This is the Web of the 1990s and, to some degree, the early 2000s — that some of us experienced and remember.
The Web that some of us want to make a come back.
Discussion
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@reiver i do occasionally see some individual websites, mainly those shared with me through matrix and fedi. seeing peoples' creativity in their expression is a treat in the hellscape that is the modern web and i hope it becomes more common
@reiver It was because corporations just couldn't understand it at the time. And they didn't have the frameworks setup for all the enshittification (like all the tracking stuff) back then.
The Web was basically mostly owned by real people instead of corporations and it was both horrible and amazing at the same time. 😆
Wow there sure were a lot of trolls back in those days though... That's one thing that seems to have eased up somehow. They're still around of course, but not nearly as many. At least outside of places like 4-chan or whatever.
@reiver, oh yeah, I still remember when searching for a recommendation or a comparison between two whatever things/products yielded something else than a bunch of nameless websites with paragraphs of barely helpful boilerplate text written by fucking robots with the sole intention of keeping me on the page/website for as long as possible.
@reiver The 3 podcasters who made the #forkiverse talk somewhat negatively about the #fediverse being nostalgic and populated by older internet denizens stubbornly clinging to old internet values.
They can pry these positive and open internet values from my cold, dead keyboard.
@reiver Maybe it was different outside the anglosphere, but that kind of webs were a thing until the beginning of the 2010s. Algorithms that favored clickbait were the first to suffocate them, forcing them to change or dissapear. However, that type of content was not completely eradicated, but rather it happened as in Fahrenheit 451.
@reiver
I have some long lost sites in my bookmarks 😢
@reiver Yeah, a time when you could put up your own site and not have to cut the cable to protect yourself. About 5 years up and Linux was all I needed to be safe. Even Bliss couldn't get me. . . 8*)
@reiver Ah, the days before monetization. To mis-quote Chris Hitchens, "Capitalism poisons everything"
@reiver Before HTML it was all college nerds. Every autumn we'd get an influx of freshmen but we outnumbered them and could civilize them.
Then came AoL and the Forever September with its legions of racists, evangelists, and other scammers looking for anything they could steal or corrupt to make a buck off of.
It's been downhill since.
@reiver they still exist, it just got a bit drowned out with all the advertising content and people that wanted a slice of the cake without having anything to add
@reiver It was a much less commercialized web. But it was monetized; it is mass marketing and product placement. The internet has become a world wide mall, rather than a free university or free library.
@reiver
If you want and have the ambition. You can still get smarter on the web. But that will take effort and humans are lazy. So stupid wins. 😣
@reiver I'm before that. Dial up, bulletin boards, free AOL floppy disc...
This is so much the vibe I felt when I started using the fediverse... When websites had specific pages for links to other websites. Because other people were doing cool stuff too.
@reiver let's not fall for nostalgia. Ye olde internet was full of braindead content for braindead people. You just remember the nice parts. 2 girls 1 cup isn't an Ode to Joy. Mr. Hands wasn't a fountain of wisdom.
You are correct that not everything for the old Web is worth salvaging. (Such as shock sites.)
But, I (and I suspect many others) feel that there were aspects of the old Web that are worth trying to restore.
@reiver HELLZ YEAH BROTER!
@reiver So true! We had NCSA Mosaic, but no Google, Meta, and no surveillance capitalism, real-time bidding, enshittification engines, and no attention industry.
The old structure is still here, and it works. The Internet works w/o Google, but Googly doesn't work w/o the Internet.
Try for yourself: Protect your home network w/ DNS filtering technology, e. g., a Pi-hole. Stringently use filters to block enshittified web content. Manually blacklist the whole of Google. This renders Google unusable from within your home network.
Enshittified web presences may not work properly anymore or not at all - , but you will be amazed how much of the Internet is still working! Positive side-effect: Much of tracking shit and targeted advertising vanishes from your island of happiness.
It works.