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?
- glitchyowl & kicks
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.
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.
I made post on how color wheels work here: https://multiverse.plus/gndclouds/addresses-of-color-space
Take care, wishing you the best!
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!
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.
I remember skimming through hundreds of car Geocities sites by enthusiasts who had no clue how to build a website but wanted to show off their rides. It was always a rollercoaster of poor UX and bad quality images but something was also fun about finding the random image that was a link to some internal page that had more random links on it to more and more and more.
Now everyone just posts info on curated pre-designed platforms and blogs like Facebook or Blogger which takes out half of the appeal for me, I instantly don't care about anything posted on Facebook and don't have a Facebook account. There is some good content on Blogger and the likes but there's nothing fun about most of the posts.
I clearly have been visiting the wrong sites and probably could dig up similar content to what I miss. It could also just be me being old and grumpy.
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
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.
It's available on Xbox Game Pass, and here's the Steam link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/844590/Hypnospace_Outlaw/
i dont think pre-designed sites and blogs are bad, but I think if/when they are the only (easy/popular) options out there, that's when it feels a little unfortunate
fun and casual is something that we strive for -- a lot of deep and rich things come out of playing and being playful. we hope that we can help contribute a small step toward that
I don't think it's that, I think you're describing the electronic version of an old neighborhood with character versus a modern suburban planned community. Some people genuinely prefer the latter, but there's not much of a choice both online and in the real world these days, so we're all stuck with it.
It seems to be a popular opinion on this site that ‘everyone should have a personal website’.. but I think the options available don’t make it a likely outlet for a lot of people because there is too much friction required for too little expressiveness. Even for technical people.
This project seems like fun, and that’s a great starting point.
I noticed when clicking around that it is set up so that ‘posts’ are always embedded within the multiverse site styling. This makes it have less of a ‘personal space on the internet’ feeling, but it does keep the experience more consistent, compared to if posts filled the whole page.
Was this a deliberate choice to encourage more ‘post-based’ creation and less ‘personal-site’ type creation? I am partial to the ‘personal-site’ approach but ‘post-based’ suggests other interesting options, like being able to ‘reply’ to one page with another page, and generally being a little more social
striking a balance between easy/fluid ways to express, and blogposts that feel like you is part of why we went to Nintendo and Mac paint for inspirations haha. I personally admire those tools/platforms a lot for how they offer limited yet wildly creative and fun ways to spend time
`post-based` vs `personal-site/webpage` is something we are discussing, maybe there can be a 'full screen' way to remove the frame. fwiw, the first collage blogpost I made didn't have a frame and you can feel it out here: http://weiweihsu.com/2020-07-26/wheres-home
replying to a post and a page imo has a lot of interesting possibilities that are yet to be explored too! the way we have time-based commenting and remixing for videos/audio (on soundcloud, tiktok, etc) has made us wonder in what ways can we get creative with commenting and replying, helping them be less plain
I'm just rambling on and I will pause here. so appreciate your comments here - there's so much work and fun ahead~
However, for my taste, this feels a little too close to Tumblr, which I don't think achieves "expressive and visual" in a deep sense. I hope that you will continue to explore and find more ways to differentiate yourself.
Misc. feedback:
I like how you present small blocks of text, but large blocks of text seem cramped sometimes, difficult to read.
The backgrounds are killing me. Perhaps, each background could have a solid-color fallback and readers could toggle to only display the solid fallbacks?
"Composed on today" -> "Composed today" (likewise for "yesterday")
I hope this doesn't come across as negative. What you're doing is very interesting to me and I look forward to seeing where it goes. It just hasn't fully achieved your stated goal, yet, in my opinion.
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.
we want to make blogging on the web a little more casual expressive than it's been. which is why we've went with a free-form canvas with lots of style customisation options ~*
here's my mic check - https://multiverse.plus/glitchyowl/haiyo-multiverse
we have had discussions about offering ways to embedding (like on the home page) and exporting the styles in json/css format too
in case folks are interested, this is wuz's post on the old forums: https://multiverse.plus/wuz/a-love-letter-to-jred-net
I mostly need code examples (with highlights) and diagrams (potentially with animations) in my articles. Is there something planned for that?
for now, you can copy and paste linked text into the text control, so format the text using something like https://trix-editor.org/ home page - then copy and paste it in
can you share more about what you have in mind for diagrams? drawing them with shapes or detailed diagrams (excel style)
animations and even code based triggers are features we think could really introduce more depth and interesting authoring abilities to this blogging site. if you have examples of animated diagrams, I'd love to see them and plan features with them in mind
Like animating the travel of a request through a chain of services, etc.
So, nothing too fancy.
I like the idea but I dread what people will do with it.
you can get a (loose) feel of how conversing will work by checking out this prototype by kicks: https://www.kickscondor.com/HT2020/
if you have any ideas for how social could work well on the site for you, pls let us know! hello [at] multiverse [dot] plus
It has the potential to become a new community.
However... I'm confused how to discover groups.
would love to discuss and hear your ideas on it if you are up for it! we are at hello@multiverse.plus or our discord group is here: https://discord.gg/5MvkKjAyrM
and in case its interesting, humdrum shared their thoughts on groups in this multiverse wishlist post: https://multiverse.plus/kvnk/multiverse-wishlist
and @kickscondor also wrote up some thoughts on the social aspect: https://multiverse.plus/kicks/not-just-a-subreddit
Exciting project. Tasteful design.
You can also email us at hello@multiverse.plus and we'll look into it. Might be a specific browser issue.
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.
