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An Internet Canvas (mmm.page)
139 points by jaflo on May 5, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 31 comments


Oy. Author of this. Surprised to see this here. If you’re curious, recently launched beta [1] and also wrote up a “why” to the project [2].

Also: a StumbleUpon-like explore experience of pages created using mmm.page [3].

[1] https://twitter.com/xhfloz/status/1653740562648821760?s=46

[2] https://twitter.com/xhfloz/status/1631746024120221698?s=46

[3] https://explore.mmm.page


Just wanted to say mmm.page has been such a big inspiration for me and your design taste is impeccable -- in case it hasn't been said enough already!


Thank you! Curious — how did you find out about mmm initially?


Not the OP, but I found out about mmm.page through Kinopio: https://kinopio.club/

Both make me happy about the next evolutionary steps in the world wide web :)


Through discord! A good friend started talking about it a while back, no idea how she first found it out about it but possibly through tumblr since that used to be her main hub for a while.


Love the look and feel. It's the perfect mix of clean and chaotic. As someone that works at a link-in-bio company, I find the way you've approached this far more creative.


I can't believe you're ONE person who made all of it. Absolutely incredible work!


Sorry not gonna pay 5$ a month for what should essentially be free and open part of the web (instead of VC-funded and monetized).


Not VC-funded :)

As to charging an (optional) paid plan, unfortunately, I have been bootstrapping this full-time the past few years, and because I can’t till my own land anymore, have to find the least terrible way of exchanging labor for money, such that I can pay for food and bills.

That being said, there is a free tier for this very reason, as I remember all the free services that got me started initially. Hoping to make this tier more generous once the project is profitable.

Let me know if you have other ideas. If I can (a) pay for business costs (accounting, APIs, hosting, etc), (b) pay for my bills, (c) attain a and b w/ incentives that align with my users and the principles of the project — I am all ears.


I like the idea that parts of the ‘should’ be free and open, but I’m curious how the people who work on these things would have time to do so if not paid.

Are you suggesting that they should be paid by the government - I.e. out of taxes?

Or are you simply saying if it’s part of the web, people should work on it for free - basically like open source? Even in this case, I don’t see where the money for infrastructure and power comes from.

Maybe I’m missing another alternative.


In a mobile-first world I couldn't find a way to edit anything on the page on my iPhone.

The idea might be nice but without any mobile support (where a huge portion of the world is) it's impossible to tell whether it's good or not as we can't try it.

//edit okay it does work on mobile after reading other comments. Though the link on HN is wrong as I'm writing this: it points to a non-editable page.


mmm (www upside down) is super fun, useful, and finely crafted with a suitably peculiar community around it. Recommended.


I block Google web fonts, and it seems this breaks badly mmm.pages. I wonder why…?

Also, why does mmm.page loads ~160 Google web fonts?


Unfortunate compromise of not paying for font licenses — and google fonts is the most extensive collection of free fonts.

As for fonts — it’s unideal! Those initial fonts are actually just the glyphs subset of fonts so I can display their names in the font picker. It’s already somewhat cut down by separating the fonts into basic and all, as well as delaying the load a few seconds after initial load, but still a lot to fix up there.


Simple and straightforward editing. The editor even uses sounds to indicate when you've applied your changes.

Using a WYSIWYG editor is really useful for people who want to create content, not create an app.


Vienna Hypertext fits exactly this niche: https://vienna.earth/


You absolutely lost me personally with "raises 2.5 million in capital"

History tells me to never trust anything this well funded for something likely to be so personal. Perhaps theres a business case and good luck, but I'll be avoiding.


Thanks for sharing original link — had not seen that project before. I’ll refrain from commenting on their funding, but fyi is mmm.page is wholly bootstrapped (which has left a healthy dent in my savings over the past three years haha).

So if you enjoy the project, or want to support some of the researchy aspects of it, please consider upgrading!

I have another article in the works about the importance of independent funding models and slow growth incentives w/r/t organic social networks, and projects that necessarily require slow exploration as a community (not, in contrast, “spaces designed by committee”).


I’m not saying this is vaporware but … where’s the app?


My world started with LaTeX so I'll support an editor with the audacious goal of making editing "fun". Wasn't aware of mmm, but it looks and "feels" great.

PS: I am still in love with LaTeX--one of the only strongly-typed editors still standing the test of time.


As someone pursuing my own vision of a hypercard-like multimedia environment that lives in a self-contained HTML document, I'm quite interested in learning about the approach mmm.page takes with interactivity, but attempting to add "custom code" just tells me I need to upgrade. Is there somewhere with more details?


> Also, so I’m walking the walk, this page is fully editable. Read once normal, then try editing it.

So how do you do that? I'm probably missing something very obvious here.


The page shared here was a read-only version. The editable version is at: https://paper.mmm.dev

(But due to some iFrame hackiness, it doesn’t work in incognito.)


Poking at the editor sure reminds me of swearing at Wordpress' Block Editor.


Oof. I take it that’s not a great thing.


Huge fan! Excited to follow along and especially stoked for mmm.town. Keep up the amazing work


The homepage is very slow for me and causes my CPU fan to spin like crazy.


It could do with a heavy perf pass tbh. Haven’t had time juggling all the feature work, but it’s planned for 1.0. Mind letting me know what machine you’re on?


This is really cool. Absolutely fantastic editor! I'm blown away


MySpace vibes


lol! I thought the exact same thing! Totally reminded me of old MySpace pages.




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