The Midnight Pub (opens in new tab)

I 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 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!

This is using Gemini as the primary protocol, in case anyone missed it: https://midnight.pub/manual

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.

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...

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....

this is an amazing concept imo.

this virtual city they created made me feel very nostalgic about the early days of the web.

Loved it

For instance posts by "torpor"

This is neat.