Also, you didn’t need to have a mobile phone just to sign up on a site.
Where do you find cool blogs? I run a blog myself, and have come across a few cool ones, but is there a place where people promote their blogs and where I can find blogs I might like?
Not exactly pure blogs, but random web 1.0 sites. There’s some real gems in there.
The first page that came up was somebody’s photography blog, with the most recent posts being 2021. The second was called AJ’s Ferret GIF Archive
AJ’s Ferret GIF Archive
Oh hell yes!
it’s delightful
Back when the internet was just a small collection of weirdos sharing their passions and interests with eachother, without advertising, without SEO (Hell, Search engines didnt even exist during a lot of those early days…), Without bullshit.
It’s a better place in most respects.
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.
emojis are the problem? 🥺🥺🥺😭
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.
deleted by creator
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.
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.
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.
Email may not have throttled you but your 9600 baud modem sure did.
“email” also might not throttle you, but every single (actual) mail server on earth will haha
Guess I’m the only old-school ThrottleMail user who used to follow The Dopamine Fiend on Xanga.
Bring back local BBSes. With monthly GTs.
Catch you at the inn with no guards, how bout that?
I was there when the internet was bastardized.
It was like watching Rome fall.
None of the things listed have disappeared. Rome didn’t fall, it’s still alive and well, we are just in city nearby with some people complaining that it’s not like Rome.
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/
wow, it’s magnificent!
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.
Bring back Tom!
Tom did the right thing and now enjoys his money.
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.
that’s really cool! and… um… wow, i did a bit of math on your 70MB HTML file:
that’s about 73.4 million characters. if it was a book, it would be about 48,700 pages long.
so it’s called tiddler?
I am hypergraphic. From the estimates I’ve seen, there are fewer than a thousand humans (including the unknown) to have written as much structured, coherent text in their lifetimes.
I use Tiddlywiki as my base tool: https://tiddlywiki.com/
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?
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.
- Make a personal website.
- Link to it in some places.
- Put links to other places on it.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 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 :)
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.
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.
It was just the first taste of a sweet poison.
“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.
Bring back Livejournal. It was free therapy and you could be your messy self.