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.
Thank you for mentioning neocities. I did not stumble over this project until now and I love it!
Its not that there is a shortage of these spaces, its that they are not popular. I’m not sure they ever were popular amongst the general public though, to be fair. Personally I think its okay to have a somewhat small community.
Yes, I like it smaller! Ideally you have a sort of fractal structure of a bunch of smaller, tighter communities, which are also bound up in larger but looser communities. Then you can get the benefits of broad exposure and resource sharing from large communities, as well as the benefits of meaningful individual engagement and respectful kinship from smaller communities. I think that personal sites along with forums and the rest of the Internet really can do a great job of bringing this about.
As with many things, the responsibility ultimately lies on the individual to protect themselves and resist falling into bad patterns. Most primarily, maintaining your small community takes effort, and it’s much easier to just be a passive part of a very large community that subsists on infrequent uninvested involvement from many people. It’s even easier to be part of a “community as a service” like Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, etc. where all the incentives behind community building responsibilities have been supplemented with real income or fame. But of course then the people making posts, suggesting ideas, steering trends, managing communities, etc. are all in it for reasons that are not necessarily aligned with the well-being of community members. Hence the platform becomes a facade of a healthy community. Really good community upkeep seems to need to be done out of a love for the community, and any income you collect is to support that, rather than the other way around. But love for a community is often not sufficient fuel to power someone to serve huge groups out of the goodness of their heart, when they don’t even know 99% of the members. Not to mention that even if someone really is that altruistic and empathetic, the time and resources become unfeasible. So ultimately, a fractal model or an interleaved model seems to be the only one that could work.
Don’t get me wrong. Large communities are awesome in their own ways and have their own benefits. They have more challenges, though. Ultimately the best way to build a good large community is by building a good small community.
Would you say all of that is true for communities outside in the real world? Ive a theory that groups can become so large the negatives nearly always outweigh the positives but I haven’t really had time to think it through entirely.
I do think the real world has some differences that make it more difficult. Mostly that whoever is coordinating the larger groups is very likely to have access to more power and resources and therefore is corruptible. And then that’s one of the systems that brings about that Pareto distribution sort of imbalance among people. Some inequality in terms of power is not destructive, but too much is almost guaranteed to end badly. But online, the sort of power and resources that are accrued are ultimately just less likely to eventually reach a point of being able to exert full control over the smaller layers of the community. I mean sure, someone could start acting despotic with their own “fiefdom” as another commenter aptly put it, like has sometimes happened with open source repositories or forums, but it’s hard for someone’s website to get so popular that they’re somehow able to directly force changes upon your website (not impossible, I know).
Rage bait attention seeking absolutely was a thing back then, it was just severely limited and localized.
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.
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).
The fediverse is similar enough for me :)
We need to just ban advertising. The free with ads model is toxic to humanity.
Ads are fine relatively speaking. Its the data brokers that are the real problem
Data brokers wouldn’t exist without ads. The whole reason companies collect info on people is to better manipulate them into buying products.
Gemini is trying to bring that back.
Although it may not be technically the best approach, the 56k vibe is there.What are your favorite capsules? My favorite is Ploum.
Whenever i dip my nose it’s a rabbit hole and it’s 1h to get up to go to work, so… no fav yet…
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’m so old I remember webrings.
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.
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.
It was capitalism. Proves that they would sell to you the rope to hang them.
they would sell to you the rope to hang them.
They would sell you a subscription for the rope nowadays.
Capitalism ruins everything, just look at America
Britain ruined North America (ask the many natives of colonial times) before America could ruin the rest of the continent, then itself
I’m not sure I’d pin the ruining of north America on the Brits. They got that ball rolling.
While the big three empirical powers that colonized the Americas are all at fault, they are late comers compared to the Spanish. By the time the British started their first colony Desoto had ripped through appalachia, on a quest for gold, and had murdered, raped, and enslaved many natives. More importantly though, he introduced most of the tribes to old world diseases, which was apocalyptic to them.
True, that ball was already rolling when the Brits kicked it, but my point is that it didn’t stop being kicked afterwards either. Or to this day, really.
Oh yeah, the Native American genocide is still happening. These days it is mostly ignoring treaties to take their land for things like oil pipelines, but still going on.
They would sell you the rope to hang yourself … and market you the idea that it would be a good and popular thing to hang yourself with their Deluxe Hangman 3000 Super rope made from naturally sourced hemp.
I think the expression is the capitalists will sell you the rope with which you’ll hang them.
So long as you’re planning to hang them next quarter – they can’t see that far.
How much?
Stop blaming capitalism - people are the problem, not the systems they create.
The average person is a fucking retard and that’s not changing - when they reach a space, it goes to shit.
This self-loathing bullshit is way too common.
People aren’t the problem, the average person is average, the system is what drives down the average mental and emotional intelligence instead of up, and humanity is filled with plenty of people like Mr. Rogers, Bob Ross, and Harriet Tubman.
“People” are okay. They’re just suffering under the boots of a small group of people who are not.
Lmao speak for yourself with the “self loathing” label - I hate the rest of y’all because you’re dumb as fuck.
Ah yes, people are the problem, but you’re not people. You’re better than that.
As long as we’re blaming something instead of coming up with a new system of distributing goods and services.
I think a problem is that different people have different meanings attached to the word capitalism
when some people hear it they think of trillionares exploiting homeless people, but when I hear it I think of private property and markets and competition
Im chill with the 2ed meaning, as long as it doesnt get out of control (like nowadays)
Listen, I hate capitalism as much as the next guy, but that’s not the case. Normies ruined the internet, then capitalists latched onto the normies.
The normies are fine, the problem is that capitalists consolidated everything into 4 websites and then started pushing the unprofitable weirdos like us off those sites.
It’s not a big deal, we’ve made niches for ourselves and will continue to do so because we can’t rely on corporate services not to enshittify.
It’s not a big deal
It’s absolutely a big deal. Normies getting propagandized by capitalists are how we got fascism, and no amount of “making niches for ourselves” will save us from that.
True
Plus the corporate web constantly kills off our niche spaces in the effort to make them palatable for advertisers by sanitizing minorities out of their own spaces.
I used to be super active in r/traaaa before the 3rd party plugin exodus and subsequent shutdown of the forum. Now? Those people either made a new Reddit or scattered to the 4 winds, and a similar space has struggled to take off here on Lemmy. And that’s just one of many instances of this sort of thing happening.
Both are rights, but the normies definitely destroyed the internet culture. They invaded forums without any regard for the rules set before (remember “RTFM”?), and when capitalism arrived, they all moved to commercial sites.
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Normies ruined the internet
I’m sorry, I can’t hear you over the Cyptocurrency freaks, the click bait video game ads, and the endless AI generated slop.
What was this about my dear sweet mother, who can barely check her email anymore because of all this crap, ruining the Internet?
Nah, the internet has always sucked it just has gotten worse
90’s internet was awesomer. It was simple and chill and small. We hand-wrote our silly little HTML pages and freely published our email addresses. I once mailed some random person a check to pay for a piece of shareware. They were the true halcyon days of the internet.
<blink>!!!I miss
<marquee>myself.
I was playing with some old UNIX software, and in the help text the dev said they were collecting foreign currency and asked people to send postcards with foreign currency, listing their full name and personal address. It was last updated in 1995.
What software?
A collection of games called “flying” which despite the name is a pool/billiards/curling/air hockey sim.
I had it mentioned on a Cathode Ray Dude YouTube video and wanted to try it, which led me down a bit of a rabbit hole. As far as I could find it never got ported to Linux? But it’s still in the FreeBSD repositories. So I spun up FreeBSD on a VM but couldn’t get it working because it refuses to launch on X if you have more than 8-bit color, and I was having a hell of a time launching X in that mode. So I downloaded a copy of FreeBSD 4 from around 2000 and got it to run.
I’m not that “way back when everything was better” person, but I agree.
Nothing was monetized mid-2000s? That sentence, while still an exaggeration, would have made sense 10 years earlier. Also “ragebait and attention seeking” were rampant on these “forums focused on discussion”.
I remember reading through an archive of some pre Eternal September forum argument about Aliens being a shitty, overrated movie.
You know. Aliens. Uncontroversially one of the best movies ever made.
I think the difference is that nowadays it feels like this isn’t quarantined to specific forums or usenet communities. We’ve all dealt with people IRL who use Twitter in 2025 and those people are absolutely cooked beyond belief.
As quiVadisHomines says, too, the
90’s'90s net was a simpler time; but I think that was because it was well-backed by schools and even then mostly unknown – September Effect notwithstanding.Is it capitalism or just the tribe-too-large problem? Both, where we’re not united enough to socially correct the behaviour that would be knocked down sooner with a smaller group?
Anyway, I miss the enforced simplicity of no-images/rare-images Usenet, and how it highlighted the writing and the ideas.
It’s beyond me to dream up a suitable Usenet replacement, but I know for sure that FB, IG, Lemmy, they’re solving a different problem.
IMO there’s “the Internet before Canter and Siegel” and “the Internet after Canter and Siegel”.
On the pre C&S Internet, not only was nothing monetized, there was a sense that even having an ad for something commercial was against the culture. The downside was that the pre C&S Internet was small, slow and limited.
Overall, I think the 2025 Internet is much better than 1994. But, there were certainly things to appreciate about an Internet without ads, without algorithms trying to win the attention economy, etc.
Whomever wrote this had to have been a child during that time because this doesn’t describe the internet I saw.
The 1990s internet was closer to this fantastical notion.
No, 1990s internet just hadn’t actually fulfilled the full potential of the web.
Video and audio required plugins, most of which were proprietary. Kids today don’t realize that before YouTube, the best place to watch trailers for upcoming movies was on Apple’s website, as they tried to increase adoption for QuickTime.
Speaking of plugins, much of the web was hidden behind embedded flash elements, and linking to resources was limited. I could view something in my browser, but if I sent the URL to a friend they might still need to navigate within that embedded element to get to whatever it was I was talking about.
And good luck getting plugins if you didn’t use the right operating system expected by the site. Microsoft and Windows were so busy fracturing the web standards that most site publishers simply ignored Mac or Linux users (and even ignored any browser other than MSIE).
Search engines were garbage. Yahoo actually provided a decent competition to search engines by paying humans to manually maintain an index, and review user submissions on whether to add a new site to the index.
People’s identities were largely tied to their internet service provider, which might have been a phone company, university, or employer. The publicly available email address services, not tied to ISP or employer or university, were unreliable and inconvenient. We had to literally disconnect from the internet in order to dial into Eudora or whatever to fetch mail.
Email servers only held mail for just long enough for you to download your copy, and then would delete from the server. If you wanted to read an archived email, you had to go back to the specific computer you downloaded it to, because you couldn’t just log into the email service from somewhere else. This was a pain when you used computer labs in your university (because very few of us had laptops).
User interactions with websites were clunky. Almost everything that a user submitted to a site required an actual HTTP POST transaction, and a reloading of the entire page. AJAX changed the web significantly in the mid 2000’s. The simple act of dragging a map around, and zooming in and out, for Google Maps, was revolutionary.
Everything was insecure. Encryption was rare, and even if present was usually quite weak. Security was an afterthought, and lots of people broke their computers downloading or running the wrong thing.
Nope, I think 2005-2015 was the golden age of the internet. Late enough to where the tech started to support easy, democratized use, but early enough that the corporations didn’t ruin everything.
Search engines were garbage. Yahoo actually provided a decent competition to search engines by paying humans to manually maintain an index, and review user submissions on whether to add a new site to the index.
If the web today didn’t consist of “5 websites each with screenshots from the other 4”, that could be even more competitive now when search engines have figured out how to monetize bullshit.
Email servers only held mail for just long enough for you to download your copy, and then would delete from the server. If you wanted to read an archived email, you had to go back to the specific computer you downloaded it to, because you couldn’t just log into the email service from somewhere else. This was a pain when you used computer labs in your university (because very few of us had laptops).
That’s a feature of the POP3 protocol, not mandatory, though usually used. Now people usually use IMAP and web frontends, and sometimes Exchange.
That was the normal way, yes, because disk space is not endless.
User interactions with websites were clunky. Almost everything that a user submitted to a site required an actual HTTP POST transaction, and a reloading of the entire page.
Maybe that’s how it should have been still.
Everything was insecure. Encryption was rare, and even if present was usually quite weak. Security was an afterthought, and lots of people broke their computers downloading or running the wrong thing.
That’s a fact. Well, at the same time popular knowledge that nothing is secure leads, paradoxically, to more security. People knowing everything they say is unprotected will be more responsible. That’s one thing that has sort of become better technically, but worse socially.
Nope, I think 2005-2015 was the golden age of the internet. Late enough to where the tech started to support easy, democratized use, but early enough that the corporations didn’t ruin everything.
I think I agree, except more like 2004-2011 for me.
That time period was after everything was monetized and full of ads though.
You don’t remember NetZero, do you? A free dial up ISP that gave free Internet connections under the condition that you give up like 25% of your screen to animated banner ads while you’re online.
Or BonziBuddy? Literal spyware.
What about all the MSIE toolbars, some of which had spyware, and many of which had ads?
Or just plain old email spam in the days before more sophisticated filters came out?
C’mon, you’re looking at the 1990s through rose tinted glasses. I’d argue that the typical web user saw more ads in 1998 than in 2008.
I used NetZero dialup and played shooters online. I’d get killed a LOT with the lag. Also I uninstalled that damned ape buddy from dozens of peoples machines.
I remember that if you feared everything and only used programs and visited websites your friends recommended, you’d be much better than now. If you were careless, you had a bunch of banners and a porn blocker at the end of the day.
There’s something refreshing in this TBH.
A map in your browser with full scrolling and zooming may have been impressive back then, it’s true. But you know what’s impressive today?
$ telnet mapscii.meA map in your terminal with full scrolling and zooming. 😎
Self hosting and federated social media. Take back control. Fuck the corporations.
This is why I’m a big fan of Lemmy and federated social media. It removes the monetization incentive, and it’s obscure enough to barely be targeted by bots (so far). The remaining piece that is still an issue, in my opinion, is that we’re still engulfed in the more modern internet culture of rage-bait, walling ourselves into our echo chambers, and occasionally seeing heavy-handed moderation.
I’ll take two wins out of three any day though.
obscure enough to barely be targeted by bots
Nicole is a trailblazer.
We need to bring back meta-moderation, kind of like Slashdot had.
I didn’t use Slashdot. How was it handled there?
I’ll take forum lords ruling too strictly over their little fiefdoms over the kind of stuff that happens on large platforms wrt moderation.
I agree … but we should develop the federated social media in whatever way we can, however it turns out or looks like or even operates … as long as we’re using it, it’s a good thing.
As long as corporate control is kept at bay and away from federated social media, we’ll be OK.
If any corner of the federated social media starts to get infected with corporate control, then that disease will just grow and consume the whole system … just like every other thing it destroyed before.
Yeah, I think most of the problems are downstream of corporate control. Maybe we take that piece away and the others follow.
(Or maybe the last 15 years of corporate sanitization of social media has left a cultural impact that isn’t going away…)
Nah, time heals all wounds… as long as they have time to heal.
modern internet culture of rage-bait, walling ourselves into our echo chambers, and occasionally seeing heavy-handed moderation.
I was around for usenet and those have all always been a thing. That’s just how people are. They just don’t call it “flaming” any more.
Oh totally, but I was thinking less about edgy trolls and more like, rage-bait headlines and rants intended to keep you engaged with a platform because you’re mad. Or, for example, floods of political posts with all the nuance of a negative daytime TV campaign ad (you know, with the deep voice, storm clouds, and spooky music).
I remember in the early days of the internet, that type of content was around, but still largely relegated to talk radio or email forwards. Now it’s mainstream and some of the most popular content on every major social media site. It’s disappointing and feels inauthentic, like your favorite hang-out spots have slowly filled up with solicitors handing out flyers.
Yeah, corporations getting involved to monetize those things for engagement is new. Before it was for the sheer joy of arguing with/pissing off people. That still exists as well, of course.
And because we aren’t chasing profit, mass adoption, or clout here, we can get increasingly local and granular with our instances, and increasingly rigorous about who we let in. Since what we’re chasing is real community, we have nothing to sell out for. And even if some instances do flip over to corpos, we can just defederate and welcome the inevitable influx of departing users.
The thing you really have to look out for in the future is “premium” instances or forks of Lemmy which are paywalled, and eventually locked down to a single instance. It just becomes the next Twitter. It’s unlikely, but something to be wary of once the rest of the open internet is picked clean.
Shame that capital is without a doubt mining our genuine public communications for their wage depressing plagiarism machines, because it’s not like you can get that from the old place anymore.
…it’s obscure enough to barely be targeted by bots (so far).
This is what concerns me. If the fediverse ever catches on to the point where it’s worth it for bad actors to be running bots, not only will instances have to restrict signups, but also defederate from those that don’t (kinda like how beehaw does it).
