Asklemmy

I would adore having 1990's Internet back. It wasn't about media. It wasn't about ads. Wasn't about all sorts of flashy, colorful, mind-numbing drivel. It was just information, pure and simple. We still communicated. We still made friends around the world. But it was new, novel, and simpler. I remember when pop-up ads were invented and introduced. We thought that was bad. Little did we know what it would all turn into.

websites like this on every topic imaginable.

I miss Usenet.

Audiogalaxy Satellite. This was THE BEST mp3 service available. It was an index of privately run FTP servers. It was 97, I had just gotten cable internet. I went to spring break for a week, left my server up with a 1.5 ratio. Came back to a hard drive full of shitty late 90's pop. Literally full. Which wasn't saying much since my HD at the time was maybe 2 gigs.

I miss there being lots of pages people would go to, lots or things and communities to explore. I understand there's probably more pages in total now, but I still feel like users mostly gravitate the same ones.

Porn pics that loaded line by line, from top to bottom. There was a real sense of mystery and tension.

When you jumped on to chat (IRC) you didn't get pressured into upgrading to nitro (Discord).. IRC is still around but all the nice free networks have been decimated in acquisitions and other things.. there are still a lot of great Niche communities if you look hard however.

I didn't really "participate" in the internet in the early days, those being the early 2000s for me. Most of my memories from back then are of flash games and animations, had a lot of fun with those over the years.

Most of all I think I just miss the pre-gamergate internet on the whole. Obviously there have always been bigots and assholes on the internet, but now they've really staked their claim and driven their hooks in deep. It sucks to watch everything I enjoy become part of the culture war and the most vocal parts of virtually every fan base that I would otherwise be a part of turn into raging pieces of shit.

Though I suppose the internet already had enough evil in it to harass a bunch of actors from the Star Wars prequels to the brink of suicide well before gamergate, so maybe shit was just always bad.

&TOTSE:

Q: What is TOTSE all about, anyway?

A: A lot of people have some weird idea that this web site is a Bad Place, a place for hackers, software pirates, and anarchists. The reason that they think this is that there are informational text files on here about hacking, piracy, and anarchy.
However, there are also text files on here that discuss politics; democratic, right wing, left wing, libertarian, communist, and everything in between, but this is not a political web site.
There are files on here that discuss Jesus Christ, Muhammed, Buddha, Crowley, John Smith, and "Bob", but this is not a religious web site.
There are files full of short stories, science fiction, humorous articles, and great works of literature, but this is not a literary web site.
There are files with information on rocketry, radio broadcasting, chemistry, electronics, genetics, and computers, but this is not a technical web site.
This web site is about INFORMATION. All sorts and all viewpoints. Some of the information you will agree with, some you will find shocking, and some you will probably disagree with violently. That is the whole point. In this society we go to schools where there is one right answer: The Teacher's. There is one acceptable version of events: The Television's. There is only one acceptable occupation: The pursuit of money. There is only one political choice to make: The Status Quo.
On this web site you are expected to make decisions all by yourself. You get to decide who and what to agree with, and why. You get to hear new viewpoints that you may have never heard before. On this web site people exist without age, without skin color, without gender, without clothes, without nationality, without any of the visual cues we usually use to discredit or ignore people who are unlike ourselves. All of these things are stripped away and the ideas themselves are laid bare.
You will change. You will transform. You will learn. You will disagree.
You will enjoy it.

It's a shame now the modern internet has switched from anonymity to identity politics, from freedom to cancel culture.

@Provider Web rings, IRC, and forums. Actual personal home pages dedicated to niche interests.

It was glorious. Websites made with a texteditor. Fansites for games and TV shows. Ever pic took a good while to load line after line (we mid-boobies now!). IRC chat and slapping fish around. Usenet for serious discussions and help. Picking up a girl on a X-Files messageboard. A while later my mind was blown away by MP3. You could do what?! Download music. A track for only 30 minutes?! Wtf! Oh yeah, and MP3 encoding was done on the command line without gui. The mid 90s internet was awesome.

90s, slow (56kb/s) and expansive (4$/h) connection, PC was an instrument to do a single specific search at day without distractions. That's all. Game change was the subscription to monthly plans and speed up to 2mb/s.

I certainly don't miss all the exploits, viruses, and general lack of security. Security and privacy online are very recent. Back in the day, everything was transmitted in plain text and browsers and extensions were full of holes that were easily exploited. Your computer could get a virus just by opening a webpage.

I miss msn messenger so much.

Static websites, they may have looked terrible, but all that dynamic loading nowadays is infuriating.

Also I feel like I can't find things on websites anymore. 9/10 times it seems easier to just use a search engine to find the specific part of a website, instead of using the sites navigation. I remember that being different around the 2000s.

MSN Messenger, Angelfire, Geocities, marquee tags, flame gifs.

And forums, of course. Music forums, mostly. The dopamine hit when you posted enough to achieve the next "rank". Scrolling flame text in your signature.

I was 9 and had a cringy fan website for my favourite band. I used it to practice HTML and JavaScript (which blew my mind). HTML frames were the subject of a holy war at the time, so I had separate versions of the homepage, one using frames and one without. I would spam the (very few) visitors to my site with alerts and prompts.

Every now and again I would get random emails from (real) people around the world asking me to check out their band or their website etc. And most of the time they were actually good (by my standards at the time).

There was also, of course, the dreaded click which indicated your connection had been lost, most probably because someone had picked up the phone. So you'd have to reconnect and listen to that screechy dial-up sound.

I think what I miss is the novelty of the internet. The fact that it was fairly new was what made it exciting, whereas now the internet is old hat. That being said, a lot of the issues people complain about today's internet existed back then too. There were pop up ads that were annoying as hell, but fewer ad blockers. There was spyware and adware, which if you click the wrong thing would track your every move to add even more pop up ads. There was less security and awareness about that stuff back then, so it was easy to become a victim of spyware and adware. Hell, I remember when I first accessed the internet, it was through AOL, which was a major corporation back then with it's own browser and ecosystem that was designed to keep you on their webpages and seemed disinterested in letting you explore the web beyond that.

It was very user generated. And the search engines facilitated that, giving you very diverse results. This was long before the utter decline that is the current "authoritative" sources boosting. Now we're all herded into a few large web sites and social networks. It's a very sad state of affairs.

I spent 95% of my time shitposting on one forum in the early 2000's. It was a similar experience to spending 95% of my time on reddit or one of the other major social media sites, except that crazy new ideas for social media didn't really exist back then. They were all traditional forums where everything is posted in chronological order. I remember occasionally sumbling across a threaded forum back then, where you could reply directly to a comment and start a new thread chain like lemmy and reddit can. That was about it as far as innovation went, or at least from what I remember.

The other 5% where I was browsing those old web 1.0 sites with basic html and flash and all that stuff, I don't miss that stuff too much. It would be nice to browse through an archive of stuff like that once or twice for nostalgia's sake, but the modern internet is good too. I have no qualms with the modern internet.

@Provider YouTube gives adsense money for the effort. Your written guide on some trashy 90s website or Medium doesn't. The only people who write tutorials nowadays, are the ones that are getting payed by corps for muh SEO. That is why all guides start with "What is X?" instead of giving it straight to you.

@Provider Search. Can't find anything these days. I get so frustrated with the results being completely irrelevant and or obvious ads. I used to get 100 pages of results and have to narrow my search with operants like AND or "specific phrases". I used to feel like I had all this knowledge at my fingertips if I could just word it right. Much of it is still out there, I'll just never find it

This Tumblr post has some helpful links

https://www.tumblr.com/myalgias/721490730516922368/cea-tide-ladyshinga-im-sorry-friends-but

I remember my Technology teacher in high school (1998-ish) showing me what websites I could go to for downloading full albums for free. He initially showed me a directory just filled with Pink Floyd tracks.

You can still find things in open directories, but it doesn't have that same feel of being wild woolly and free.

I miss early social media like LiveJournal weirdly. 1999-2005-ish was wild times.

I also remember hosting DJ Dangermouse's "Grey Album" which was a mix of The Beatles White Album with Jay-Z's Black Album on my website as protest. The album was released for free, no money was made from it, yet Dangermouse was sued and banned from distributing it.

IRC when it was truly big and building your own homepage at Geocities

E-mail pen pals. I made friends from all over the world, it was a great way to get to know other people and their culture. Writing huge e-mails about where you're from and what life is like where you live. Because you usually only write one every couple of days, it was something to look forward to.
I guess social media kind of ruined that part, why write to someone when you can just post it for the whole world to see.

I remember going over to my buddy's place. He had this hovercraft game and it was the most unplayable garbage ever, but it was fun because you were racing against other people on the internet. You were lagging so hard and getting maybe 10 or less frames. Garbage experience, but an experience nonetheless lol.

@Provider
I miss Listerv culture. I grew up with mimeographed APA fanzines, and mailing lists were the most pure implementation of that kind of community on the Internet.

Seemed like any interest, no matter how obscure, had a welcoming Listerv community online. If you knew how to find it.

i think most of what i did was play freddi fish, pajama sam, and backyard baseball/football

Before the internet, there was this thing called Fidonet which is a BBS that also allowed transferring files. It was such amazing technology at the time. You had your computer connect to the network using an acoustic modem and then at 300 baud you were on a very early version of a peer-to-peer network.

it used to be more difficult for a smooth brain to tell everyone their opinion.

@Provider Written recipes where you didn't have any images or photos and didn't have to scroll down 14 pages of life story.

Just require a list of ingredients (using metric weights as only about 2 countries in the world use spoons and cups as a measure and every cook has scales), followed by a list of actions with time and temperatures where required.