if you aren't expecting this perspective
https://usesthis.com/interviews/kicks.condor/ according to this it is a Facebook labs personality. The domain owner is obfuscated. Kickscondor didn't provide a valid response to my question. I would rather not participate on any Facebook owned or related properties, domains, projects. Also, I didn't find any privacy or data policies on multiverse.
> Also, I didn't find any privacy or data policies on multiverse.
Another site asking for people to sign up using only their email address, having no TOS/PP, and the people from the project acting like trolls instead of answering simple questions.
Yeah I asked because I was sort of hoping for a simple answer free of irony and trolling. Deflecting and avoiding the question, especially as their comment I initially replied to wasn't in the same tone, is disheartening.
You are "disheartened" by not having it explicitly stated that there are no twins named "Cody" and "Jody" working for Facebook Labs saying things like "So basically imagine one day being able to buy Kicks Condor from Facebook and be him in your world." and that they like Segway electric shoes? Claiming to use VR to interact with personalities they're inventing? Saying they "pull a lot from the amateur cigar-smoking community"?
I'm sorry. Sometimes I don't know how to relate to people who are very serious about the topic at hand. I'm sorry - you asked the question earnestly and I disappointed.
You could still answer my question directly. Every other response you've given to comments in this thread lacks the irony and deference you've given me.
Again the charades. You think you’re being funny, but privacy is a real concern today and this obscurity is honestly a huge red sign for signing up for any of your projects, including this latest one. Who knows where our data will end up.
I'm >90% sure that was a joke. In the same way that kickscondor.com was not actually seized by the FBI for Kicks Condor being stolen IP from a National Treasure sequel.
