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.
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.
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).
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.
The fediverse is similar enough for me :)
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.
Gemini is trying to bring that back.
Although it may not be technically the best approach, the 56k vibe is there.I'm so old I remember webrings.
Capitalism
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 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.
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
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.
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.
I can literally never use Reddit again but all.my search results keep taking me there
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 <blink> tag finally fell out of fashion.
"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..."
<sigh> they were spot on.
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.
I was there, even a couple years before that... and in reality not so much has changed.
What we now call "The Internet" is what BTX (in germany) was back then: A commercialised platform controlled by corporations. Trolling, hate, ragebait... all nothing new, just look at archived posts from the Usenet!
The cool thing is that we now can rebuild something that is more akin to the BBS networks of yesteryear, something like the Fido-net, something that is entirely owned by the people using it.
I would argue was even more the case during the earliest days of the web. It was really a open, untamed, wild west feeling, like anything was possible.
Then the corporatization of the internet happened during the dotcom bubble, and all hell broke loose, we know the rest.
As per examples through history, greed and profit chasing have completely ruined what once belonged to the people.
I remember when the internet was only for nerds.. before it was ruined by the high school cool kids and the jocks
It ain't years it's months ago...
It sucks because it’s beginning to feel like a life wasted. I got in early, my career pre-dates the 1st .com crash. My first browser was Mosaic, then shortly became Netscape with the big pulsating “N” animation.
I LOVED the early internet. I loved the personal sites, webrings, IRC and newsgroups. I remember the first time I spoke with someone on the other side of the world (hello to my Canberra friend, it’s me, your midwestern buddy). I felt part of something that was new and exciting and fun.
Then ads came and it’s just gone to shit ever since. To the point where I now hate being online, all my shit is selfhosted and I barely interact with anything besides lemmy and mastodon (they still feel like the actual internet).
I used to be slightly disappointed my kids didn’t turn out as nerdy as me. Now I am just thrilled that I was able to be a cautionary tale for them.
Heres your reminder to get the fuck off the internet in your free time, stop giving these bastards your data for free
It feels unsustainable, right? Like the value of of this tsunami of advertising has to be inflated, especially with bots/agents taking over traffic. People’s tolerance for junk isn’t infinite. At some point the illusion has to crack, and the advertising bubble will pop and burn the internet/app ecosystems down, hopefully…
Ah yes, the halceon days of non-stop pop-up ads and malware taskbars. /s
Not to mention that everything they mentioned was absolutely started to become what it is today. Nothing changed, they just progressed their plans over 20 years. Pretending it was all started with benevolent intentions is naive at best.
I'm not worried. We'll make a new one.
They just don't do nostalgia like they used to. I've been using that gag so long, I just got a bit nostalgic over it.
Soon you'll be able to have AI just run your social media. AI will learn what you post, how you respond and what you respond too. Then just run it on auto pilot with updates everyday on events. Imagine that? AI just talking to each other but just with your code.
What will you do with the extra time you're not on social media? Maybe AI saves us from social media cancer?
Yee Gads, Del needs to get off twittler. Come to Fedi, Fren!
Google did not work great. Finding what you’re looking for resulted in going through a ton of pages of results. It was chaotic.
