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Posted by bpierre 3 hours ago

nowhere: an entire website encoded in a URL(hostednowhere.com)
69 points | 53 comments
foltik 1 hour ago|
> The internet promised freedom. Platforms delivered permission.

> Private through physics. Not through policy.

Goodness, LLM really convinced itself this was groundbreaking.

You could describe a .html file sitting on your computer with all of the same marketing bluster.

Someone has to send it to you all the same, and you might as well not rely on some random internet service to render it??

giancarlostoro 14 minutes ago||
It went through the "bullshit startup founder speech" part of the LLM I guess, I wonder how bullshitjs would parse this one...

https://mourner.github.io/bullshit.js/

Edit: Apparently "Platforms" => "Bullshit" ;)

huflungdung 1 hour ago||
You’re absolutely right. This changes everything. The html file is the smoking gun. Let me delve into this to give the user a clearer picture.
jamiecurle 28 minutes ago||
That's not a reply – that's a retort.
pdyc 18 minutes ago||
I did a showhn with similar idea(got a whooping 1 point and was flagged as spam which was later removed by mods), you paste your html and it encodes it into url, you can share the url without server involvement. I even added a url shortener because while technically feasible encoded url becomes long and QR code no longer works reliably. I also added annotation so you can add your comments and pass it to colleagues.

https://easyanalytica.com/tools/html-playground/

bronxpockfabz 2 hours ago||
> hosted nowhere

> present everywhere

> Still here when the internet isn't

I'm afraid the OP may not have full understanding of how internet works. This is either some kind of a post irony, or some vibe code fever dream.

Either way, I'm deeply confused.

embedding-shape 2 hours ago||
I guess in theory if this is packaged as a PWA (or the old-school way, a single .html with everything needed inside of it) you could actually run this anywhere and without internet access easily.

Besides loading the frontend resources, is there anything else that wouldn't work? Seems like a simple idea, so as long as the assets could be loaded, you'd be able to "load" the "apps", wouldn't you?

bronxpockfabz 1 hour ago||
Sure, but what's the point then? Seems like .html with extra steps, not to mention that the URL itself won't work.

Now for online, the data is in the URL already, publicly available (unless shared privately), and the "loader" is still served from the server, so you have to trust the server not to exfiltrate the data.

embedding-shape 1 hour ago||
> Sure, but what's the point then? Seems like .html with extra steps, not to mention that the URL itself won't work.

Literally says in the submission title and the website itself: An entire website encoded in a URL.

And yes, the domain part of the URL might not work, but whatever URL you use locally would work just as well if you switch the domain, unless I'm missing something.

> Now for online, the data is in the URL already, publicly available (unless shared privately), and the "loader" is still served from the server, so you have to trust the server not to exfiltrate the data.

Yes, the data is in the URL, seems to be the single point of this entire project. I don't seem to find any "server" doing anything of worth here, all the meat really sits in the client-side code, which you can serve however you like, might even work through file://, haven't tried it myself.

bronxpockfabz 1 hour ago||
> An entire website encoded in a URL

It is very much not, open the network tab on any of the examples, behold.

embedding-shape 1 hour ago||
> open the network tab on any of the examples

Ok, using https://nowhr.xyz/s#yzXyzs8PcDbxyQ_0KbYMzzRNytKNyE0JDM0x8zT2... as found in the HN comments as an example.

Not a single one of those requests contain the string "This is a message site. I guess. Just checking.", or did I miss something? All it seems to load is the "website loader", which is the part that decodes the URL (locally) and displays you "the website".

So assuming you have local access to the loader and you have the parts from the URL, you'd be able to load it.

I'm not sure if y'all are consciously misreading how this is supposed to work, or if I'm misunderstanding what y'all are complaining about. It's not "A public internet website can be loaded if you're not connected to the public internet", it's "websites loaded in this way can be loaded this way as long as you have the loader".

choward 17 minutes ago|||
If it was a simple web site without any third party dependencies, you could bookmark it.
brazzy 2 hours ago||
The technology is interesting and has some merit, but the way it's communicated is clearly style (and grand, vague claims) over substance.
wateralien 1 hour ago||
Like this: https://nowhr.xyz/s#yzXyzs8PcDbxyQ_0KbYMzzRNytKNyE0JDM0x8zT2...
tasuki 1 hour ago|
Thank you! I looked through their damn webpage (hosted very much somewhere) and they didn't link a single example!
Igor_Wiwi 1 hour ago||
I am using similar method to share Markdown files as one big URL like this: https://mdview.io/#mdv=N4IgbiBcCMA0IBMCGAXJUTADrhzWOAtgnjgMQ...
huflungdung 1 hour ago|
[dead]
giancarlostoro 15 minutes ago||
You have to fish around to figure out how to make your URL, only to find out it is some browser extension.
nmoadev 1 hour ago||
Interesting thought to explore but overblown claims. For the privacy claims to hold, a fundamental conceit is that you trust and use the nowhere app / domain. The source is open, so let’s imagine that you individually can be satisfied.

Now, the idea that entire apps can be shared via a link in a Signal chat or a QR code on a flier is a fascinating bit of compression and potential for archiving.

Imagine games shared on paper QR codes at a meetup.

Oh but here’s the rub, do you trust the arbitrary code you just scanned off of a QR code? TLS has become a proxy for trusted authorship. “Well if it’s really coming my bank then it’s probably safe”

toyg 2 hours ago||
If I understand correctly, when a nowhere URL is pasted in a browser, what happens is:

1. the browser downloads generic JS libraries from the main site

2. these libraries then decode the fragment part, and transform it into the UI

If that's correct, someone still has to host or otherwise distribute the libraries - hence why you need the app to use it while offline (it ships the libraries).

This is not criticism, I'm just trying to get my head around how it works.

rrvsh 2 hours ago|
I think it still fulfills the brief; the website you are accessing is still hosted "nowhere". Very cool concept, just read about fragments on the MDN docs a couple month ago
nchie 1 hour ago|||
But dependencies are part of a website? It literally says "Still here when the internet isn't." - but I can't go on there without an internet connection?
jdiff 1 hour ago||
Service Workers can cough up this stuff even without a connection, provided you already visited the site once before. This is how sites like Twitter still load their bones even without a connection.
embedding-shape 2 hours ago|||
> Very cool concept, just read about fragments on the MDN docs a couple month ago

Crazy to hear someone reading about something today, that been around since the 90s and probably is one of the first parts you touch when doing web development, but I guess you're just another one of the 10K lucky ones :) (https://xkcd.com/1053/)

zane__chen 2 hours ago||
I don't see any demo.

But would this mean encoding the entire dist folder after build step?

csmantle 1 hour ago|
This resembles some serverless pastebins. Data is serialized into the fragment part, and client-side JS deserializes them. The only practical difference is that this app sets them as HTML while those set them as text.
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