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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.

It was capitalism. Proves that they would sell to you the rope to hang them.

90's internet was awesomer. It was simple and chill and small. We hand-wrote our silly little HTML pages and freely published our email addresses. I once mailed some random person a check to pay for a piece of shareware. They were the true halcyon days of the internet.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Whomever wrote this had to have been a child during that time because this doesn’t describe the internet I saw.

The 1990s internet was closer to this fantastical notion.

Self hosting and federated social media. Take back control. Fuck the corporations.

I miss old YouTube so much it hurts omg. i miss how it wasn't about engagement, branding, money or camera quality, it was about broadcasting yourself and having fun. now it's become a bland corporate shell of what it used to be and half of my recommendations are AI slop lol

source: I'm so old I remember when YouTube vids were rated with stars and everyone had neon channels with funky text

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.

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

There was no better internet than going to college in the late '90s. You go from a 56Kbps modem with hundreds of milliseconds of latency being a GOOD setup, to being directly on a 10Mbps LAN with everybody else in your class. It was right before Napster started and people were sharing entire discographies of MP3s via network file share from their own machines.

"The Matrix was redesigned to this, the peak of your civilization. I say your civilization because as soon as we started thinking for you, it really became our civilization..."

they were spot on.

this is exactly what i said to a friend today

actually, in a few years, maybe the young people won't spend their time on instagram, because it's all bots anyways. maybe then the young people will enjoy living outside of their screen-devices again, and physical life could get a revival.

I don’t remember it that way. To me, it was a minefield of viruses, popup ads, chain mail, and unexpected extreme NFSW content.

Everything improved a bit when browsers started limiting recursive popups and hidden executables on websites, but for much of the late 90s and early aughts, every click was risky. And oh my god the design of things. I was so happy when the tag finally fell out of fashion.

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.

It was so human a lot of usenet was properly unsavory.

Because that's what humans are, mostly.

It's so interesting. My partner is still on Reddit and she was complaining to me about the massive amount of bots, trolls and general negativity. My response was basically, yeah, that's why I left and don't miss it one bit. I found a much better place that has actual discussion and nowhere near that level of toxicity. I asked her if she wanted to know about it and her answer was just "No". LOL. She's also a fan of super drama filled reality TV so I guess if you like one you like the other.

Capitalism

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).

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

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

The fediverse is similar enough for me :)

Between SEO and Googles own bullshit finding information online feels like trying to find the milk in a supermarket or the exit in a casino, designed to make you pass through as much bullshit that's completely unrelated to what you actually want as possible.

It was, but... this morning I pulled out my pocket computer that also can make calls, started streaming the Disco Elysium soundtrack, and proceeded to drive across two cities. There were no pauses or hiccups in the stream.

The early 2000s mind cannot comprehend this.

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

I can literally never use Reddit again but all.my search results keep taking me there

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".