i think we need Cracked-style articles back. desperately. or like, a guy doing a weird thing and writing a piece on it. sites like those are declining faster than the glaciers.
The internet felt alive back then. Now…it feels like the dead internet theory is real. Please don’t let this wonderful federated site become dead :'(
Working on it!
I am going really old internet here but the sense of adventure. I had something called the Internet Yellow Pages because search engines didn’t really exist yet. And going to these sites using ftp, Archie, gopher, etc., you never knew what you were going to find.
We had rules that we pretty much all agreed on because we knew things would go badly if we didn’t.
- Don’t feed the trolls
- Don’t talk about internet memes in real life
- Stay anonymous, there’s a bunch of freaks on the internet! Also, you’re one of them.
- On the internet no one knows if you’re a dog
There was a whole self-deprecating nature to it. We knew posting on the internet wasn’t really a positive activity. It was just a guilty pleasure. We knew it was all nonsense and nothing posted on the internet should be taken seriously.
I remember when it first started cropping up where people were saying internet meme type things in public. Someone said “The internet is leaking, this won’t end well.”
Didn’t realize how prophetic this was. Now not only do people feed the trolls, the trolls get paid really well through monetization. People have T-shirts with dumb internet memes, and awkwardly say them out loud thinking it’s cool. It’s so cringey.
People shitpost under their own name and get super upset about being “cancelled”. Maybe you shoulda done that anonymously, dumbass?
Identity is the most important thing to people on the internet now. Your identity matters more than your ideas now. It was better when we assumed everyone was a dog mashing on a keyboard and you had to explain out your ideas rather than ending discussion with sentiments around “you just can’t understand my experiences” rather than making an effort to explain them so others can understand.
When it went from “we’re all losers trying to explain things to each other as best we can” to “we’re all wannabe celebrities that don’t have time to explain anything to the losers who aren’t good enough to understand our experiences” it all went to shit.
Identity is the most important thing to people on the internet now
which is honestly and deeply confusing. because on the internet no one knows you’re a dog! (oh. you got back to that two sentences later)
i just don’t go in for identity. at all. no one knows i’m a dog, and i like it that way.
Don’t get me wrong, identity is important. Even on the internet it can make sense in certain contexts like if you have a community for people of that group. There’s a time and a place for that.
But in most contexts it’s really unimportant in internet conversations.
But with the rise in social media it’s become the most important thing on the internet to the point where people can’t express ideas or accept an idea without it being connected to a person’s identity. Back in the day when everyone was pseudo-anonymous there was a death of the author kind of thing on everything so it was 100% about ideas and 0% about identity.
People having their own sites. I’m sick of everything happening on platforms (yes including this one). I want to visit someone’s place, not meet at the bar.
I’m dealing with this with my 10 year old daughter, all her friends have social media, Facebook Messenger etc.
I found delta chat, which uses IMAP email, but presents it in a chat format, she just needed her friends email accounts, easy. And it killed the desire for messenger.
We also recently setup her own website with a forum, so she and her friends can write stories, share images etc. We haven’t got to her actually building her own homepage yet, but it’s coming.
She hasn’t experienced mass social media yet, so having her own (sub)domain with a forum, her email@domain, etc is exciting for her and is letting her express herself on a platform that me and her can both fully control.
oh that’s excellent, 10/10
Technically lemmy is like people or groups having their own platform which can communicate with each other.
Usenet
Being able to host something without it being attacked a bazillion times per second. Being able to host email simply, spam being a non issue.
And yes, Usenet, of course. Fucking everyone was on Usenet.
Specifically usenet before “eternal September”.
Flash. :(
Wait, what. Someone misses proprietary software that was rightfully killed in favor of open standards?
I think it’s moreso the things that came from flash lol
All the really weird non-commercial stuff that was made in Flash.
Forums.
I’ve been using the internet since the mid 90’s but never really saw the appeal of forums, but maybe I never had something I was “into” that warranted being on a forum a lot. My only usage was support forums and I always found them annoying to use.
I personally see sites like Reddit & Lemmy as the natural evolution of forums. You still have the concept of a topic (subreddit / community) where people can make posts, but the comments are displayed in a better format.
For sure. They’re still out there, but not like they used to be. Supplanted by things like Facebook and Reddit.
Yes I miss the forums I used to visit. I was a moderator on a couple and it was a bit of a slog but still enjoyable. I started using the internet in 1996/97 and watched it evolve all these long years. It’s definitely morphed into a corporate wasteland.
There’s a certain scrappyness that has been lost. I think back to SomethingAwful, Newgrounds, that sort of stuff where people just made things, didn’t matter if they couldn’t draw, some of the best things were stick figure animations. Even on Youtube now people are doing ad reads to camera like a 1950’s talk show host.
I also miss the sort of folk mythologies that emerged from what I like to call the Contextless Era. The Napster/Limewire explosion pre-iTunes led to a lot of things being shared with no context except for chronically incorrect file names. Which is why at least one person who reads this sentence still thinks System Of A Down wrote a song about the Legend of Zelda.
I kinda miss the PC first internet. Just in general. I miss instant messenger clients. MSN, AIM and Yahoo! Facebook fucked it up. As Tom Scott once said, those style of messengers had the benefit of requiring users to log in, which meant being online was a signal you weren’t busy.
Wait was that not system of a down???
Called it!
No; the song - simply titled “Zelda” is from the album Rabbit Joint, by the band Rabbit Joint. Singer Joe Pleiman wrote the lyrics to the tune of the Hyrule Overture by Nintendo composer Koji Kondo.
Back in the day, little known bands would attempt an early form of SEO, they’d put the names of more famous bands or artists in the file names of mp3s they would upload. Say you were an obscure (and for my purposes, fictional) metal band named Scorn Town, you might upload your newest track as “Blood of the Night - Scorn Town (metallica).mp3” to kind of trick Metallica fans into downloading and listening to your song.
But you did a stupid: It’s one of those songs whose title isn’t in the lyrics, but you wrote the band’s name into the chorus because you’re trying to get people to know who you are. So people think the file name is of the pattern “Flagpole Sitta - I’m Not Sick But I’m Not Well (Harvey Danger).mp3”. Actual title - what you think the actual title is (band name).extension. So a lot of small time acts accidentally attributed their own songs to more famous groups by incorrect titles. Or their fans did it for them; any prank phone call skits were attributed to the Jerky Boys, and any white man performing stand-up comedy who was even slightly southern (especially Bill Engval) was credited as Jeff Foxworthy.
And because this was the contextless era, no one even thinks to question this and if they do they don’t find anything because Scorn Town doesn’t and never will have a website and even if they did Alta Vista can’t find it. So it gets written into digital folk history at face value.
Pleiman’s vocals did bear quite a resemblance to that of System of a Down’s Serj Tankian, and Chop Suey was HUGE at the time. And some unknown individual uploaded Zelda by Rabbit Joint to Napster with a file name similar to “SOAD - Legend Of Zelda.mp3.”
Similarly, “The end of the world” aka “H’okay, so. Here’s the Earth, s’chillin…” was NOT made by Group X.
Link, he come to town!
The princess Zelda!
This is my favorite part of the old web.
The fact that we need a no ads version of that and it’s not XcQ is the most concrete example of enshittification I’ve seen
I miss the lack of misinformation. I remember when the news was relatively unbiased. Now everyone is selling fear and outrage.
Agree
Forums. I found forums the most engaging, interesting structure for “social media” that has ever been invented. I actually tended to get to know the people on them over time.
I have no idea why we ditched that structure in favor of “platforms”.
Forums were great but the friction to find and join new ones was very high.
Also reposts killed forums.
New posters asked the same 6 questions over and over.
Here in Germany forums are still quite active. I have several forums I actively use.
The thing with forums though, is that they oftentimes end in drama. People really do get to know one another over time on forums and that often leads to meltdowns on a scale you don’t have on lemmy or similar pages.
There are still some forums around but they are usually very niche. I frequent a few especially when I get banned from Reddit lol.
People understanding the horrible sound I consistently make in public
OLGA - the OnLine Guitar Archive.
It was a huge collection of free guitar tablature. Mostly txt files cobbled together by enthusiasts. The first time I used it, it was only an FTP server. It was rough, sure, but it beat the snot out of the ad-riddled, subscription models we have today. There was a version of Time in a Bottle that I learned half of twenty five years ago and I have never managed to find the rest. It drives me crazy because it was a really good version. Someone had put the two guitar parts together to make a better sounding, hard-as-fuck to play single guitar version. Every version on the Internet now is some dumbed down PoS, or the OG that needs two guitars.
OLGA rocked. I’d forgotten all about it.
Have you checked the internet archive? No guarantees, but if anyone in the world has a backup of an old text- based site… it’s them.
It’s been a while since I tried to find it. I should give it another shot.
This something we cannot bring back: when we were all new to this, it felt so unbelievable. Suddenly we were casually chatting with people thousands of kilometers away, who were of a completely different background. I’ll never forget when I (living in Germany with a turkish migration background) was talking to a US based Neonazi who said that he had nothing against turks, but he heard turks where the nxxxers of Germany. I mean, that was not a pleasant conversation, but it was just so unbelievable that this was actually happening. It felt like everything was possible now. I mean back in 2001 I thought “Hey, let’s hear the other side” and just went on the talibans website. Just a few years earlier that kind of insight was simply impossible. The internet just felt borderless.
A lot of things were terrible though, like “asl” or when any wrong click could easily land you on a disgusting and deservedly illegal website. Crazy times.
Crazy times indeed. My cousin brought home an Egyptian guy she met on the internet in the early 2000s. Turned out to be just fine but it seemed sketchy at the time.
I miss when web communities were more disparate, and each community had their own inside jokes, memes, and jargon.
Now every web community just uses the exact same mishmash of memes from Reddit/Twitter/4chan, and most web communities end up being indistinguishable from each other.
