this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2024
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I feel the same about the early (home) internet (years 1994-1999). Adverts if they even existed on a page were just a few lame gifs on a page. IRC and usenet were the "social media" of the time, except no-one called it that. Almost everyone online was as much of a geek as you (except AOL users), because the hoops to get online were significant enough to keep most normal people away. Businesses were convinced it was a fad, so didn't get too involved.
It was basically universities, students and a handful of modem owners that could get a TCP/IP stack to work and write a login script (ppp was quite rare in the beginning).
Rose-tinted glasses? Maybe, but there's a lot not to like about the modern internet.
Stop, you're making me cry.
I set up one of the first Echomail and Fidonet nodes in my country and was pretty active in the days the internet started. It was such a community effort, and seeing people start to grab hold and use it was a complete rush. To see what it turned into is utterly heartbreaking, but I guess it was predictable.
I see everyone talk about how we need to drive Linux adoption, and I get scared as fuck about what that would mean to Linux in 20 years. I don't want to see that community vaporize the same way.
I loved the old BBS community. I used to run an Amiga based BBS (also on Fidonet, I would say my node number, but it can still be looked up today, and we used real names so...). One day I had a drive failure and lost pretty much everything. No problem, said another Amiga BBS operator in my city. Bring your new HDD over and we'll copy over my downloads folder.
I think there'll always be weird nerds getting excited about niche things. It's exhausting to have to keep finding new spaces, but to some extent, I think that's our lot in life: we're like lyme-grass growing in sand dunes — pioneer species that grow where other things can't (or won't), putting down roots so other things can grow.
Unfortunately, the pioneer grasses can't survive indefinitely in the communities they build; their existence acts as a windbreak and encourages more sand to settle, causing the sand dune to form quicker than they can grow, eventually being smothered by the dunes they helped established. They have to find somewhere else to grow, somewhere new — the sand dune of tomorrow. That's why, when there's a series of sand dunes at a beach, you see a sort of progression, moving from more established sand dunes to younger ones as you get closer to the shore.
Maybe in 20 years, Linux will be unrecognisable to us, and maybe that space will no longer be home to nerds like us. But we'll always find something new to be excited about; the community won't be vaporised, it'll just be rejigged a bunch, as we discover new areas to put down roots. That is sad, but I think the alternative would be sadder, in a way. I don't mean if Linux doesn't become widely adopted, but if people stop trying to push for that — at the core of this movement/community is a bunch of people saying "hey, look at this really cool thing I care about".
It's easy to blame the Marram grasses for crowding out the early pioneers, but we do this to ourselves, by building tools for others to use, and working on outreach. In a way, that's how we survive, because our community relies on people who are excited about building something new in an unexplored problem space; more gatekeepy communities may maintain their "ideological purity" for longer, but they inevitably die out.
It sucks to feel crowded out by the masses, but there'll always be new spaces for people like us, because we're good at building and tinkering. After all, look at where we are right now. Lemmy isn't especially radical or new, but the atmosphere here is incredibly different to Reddit. I'm way more likely to find thought provoking discussions like this thread, for example, and to care enough to write comments like this.
Amateur radio is still somewhat like this, but nothing like it used to be. That used to be the ultimate nerd hobby. My dad was a ham and I eventually got my license, but I don't find it anywhere near as fascinating anymore. But it was the original opensource project, and you used to share info on the hobby over the airwaves coming out of the machine you built by hand.
Bill pay. Maps. Wikipedia. Every Song Ever. Every Movie Ever. Every re-run ever. Almost all the games. Communication about weird hobbies with people across the globe. Email your favorite author or artist directly. Free e-books from 5000BC to 1935 AD. Online tickets for travel. Online shopping. Podcasting. Online music collaboration.
Postal mail still a thing.
There is a lot to like about the contemporary internet. Perhaps people are less grateful now.
"every re-run ever" - except when streaming platforms decide to delete stuff forever arbitrarily, because they give zero shits about preservation.
That's what piracy is for
Just download it then! I just got Infinity Train!
Well. I think it might be worth checking again what I wrote. I was quite clear in that I said there's a not lot to like, not that there's nothing to like. If I didn't get anything from the modern internet, I'd not be here posting these comments.
I'd like to pull you up on the point about free e-books. Project Gutenburg was in its second decade by the time most home users got online. So that's hardly a contemporary internet exclusive, it's almost as old as the internet itself. Also, communication about weird hobbies is certainly not unique to the contemporary internet. We just did it on open services not controlled by corporate entities. Corporates that only run the service in order to sell your data.
As for a few of the things I don't like? Well. Ads everywhere (including those containing malware), constant hacking attempts for anyone running a server (ssh/sip/www very commonly hit with some protocols getting 100+ hits per second), AI crawlers scooping up the whole internet without any care about how they impact transit fees or user experience, licensed purchases (streaming services, games, etc that can be taken away at a moments notice with zero recourse for the user), terrible user agreements for EVERYTHING especially regarding privacy with no way to reject since ALL companies offering similar services have the same damned agreements, subscriptions on everything everywhere and increasingly so, having to click to reject cookies everywhere and knowing they're still building a profile about me whether I like it or not just in order to throw more adverts my way.
Dude in that era accessing the internet was incredibly easy.
Most big ISPs had floppies or CDs you could take (for free!) that included their software (for Windows, at least) that pretty much did everything.
After Windows 95 came out, with Dial-up Networking right out of the box, the ISP software was no longer needed. There were instructional documents, and if you could follow directions, you could get online pretty easily. This made it a lot easier for small independent ISPs to start up.
That's what we need again. The independent ISPs. It was easy for them then because the phoneline pulled double-duty. I do wish we could do that again...separate the infrastructure from the provider, have a municipal fiber provider and a free-market for Internet services over the fiber.
People don't know how to follow basic directions though. I don't know if that's a recent phenomenon or not. I'm nearing 40 (and rather cynical), but still feel I'm too young to really remember what it was like in the before-times.
What got hard was trying to get your modem working in Linux. Especially if you were unfortunate enough to have bought a Winmodem.
AOL did, and the others that were easy (compuserve etc) provided their own limited interface to a curated Internet.
Most providers (at least here in the UK) that provided actual tcpip did so using slip and a login screen. Which generally needed a script to login and then chain on slip to connect it to the local stack.
It wasn't until 1998 or 1999 there was widespread use of ppp and the windows 98 dial up networking could get you straight in. Then in the UK we had services like freeserve which provided simple ways to connect.
What is absolutely hilarious about this is that most European countries have this as well as a lot of other countries. It's just the US that is overrun by corporate owned broadband.
Doesn't even have to be municipal...I'd settle for a strongly regulated public/private partnership...but really nothing we have now works.
Around here, our electric service is kind of like that. You have your supply (the energy provider) and your distribution (the wire owner). We can choose our own supply but we have to have the distributor that's in the region. There's some good suppliers but there's also a lot of scams.
That's the closest analogy we have currently to what I'm talking about, but still not quite perfect, since as far as I'm aware the electric supply thing is more like a group-buy of bulk energy and weird business math.
Bruh if you lived in a rural area you might have not got dial-up until the mid 2000s