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Everyone lamenting this needs to check out neocities, or even get into publishing your own website. Even if it's on a "big evil" service like GoDaddy or AWS, whatever. As long as it's easy for you. Or learn to self host a site. The internet infrastructure itself is the same, but now we have faster speeds, which means your personal sites can be bigger and less optimized (easier for novices and amateurs to create). People still run webrings, people still have affiliate buttons, there's other ways to find things than search engines, and there's other search engines than the big ones anyways.

There are active communities out there that are keeping a lot of the old Internet alive, while also pushing it forward in new ways. A lot of neocities sites are very progressive. If you have an itch for discussion, then publish pages on your website in response to other people's writings, link them, sign their guestbook.

Email still exists. I have a personal protonmail that I use only for actually writing back and forth to people, I don't sign up for services with it aside from fediverse ones. People do still run phpbb style forums, too. You'll find some if you poke around the small web enough.

A lot of these things are not lost or dead. They just aren't the default Internet experience, they're hard to find by accident. But they are out there! And it's very inspiring and comforting.

I always look back to the 1960s visionaries and their charmingly naive ideas about the future use of computers.

I suspect that if they could have seen the actual future they would have become plumbers.

Rage bait attention seeking absolutely was a thing back then, it was just severely limited and localized.

We need to just ban advertising. The free with ads model is toxic to humanity.

Why do people never mention anything other than YouTube? DailyMotion is trash now but was around then. Veoh was another good one. There were so many other video streaming platforms before YouTube's reign. Some forums still exists. Before Spotify, there was several music streaming platforms also and I'm not talking about LimeWire. playlist.com was legit before and GrooveShark was the Spotify before they decided to kill it off because couldn't profit. So many cool things before capitalism ruined them (e.g. Skype).

I think those old forums dedicated to discussions and interests are still there. The internet has been urbanized and now most people live in large cities, but some people still live in small towns in the countryside.

Pardon me, but Friendster was for friends - Myspace was for tricking people into listening to Nickelback.

The fediverse is similar enough for me :)

On the early days of the internet, I found a website about a comic I like. I emailed the person who made the website. I told them that I liked the site, and I sent them a game that I'd made (which had nothing whatsoever to do with the comic or their site). They tried the game and said it was fun...

That kind of interaction can never happen any more. Money has ruined it. Scams and monetization, everywhere, making everything into manipulative toxic sludge.

Gemini is trying to bring that back.
Although it may not be technically the best approach, the 56k vibe is there.

The Internet was even better before 2001. Around 2002 is when paywalls started becoming a thing along with the increased enforcement of the DMCA.

Feels like we're all old men whose country was conquered

The corporations could not get their heads wrapped around the internet at first. They needed to deal with nerds and computer geeks to get anything done. These same people that they had kicked around and laughed at for being useless now had to be brought into boardrooms for product discussions. Then the dot com crashes happened and corporations learned that all of those people were not Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. All of these gave the internet an extended era that felt a bit like the "Wild West". AOL internet was a commercial product that got mauled constantly because it hired average skilled programmers, the really ingenious programmers were the ones developing Instant Message based "punters" and program crashing email "bombs".

I'm so old I remember webrings.

It's a bit more nuanced. Trolling and ragebait absolutely was a thing, but there was still a certain sense that it was just part of the Wild West nature of the internet. Someone posting racist garbage on a phpBB would be a minor irritant that would catch a bit of flak but be otherwise ignored.

These days it's entire office blocks full of professional trolls armed with advanced analytics, profiling systems and AI paid to push political agendas. And the most frustrating part of it is that despite the fact that everyone knows this to be true, it's still working anyway and we have elected officials of ostensibly Developed countries repeating obvious bullshit they saw online.

It really doesn't need to be this way.

At any time, we can decide to open our own blog for $9 a year. At any time we can choose to ditch algorithmic socials.

If we don't like them, we don't need to use them, and just switch off.

Women used to post sexy photos of themselves just for the joy of getting a few people's attention.

Capitalism

Well... the type of stuff we long for are still around, it's just that we don't visit it as much anymore. Lemmy is a perfect example of this - it's around, it's better, but people still default to Reddit instead.