this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2025
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[–] mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de 12 points 6 days ago (2 children)

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.

[–] architectonas@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

Thank you for mentioning neocities. I did not stumble over this project until now and I love it!

[–] Rekorse@sh.itjust.works 7 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Its not that there is a shortage of these spaces, its that they are not popular. I'm not sure they ever were popular amongst the general public though, to be fair. Personally I think its okay to have a somewhat small community.

[–] mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

Yes, I like it smaller! Ideally you have a sort of fractal structure of a bunch of smaller, tighter communities, which are also bound up in larger but looser communities. Then you can get the benefits of broad exposure and resource sharing from large communities, as well as the benefits of meaningful individual engagement and respectful kinship from smaller communities. I think that personal sites along with forums and the rest of the Internet really can do a great job of bringing this about.

As with many things, the responsibility ultimately lies on the individual to protect themselves and resist falling into bad patterns. Most primarily, maintaining your small community takes effort, and it's much easier to just be a passive part of a very large community that subsists on infrequent uninvested involvement from many people. It's even easier to be part of a "community as a service" like Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, etc. where all the incentives behind community building responsibilities have been supplemented with real income or fame. But of course then the people making posts, suggesting ideas, steering trends, managing communities, etc. are all in it for reasons that are not necessarily aligned with the well-being of community members. Hence the platform becomes a facade of a healthy community. Really good community upkeep seems to need to be done out of a love for the community, and any income you collect is to support that, rather than the other way around. But love for a community is often not sufficient fuel to power someone to serve huge groups out of the goodness of their heart, when they don't even know 99% of the members. Not to mention that even if someone really is that altruistic and empathetic, the time and resources become unfeasible. So ultimately, a fractal model or an interleaved model seems to be the only one that could work.

Don't get me wrong. Large communities are awesome in their own ways and have their own benefits. They have more challenges, though. Ultimately the best way to build a good large community is by building a good small community.

[–] Rekorse@sh.itjust.works 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Would you say all of that is true for communities outside in the real world? Ive a theory that groups can become so large the negatives nearly always outweigh the positives but I haven't really had time to think it through entirely.

[–] mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 5 days ago

I do think the real world has some differences that make it more difficult. Mostly that whoever is coordinating the larger groups is very likely to have access to more power and resources and therefore is corruptible. And then that's one of the systems that brings about that Pareto distribution sort of imbalance among people. Some inequality in terms of power is not destructive, but too much is almost guaranteed to end badly. But online, the sort of power and resources that are accrued are ultimately just less likely to eventually reach a point of being able to exert full control over the smaller layers of the community. I mean sure, someone could start acting despotic with their own "fiefdom" as another commenter aptly put it, like has sometimes happened with open source repositories or forums, but it's hard for someone's website to get so popular that they're somehow able to directly force changes upon your website (not impossible, I know).

[–] RickyRigatoni@retrolemmy.com 17 points 6 days ago

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

[–] HugeNerd@lemmy.ca 9 points 6 days ago

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.

[–] thatradomguy@lemmy.world 7 points 6 days ago

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).

[–] irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 6 days ago

The fediverse is similar enough for me :)

[–] Sunsofold@lemmings.world 6 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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

[–] MiDaBa@lemmy.ml 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Ads are fine relatively speaking. Its the data brokers that are the real problem

[–] Sunsofold@lemmings.world 1 points 5 days ago

Data brokers wouldn't exist without ads. The whole reason companies collect info on people is to better manipulate them into buying products.

[–] 0x0@lemmy.zip 7 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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

[–] MissingGhost@lemmy.ml 3 points 6 days ago (1 children)

What are your favorite capsules? My favorite is Ploum.

[–] 0x0@lemmy.zip 2 points 6 days ago

Whenever i dip my nose it's a rabbit hole and it's 1h to get up to go to work, so... no fav yet...

[–] Wilco@lemm.ee 6 points 6 days ago

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".

[–] HugeNerd@lemmy.ca 6 points 6 days ago

I'm so old I remember webrings.

[–] ArchmageAzor@lemmy.world 5 points 6 days ago

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.

[–] planish@sh.itjust.works -1 points 6 days ago

There were also "no girls on the Internet". Everything was gatekept, every space was some sysop's petty feifdom. Racism ran rampant, so pervasive as to be almost invisible.

It wasn't uniformly better.

We can't, and shouldn't go back. Ever forward.

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