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The internet didn’t want you. You used the internet at your own risk. You were the outsider there, and I miss that. Anything friendly was still trying to figure out how to sell things to you on the internet.
I miss forums. Reddit and discord and gb ruined it.
There’s still rss.
There’s still email.
There are still blogs.And there’s gemini.
In México very little News sources use RSS, at most they have Flipboard accounts or Twitter :(
This also applies to information about the government, where most of the politicians and other elements use Twitter :/
You can’t even get regulatory bodies to have an RSS feed. In my last job I was really annoyed because the only way you could figure out if the EU had changed their chemical regulations is by being in either a very specific LinkedIn group or just checking their website again and again.
It’s hard to write software for regulatory compliance when the regulations and data schema change seemingly at random.
Sometimes you just have to dig a little deeper because they don’t really want you using RSS. If you give me some examples I can take a look
True elsewhere – there’s no profit in RSS I guess.
It is still around though and you can RSS-ify some sites.
Blogs never begged for dopamine
The little counter I put on my page certainly did! Got so excited when it reached 100, even though it was mostly me.
But you never made an onlyfans to channel more traffic and then eventually get caught up in a cartel and get owned and sold by a pimp even though on paper it looked as if you were making your own choices.
The “old internet” still exists mostly. People have moved on to other things. You can still use IRC, Usenet, RSS, BBS, Forums… they all exist. They may not be as popular… but a lot of the old web tech is still out there.
If anyone really cares, gopher is still somewhat alive.
“email never throttled you”
Someone forgot about the good ol’ days of spam? Chainmails? Viruses? Here’s an example of a classic virus,
YOU HAVE NOW RECEIVED THE UNIX VIRUS
This virus works on the honor system:
If you’re running a variant of Unix or Linux, please forward thismessage to everyone you know and delete a bunch of your files at random.
They used to make you pay $100/yr for an email address.
Not custom. Just an email address
I can assure you, your email is throttled. You just haven’t noticed.
Absolutely miss that old internet.
It had flaws aplenty, but anyone could pick up a “…for dummies” book and cadge together a website. Plenty of free website generators and hosts, too. All those personal pages, family pages, “Hello World!” pages, personal hobbies and small businesses…. Then of course the newsgroups, freeware apps and tools from generous people filling in the gaps in available software…yeah. It was completely unpolished, wild, and unpredictable…but it was awesome, available, and far more egalitarian.
I do miss it, the zeitgeist anyway. Sure. Modern speeds and frontends are nice, but everyday people are priced out and corralled, monetized and stalked. We’ve become the coppertops of The Matrix; exploited, mined, and willingly, in some cases, enslaved.
It is easier than it’s ever been to host your own website. You could have what most personal websites were like in the 00s without ever once coming out of the free tier in Azure. Domains are still gonna cost you, but actual hosting is pennies.
Yes, I don’t disagree that it’s not hard, especially with all the free templates available. Today, however, the odds of anyone ever randomly finding your personal self-hosted website are essentially zero. You don’t have any SEO, no adspace to earn higher search engine priority, nothing. Someone would have to specifically search for you/your site to find you. That’s unlike the early web where your site might randomly show up in a search for whatever hobby/business/interest that you might have included in site text or “about” in the HTML.
Actually, it was probably kind of a boon for us nerds, because cool people would come to us and ask us to make their webpages for them. Now Zuck etc. does it for them…
There’s more computing power than ever but seemingly fewer services than ever.
And it’s not like there was any shortage of dummies that actually did, either!
No, there weren’t. But that wasn’t a problem because they could be avoided, or they were curiosities. Not like today, where social media keeps shoving them in front of you at every opportunity.
The old internet died when we started gamifying human interaction.
Get rid of up/down votes. Get rid of reputation points. Get rid of Emojis. Get rid of all that shit. That shit has lead to dopamine overload, and the extremism in human interaction both on and offline… cause people don’t just talk to each other anymore. Humans, on the whole, just regurgitate ideas and comments back and forth that previously got high marks, thus getting them high marks. People tend to be afraid to speak unpopular but necessary truths because they are scared of their magic fairy points being reduced by an onslaught of downvotes/dislikes/whatevers, Or god forbid something you said be misconstrued and a whole hate train pile on you because you have 30 downvotes so obviously you are wrong and evil and bad, thus resulting in interaction being skewed ever further towards more and more extremes in content because of the incessant need to fish for that next hit of the gamified reward systems.
Its toxic as fuck.
Human interaction shouldnt be gamified. It should just…exist.
Have an… Errr… Upvote.
You’re right, it also highly goes against a lot of small groups, neurodivergent with different understanding etc.
It’s literally out of control with no corrective.
But yay internet points.
Voting is great though. It helps sort wheat from chaff.
… Is what i would like to say, but maybe that only works in smaller communities. I know a YouTuber who is currently getting baselessly harassed by popular assholes and she probably has an insane number of dislikes.
Voting is great though. It helps sort wheat from chaff.
Except it doesnt.
It just reinforces blind group think, no thought or reason. Upvotes don’t make people more right, downvotes don’t make people more wrong. Its just thoughtless highschool cliquey shit, that was intentionally created to manipulate users into conflict to provoke more engagement… Theres a reason this upvote/downvote shit started on ad driven social media… Only you get to do it all hidden behind the anonymity of a button.
it’s not for right and wrong. just a different perspective from sorting by new. unless someone has a better idea. still have to keep a finger on the block button, not just for the terrible and awful stuff, but all that you don’t care about. No omniscient god swooping in to curate the content fairly and truely, and AI is not that.
Why no emojis? Personally, I’ve always felt like they were just a better way of expressing a person’s emotion or meaning that’s a bit more than plain text can easily describe.
emojis are the problem? 🥺🥺🥺😭
We used to make our own WEB PAGES!
RSS still works pretty well.
As does everything else in the list. It’s just that almost no one uses it, because people don’t mind the not owning in exchange of the content.
No one uses emails?
Mate, the world runs on email.
Maybe for work, and even that is being overtaken in volume by slack, teams and others. Email is for inter-company communication mostly. The volume of imessage, Snapchat, WhatsApp, signal, reddit and Co dwarves email.
Mate, the world runs on
emailExcel spreadsheets.There, FTFY.
It’s just that almost no one uses it, because
peopleeternal September phone users don’t mind the not owning in exchange of the content.What are eternal September phone users?
We need to reject web3 and create web 1.5. a modern version of web 1.0, without the bullshit and platforms.
Join the uBlock+NoScript revolution! We don’t even see the social media buttons.
Web3 is more that everything is an app/platform now.
Keep your ad blockers though.
Fuck you, yes it was perfect.
bring back geocities!
THANK you, there goes a week’s worth of my life now
You can get a full dose of nostalgia with this one: https://displayman.neocities.org/
Even after closing the tab, that background music is still playing!
I can’t tell if that’s a parody, since it has every single 2000s homepage trope, or actually archived. I’m too distracted by its glory to look deeper.
My first Geocities was a totally redundant Commander Keen fansite, complete with “under constructions”, tacky gifs, marquee tags and background midis. I still have the html files. I had a freeware games Tripod site as well.
wow, it’s magnificent!
Seems to be blocked by my adguard instance :(
With some similarities to federation, I’m grateful to be able to syndicate to both neocities and nekoweb. Long live the web and indienet!
what am i looking at here? looks really cool.
There are attempts to explain what it is within the document, but I think it’s not easy to summarize or define. It’s a ~70MB html file that I’ve written in every day for about 10 years. I cover a significant variety of topics. It’s a journal, a wiki, and a social media replacement (I speak with others from the site itself), too. It serves many functions. If you end up makin’ your own site, lemme know. I’m an avid reader.
Bring back Tom!
Tom did the right thing and now enjoys his money.
This might not be a question for you, but I’ll ask it anyway.
What do we do to get it back? I have computers, I have an internet connection. What can I and we do to make our space?
I still use email and RSS.
If you want to read blogs and minor websites, maybe check out kagis “small web” index (this is free access I believe): https://kagi.com/smallweb
The real web is still there, and probably has as many users as it did 25 years ago, but the average person doesn’t use it. Remember the average person didn’t use the internet much at all 25 years ago.
One thing I want to do is try to create a space for family to hang out. Self-hosted. No concerns about data mining or trolls, just a personal space for us.
They don’t have to use it but starting from the right group, I think they will, many of them perhaps only because it will become the only place to see photos of our kids. Just need the right platform.
Save my UN, if it’s old internet, somewhat accessible, I’ll do my best to multiply.
My plan is to have a self hosted, private site for the family. In the old days, people made their own sites and others could visit. I see this as a replacement for social media - instead of using facebook to catch up on family, this would be a self-hosted alternative. People could still use facebook for other things if they wanted, but this would be somewhere you would know you’d see all the posts people were making, with no ads or manipulative algorithms.
Despite all the options, it’s actually a hard thing to find a good solution. There there is promise in some so I haven’t given up hope yet.
In terms of public sharing, I see Lemmy as one form of that. Anyone can host their own instance but we all share with each other. No ads, algorithms are known and published. For things more like a personal site, it’s never been easier to self-host things.
Send me an invite and I’ll chat with folks seldomly.
Also, I do see Lemmy as exactly that, I just hope it becomes more wide spread.
Support federated content and sites. Self-host your own content using software that makes it compatible with federation. Continue to use democratized protocols (email, RSS, etc.)
We’ll never be able to go back to the way it was. But we can take the good parts and center around them going forward. Proprietary and silo’d content and platforms eat themselves alive by design. The open web just has to outlive it.
I like this outlook quite a bit
- Make a personal website.
- Link to it in some places.
- Put links to other places on it.
This might be the depressing answer, but: nothing.
Most people want a fun (=addictive), nice looking, free (=no cost to them), easy to use web.
And the current internet will always outperform the old one. Ads generate revenue and allow companies to fund development costs, hosting costs and optimize their page for search engines better than individuals.
You, personally, can use platforms that mimick the old web, just like you’re doing right now.
But if this is what most people wanted and cared about, Reddit and Twitter would long be dead and the Fediverse big and thriving.I appreciate the insight, but I’m not asking most people, and most people aren’t asking. I’m asking for us.
What do we do and where do we go?
If they want to live in advertising hell, so be it. There was a time that people had to be convinced to pay for internet. We can do it again. I don’t have the skills to design it, but if I see it, I can absolutely propagate it.
So what do we do next?
I personally think a lot of it starts with search.
A search engine that discards the SEO generated stuff by default. That discards web stores unless you are specifically looking for products to buy.
It’s terrible to say, but most internet is curated now by search engines and social media.
Then realize most internet content does not require engagement. We don’t need comment sections on everything. We don’t need a button to share (because you can always just copy the URL)
Then social media needs massive regulation, but for most people that’s going to be like getting someone off crack. They’ve made it addictive. Social media should be private by default but that almost defeats the purpose.
In addition to the other suggestions, I also recommend marginalia-search.com as an excellent searchengine for finding sites that get lost in the usual SEO soup. It has labels for sites containing javascript, tracking, ads, etc. and can find older sites quite well, though you might have to scroll past the stackexchange and substack posts, which it also picks up. The old version also has a funky diagram to show the relevance of your search, which doesn’t have anything to do with anything but is kinda cool I think.
E: especially the explore page is a good way to just see some sites.
Neat, will look into it, thank you
Idk I might’ve been able to live without seeing the Mr. Hands video, back in the day.
Twice this week I’ve looked up some song lyrics origins/meanings, and it’s obvious the old sites are just running LLM summaries of every song they have in their DB.
Wikipedia has notoriously been vague on this, only covering it with a couple sentences for some interview source etc. But those couple of sentences said so much more than the 20 paragraph essay of an LLM trying to figure out and explain creative writing.
It used to be fans chimed in with their ideas and sources, establishing a solid lyrics origin or meaning. But apparently that’s dead now for the big services and the blogs that exist buried under SEO.
Seriously, do it now and see what I’m talking about. It’s absolute spew.
LLM trying to figure out and explain creative writing.
They aren’t even that capable. They simply try to predict the words that would meet a naïve observer’s expectations.
I also hate how ChatGPT infected the web nowadays is, though I usually look up song lyrics on genius. They sometimes have user generated comments with interesting tid bits. Akin to the old forums would be a lemmy community for interpreting song lyrics :)
It’s depressing because I’d rather read someone being completely wrong about a song than for some LLM to summarise the “correct” answer
I looked up something recently, I think it was about some game, and the top result (and probably several after) were just total gibberish that didn’t help at all. Just generative nonsense based on the words it was provided.
I really hope we get a solution to this. I know this is the most profitable to these people, but it’s far from the most useful. It’s just so cheap to make that anything else existing becomes near impossible. No matter what else is created, once the rules for optimizing it are figured out it’ll be flooded with AI nonsense. It honestly feels like the death of information right now, and I don’t see an ending.
i donno man. i still use rss, and they solved tracking by not putting the article in the xml, just a link that ends in source rss.
Or putting a weird (and illegal) consent dialogue the reader can’t crawl. Golem.de does that, one of the biggest german tech newspapers.
Isn’t that a legitimate use-case for RSS (specifically Atom) though? My blog’s feed just points to the plain-HTML pages with the post. It seems wasteful to put my entire site in a single, polled file.
I still use my feed reader ever day.
