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.<p>I love the URL-as-a-real-place concept too, makes me think back to old Geocities URLs.
This is using Gemini as the primary protocol, in case anyone missed it: <a href="https://midnight.pub/manual" rel="nofollow">https://midnight.pub/manual</a>
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.<p>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....