Ah, the early days of the internet where every click on a link felt like you discovered something new and exciting. I remember making my own ‘homepage’ (with stats counter, most of the visits were my own), the dial-up modem’s noises, browsing open ftp servers to find interesting warez and generally not worrying about viruses.

Less centralized than it is now. Miss that.

Less ads.

Otoh web design was very childish back then. Peak was Starfield background with bright color text with some animated gifs plastered all over.

I think I miss most is online gaming where voice chat wasn’t an option. Things were a tad more civilized when you had to type in what you wanted to say. Or just efficient. I actually learned to type fast cuz of this. Plus I can read the shorthand better than understand most people’s accents.

I think it would be the separation between “real life” and “online life”.

Getting hacked used to mean either restoring a page from a backup, asking your friends to help you get some gear back, or deleting posts on a forum.

Today, getting hacked leads to empty bank accounts, identity theft, and real life fallout.

I miss the anonymity that was the “default”, when the logged in user was the data product, not the person behind that user.

Most of all, I miss the community that used to exist with their odd etiquettes and diverse ideals. It was a delight to stumble across new forums, now it always just seems to be more of the same.

People talk about the early days of the Internet, then only go back as far as the world wide web.

There was Internet before Web servers.

When I think of the early Internet, I’m usually thinking of USENET. Posting a question about a Linux device driver not working, getting an answer back from the guy who wrote it, and then him fixing it to work with your hardware.

If I think of the early web, it was very exciting. Mosaic was the browser, and HTML was clean. Briefly, it was almost pure information and untainted by profit motive.

Anyone with a server on the Internet (an extremely exclusive group) could install a web server and start their own site. It was very populist among the privileged few who could participate.

There were assholes. There are always assholes. But there were very few stupid assholes. The nature of the early Internet meant there was a certain threshold you had to cross before you had access. Then, AOL came, and stupid assholes arrived.

It’s been downhill ever since.

Now GET OFF MY LAWN!!!

Edit: typo

So, I was born in 1976 and nineteen years later I had high speed internet. I do often sit and think about those early days. For me, it was a lot about trying new things and making them work in a fashion that I wanted. I mean, aside from all the AOL chat rooms, Second Life, ICQ, etc. There was a lot of exploration and creativity. It wasn’t very different from Lemmy and Mastodon at the moment, to some degree.

Then came Web 2.0. I was reminiscing about that recently as I went through my old (circa 2007) Twitter account and deleted the dozens and dozens of Connected Apps and Services. Back when Twitter was an SMS service only, you had to use third party apps to connect to it. There were so many awesome apps back then, even before the iOS App Store. Then so many of those apps were bought by Google, Facebook, or Apple and turned into something else or just flat out killed because of the competition. Most of them didn’t make it. RIP PhotoVine.

What’s sad is that our collective creative expression is being used for likes and karma removed on social media (because you can actually get paid while the platform serves ads) rather than creating our own unique communities. It seems like the Fediverse gives some of that power back to us - if we choose to utilize it.

I mean, it’s great that these social platforms exist for people to so-easily create and express themselves but at the same time it’s all so repetitive and click baity / rage baity. The algorithm decides what to show you to keep your attention the longest, not to motivate or inspire you. It’s not super easy to find interesting quirky odd things that make you question the world so social media is creating a warped sense of reality where we all generally like the same things. It’s monotonous. It’s artificial. It’s driven by dopamine and ad revenue. I know it’s not all bad, but a lot of it is. I know there’s lots of weird and quirky and inspiring content out there. But a lot of it is not. The problem is how do we discover this stuff if we don’t already know about it?

What I miss about the early days of the internet is the lack of a handful of megacorps owning and curating everything we experience.

I miss the wild west feel and community. And that it wasn’t always online. I also hate that everything is in a web app,etc. I miss exploring random websites. I feel like the internet is just a series of walled gardens these days.

Its not super early but I miss the big days of Flash Games. A plethora of passionate games all at your fingertips. My heart goes out to all the developers that made that possible.

You didn’t have to subscribe to everything

Fun fact: You can recreate a lot of this by starting your own website. Remember all the quirky, niche stuff you could stumble over? Large corporate sites forced all of that onto their server and baited people with millions of views and money. Everything not viral was punished and hidden away. But we can still jsut put stuff on the web for free or for a couple of bucks with a webhoster somewhere. It’s work, it serves small audiences and it might be totally overlooked. But it will be YOURS.

In that sense, promote your blog or website here: https://feddit.de/c/blogging

@Provider

So many of these responses about the “early days of the internet” are talking about websites.

Does WWW really count as “the early internet?”

Good grief I’m old.

I remember just the sheer wonder and awe. The raw thrill of exploration… It hadnt been corprotized yet, So there wasnt any real ads or anything. Just a vast existence that felt like raw, unexplored territory, every keystroke unveiling a new and wonderous world hidden just behind the next hill.

Websites had visitor counters, which further enforced the thrill of exploration when you stumbled upon a website that had a visitor counter in the single or double digits. Discovering the bleeding edges of human civilization, where a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent had dared to tread.

The raw exhilaration of it all causing time to seemingly stop for you, until you realize 36 hours has past in the blink of an eye, and suddenly crash for 12+ hours of sleep.

There is no magic to the web anymore. Its just…a utility. Boring, and sterile. Dangers more from the corporatization and ads thananything else. Changing constantly only in the pursuit of shifting trends expressly and only for the purpose of improving metrics… because getting 30,000 hits that’ll never come back looks better than 5,000 people that regularly engage.

God fucking hell I’m depressed as fuck now.

i miss all the charming chatrooms, blogs and this realy oldschool selfmade homepages.

Also i miss MSN a little bit but Discord is a close enough experience.

Sadly after Facebook got popular all of these went downhill realy quick…

expired

call me crazy, but I miss chat rooms and “A/S/L?”

'course I was a teen at the time, so maybe that’s why.

&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.