There are still plenty of small websites around. The Naive Weekly newsletter is a great way to find out about them.
this post was submitted on 29 May 2025
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Microblog Memes
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The internet didn't want you. You used the internet at your own risk. You were the outsider there, and I miss that. Anything friendly was still trying to figure out how to sell things to you on the internet.
Blogs never begged for dopamine
The little counter I put on my page certainly did! Got so excited when it reached 100, even though it was mostly me.
But you never made an onlyfans to channel more traffic and then eventually get caught up in a cartel and get owned and sold by a pimp even though on paper it looked as if you were making your own choices.
"email never throttled you"
Someone forgot about the good ol' days of spam? Chainmails? Viruses? Here's an example of a classic virus,
YOU HAVE NOW RECEIVED THE UNIX VIRUS
This virus works on the honor system:
If you're running a variant of Unix or Linux, please forward thismessage to everyone you know and delete a bunch of your files at random.
I can assure you, your email is throttled. You just haven’t noticed.
They used to make you pay $100/yr for an email address.
Not custom. Just an email address
The "old internet" still exists mostly. People have moved on to other things. You can still use IRC, Usenet, RSS, BBS, Forums... they all exist. They may not be as popular.. but a lot of the old web tech is still out there.
If anyone really cares, gopher is still somewhat alive.
Absolutely miss that old internet.
It had flaws aplenty, but anyone could pick up a “…for dummies” book and cadge together a website. Plenty of free website generators and hosts, too. All those personal pages, family pages, “Hello World!” pages, personal hobbies and small businesses…. Then of course the newsgroups, freeware apps and tools from generous people filling in the gaps in available software…yeah. It was completely unpolished, wild, and unpredictable…but it was awesome, available, and far more egalitarian.
I do miss it, the zeitgeist anyway. Sure. Modern speeds and frontends are nice, but everyday people are priced out and corralled, monetized and stalked. We’ve become the coppertops of The Matrix; exploited, mined, and willingly, in some cases, enslaved.
Actually, it was probably kind of a boon for us nerds, because cool people would come to us and ask us to make their webpages for them. Now Zuck etc. does it for them...
There's more computing power than ever but seemingly fewer services than ever.
It is easier than it's ever been to host your own website. You could have what most personal websites were like in the 00s without ever once coming out of the free tier in Azure. Domains are still gonna cost you, but actual hosting is pennies.
Yes, I don’t disagree that it’s not hard, especially with all the free templates available. Today, however, the odds of anyone ever randomly finding your personal self-hosted website are essentially zero. You don’t have any SEO, no adspace to earn higher search engine priority, nothing. Someone would have to specifically search for you/your site to find you. That’s unlike the early web where your site might randomly show up in a search for whatever hobby/business/interest that you might have included in site text or “about” in the HTML.
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I miss forums. Reddit and discord and gb ruined it.
Fuck you, yes it was perfect.
bring back geocities!
THANK you, there goes a week's worth of my life now
You can get a full dose of nostalgia with this one: https://displayman.neocities.org/
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This might not be a question for you, but I'll ask it anyway.
What do we do to get it back? I have computers, I have an internet connection. What can I and we do to make our space?
I still use email and RSS.
If you want to read blogs and minor websites, maybe check out kagis "small web" index (this is free access I believe): https://kagi.com/smallweb
The real web is still there, and probably has as many users as it did 25 years ago, but the average person doesn't use it. Remember the average person didn't use the internet much at all 25 years ago.
One thing I want to do is try to create a space for family to hang out. Self-hosted. No concerns about data mining or trolls, just a personal space for us.
They don't have to use it but starting from the right group, I think they will, many of them perhaps only because it will become the only place to see photos of our kids. Just need the right platform.
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Support federated content and sites. Self-host your own content using software that makes it compatible with federation. Continue to use democratized protocols (email, RSS, etc.)
We’ll never be able to go back to the way it was. But we can take the good parts and center around them going forward. Proprietary and silo’d content and platforms eat themselves alive by design. The open web just has to outlive it.
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The old internet died when we started gamifying human interaction.
Get rid of up/down votes. Get rid of reputation points. Get rid of Emojis. Get rid of all that shit. That shit has lead to dopamine overload, and the extremism in human interaction both on and offline.. cause people don't just talk to each other anymore. Humans, on the whole, just regurgitate ideas and comments back and forth that previously got high marks, thus getting them high marks. People tend to be afraid to speak unpopular but necessary truths because they are scared of their magic fairy points being reduced by an onslaught of downvotes/dislikes/whatevers, Or god forbid something you said be misconstrued and a whole hate train pile on you because you have 30 downvotes so obviously you are wrong and evil and bad, thus resulting in interaction being skewed ever further towards more and more extremes in content because of the incessant need to fish for that next hit of the gamified reward systems.
Its toxic as fuck.
Human interaction shouldnt be gamified. It should just..exist.
Voting is great though. It helps sort wheat from chaff.
... Is what i would like to say, but maybe that only works in smaller communities. I know a YouTuber who is currently getting baselessly harassed by popular assholes and she probably has an insane number of dislikes.
Voting is great though. It helps sort wheat from chaff.
Except it doesnt.
It just reinforces blind group think, no thought or reason. Upvotes don't make people more right, downvotes don't make people more wrong. Its just thoughtless highschool cliquey shit, that was intentionally created to manipulate users into conflict to provoke more engagement.. Theres a reason this upvote/downvote shit started on ad driven social media... Only you get to do it all hidden behind the anonymity of a button.
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Twice this week I've looked up some song lyrics origins/meanings, and it's obvious the old sites are just running LLM summaries of every song they have in their DB.
Wikipedia has notoriously been vague on this, only covering it with a couple sentences for some interview source etc. But those couple of sentences said so much more than the 20 paragraph essay of an LLM trying to figure out and explain creative writing.
It used to be fans chimed in with their ideas and sources, establishing a solid lyrics origin or meaning. But apparently that's dead now for the big services and the blogs that exist buried under SEO.
Seriously, do it now and see what I'm talking about. It's absolute spew.
LLM trying to figure out and explain creative writing.
They aren't even that capable. They simply try to predict the words that would meet a naïve observer's expectations.
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RSS still works pretty well.
As does everything else in the list. It's just that almost no one uses it, because people don't mind the not owning in exchange of the content.
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We need to reject web3 and create web 1.5. a modern version of web 1.0, without the bullshit and platforms.
Join the uBlock+NoScript revolution! We don't even see the social media buttons.
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i donno man. i still use rss, and they solved tracking by not putting the article in the xml, just a link that ends in source rss.
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We used to make our own WEB PAGES!
Blogs never begged for dopamine
My livejournal certainly did.
I still use my feed reader ever day.
past tense
I still use these things. People who post this shit are telling on themselves.
Also, you didn't need to have a mobile phone just to sign up on a site.
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