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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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?<p>- glitchyowl & kicks
I honestly miss people building random stuff on the internet to showcase unique information on things like Geocities. They were almost always "ugly" but also always visually entertaining.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
I think this is great.<p>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.<p>This project seems like fun, and that’s a great starting point.<p>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.<p>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
I like your goal "to make 'blogging' more expressive and visual, possibly to break a piece off and reboot it, now that it's fallen out of fashion." I have the impression that, with some of your other projects, Kicks, you are trying to do this for all the web, not just blogging.<p>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.<p>Misc. feedback:<p>I like how you present small blocks of text, but large blocks of text seem cramped sometimes, difficult to read.<p>The backgrounds are killing me. Perhaps, each background could have a solid-color fallback and readers could toggle to only display the solid fallbacks?<p>"Composed on today" -> "Composed today" (likewise for "yesterday")<p>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.
glitchyowl here, one of the creator of multiverse, thanks for peeking in<p>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 ~*<p>here's my mic check - <a href="https://multiverse.plus/glitchyowl/haiyo-multiverse" rel="nofollow">https://multiverse.plus/glitchyowl/haiyo-multiverse</a>
Been using Multiverse for a bit now and I honestly love it so very much. It's a brilliant mix of creative expression and creative limits - I can make cool stuff without having the infinite array of options that I would in design software. I recently wrote about my experience with old forums when I was a youngling on the internet and creating the post was honestly so much fun! I've felt my creativity really coming back since I've started using Multiverse.
I don't know if I'll be going back but it's an interesting idea. It reminds me of the geocities/angelfire/myspace/a bunch of other content builders of the early 2000s era of web stuff.<p><a href="https://multiverse.plus/onion2k/hello-hn" rel="nofollow">https://multiverse.plus/onion2k/hello-hn</a>
I like the idea.<p>I mostly need code examples (with highlights) and diagrams (potentially with animations) in my articles. Is there something planned for that?
kicks has such a fun & distinctive visual style. Came to comment that the design reminded me of <a href="https://www.kickscondor.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.kickscondor.com/</a> and now I understand why!
I started to use this product and it's definitely fun! I'm interested in how the others use and if it is accepted by large number of users.
Anyway, I think this merged well of nostalgia and modern service design.
Wow, if you try this page with dark reader the colors pop even more. Especially the ones at the bottom. Nice idea to bring back more of the creativity in the web, btw. I wish you luck with the project.
I like the playfulness of it, and the ability to customize my "voice."<p>It has the potential to become a new community.<p>However... I'm confused how to discover groups.
Livestream if you want to peek in on Multiverse.plus or ask questions: <a href="https://www.twitch.tv/kickscondor/" rel="nofollow">https://www.twitch.tv/kickscondor/</a>
Very cool - that said, it appears that I'm not receiving (is it being sent?) the sign-up email for new accounts.<p>Exciting project. Tasteful design.