Happy 1st Anniversary to My omg.lol Membership

19 September 2025 marks the first anniversary of my membership of omg.lol, a web platform consists of various services. Happy omg.lol Birthday to me! 🥳

On this day in 2024, I joined omg.lol after successfully bidding a lifetime membership during omg.lol's fundraising campaign for St. Jude, then a month later, I celebrated the one-month anniversary of my omg.lol membership with a blog post, which also explained how I discovered omg.lol.

One year later, I am pleased to report that I am still a happy member of omg.lol!

To celebrate the occasion, I decided to reflect on how I use omg.lol and the various services it provides.

Starting with omg.lol's profile page service: my omg.lol profile page can be viewed by visiting my omg.lol address, helenchong.omg.lol.

My profile page serves as my general about page on the web, with key information about me, and links to my various online presences, including this blog, my developer website, my other omg.lol-related pages, and so on.

omg.lol's profile page can be styled, by choosing one of the pre-made themes, customisation with CSS, or both. I am a fan of the Catppuccin colour scheme, especially the Mocha flavour, so I chose Catppuccin Mocha as the theme of my omg.lol profile page, with a bit of custom CSS thrown in.

I had known about /now pages before joining omg.lol — in fact, I used to have a /now page on my developer website. However, after joining omg.lol, I decided to migrate my /now page to omg.lol.

What I like about omg.lol's /now page feature is the Now Garden, a collection of omg.lol members' /now pages, making it a good way to learn about what other omg.lol members are doing now. Furthermore, omg.lol's /now page provides an option to remind you to update your /now page, although I do not use it.

I use omg.lol's statuslog service, status.lol, to share short updates about what I am doing. You can view my status updates on my status.lol page. I also embed my latest status update on my /now page.

omg.lol provides an option to cross-post your status updates to Mastodon, so occasionally I post my status updates to Mastodon, specifically omg.lol's own Mastodon instance, social.lol.

I enjoy using some.pics, omg.lol's picture sharing service, as I have found it a good alternative to Instagram for sharing pictures if you do not care about having social media features for your pictures.

Since some.pics provides Markdown snippets for each of your uploaded pictures, and I write my blog posts in Markdown, I can and have easily embedded some of the pictures I shared on some.pics on my blog posts.

You can check out my publicly shared pictures on some.pics.

omg.lol provides every member an email forwarding address with the omg.lol domain name. It is fun to have an email address with a quirky domain name like omg.lol, and to surprise others for having such an interesting domain name, so I set up the helenchong@omg.lol address to forward emails to my personal email address. Therefore, if you want to e-mail me, you can send to helenchong@omg.lol.

A benefit of having an email forwarding address is that even if one day you decided to switch email provider, you can simply change where your email forwarding address will send email to, while others can still send you emails to the same email forwarding address.

One of the advertised features of omg.lol on its landing page is setting the DNS, or domain name system, of your omg.lol address. This means you can use your omg.lol address like a domain name, by pointing your omg.lol address to a different place on the web, and create subdomains for your omg.lol address for different purposes.

I have been enjoying making use of omg.lol's DNS feature, by using my omg.lol address, helenchong.omg.lol, as the domain name of some of my email addresses, as well as creating subdomains for my omg.lol address for Galaxy Garden, this very blog, at blog.helenchong.omg.lol, as well as various services I am self-hosting, such as the RSS reader Miniflux, the personal finance management app Actual, and others.

Proofs, also known as its domain name proven.lol, allows you to verify your ownership of digital assets, including domain names, websites, social media profiles, etc., for fun. The verification mechanic of proven.lol do not work on every website, but I did manage to verify some of my digital assets.

omg.lol has its own chat network, where I hang out often. omg.lol has a lovely community consists of a diverse array of people from different parts of the world.

In addition to getting to connect with the people in the omg.lol community, omg.lol's chat network has encouraged me to start using IRC, or Internet Relay Chat, for the first time. This led to me self-hosting my own instance of The Lounge, a web client for IRC.

More recently, omg.lol has started to host its own The Lounge instance, which can be visited at chat.social.lol, which is currently what I use to participate in omg.lol's chat network with IRC.

Coincidentally, omg.lol's shutdown of Discord as a chat option becomes effective on the first anniversary of my omg.lol membership on 19 September 2025.

omg.lol has its own Mastodon instance on social.lol, which is also where my main Fediverse presence resides.

Aside from the chat network, social.lol is another platform where I connect with fellow omg.lol members. omg.lol's code of conduct and community moderation help to ensure the omg.lol community has an inclusive and anti-bigotry environment, regardless of where the community activities occur — the chat network, Mastodon, and other omg.lol spaces.

Of course, having a Mastodon account means I can connect with other people on the Fediverse as well, so if you are on the Fediverse, you can find me at @helenchong@social.lol.

url.town is a relatively recent addition to the omg.lol ecosystem — it is a web directory where links are curated by omg.lol members. I like to share interesting or useful stuff I discovered on the web, so I have contributed to url.town.

omg.lol truly lives up to its slogan "Your fun home on the web". Since joining it in September 2024, omg.lol has become not only my favourite web service platform, but also one of my favourite online communities.

I am proud to be an omg.lol member, as platforms like these remind me the good things about the World Wide Web.