The thing about AIM, was “OMG this person is available to chat instantly, right here, right now!” A lot of people didn’t have text messaging, or they did but it was expensive, so being able to chat remotely meant calling them on the phone, or you and the other person happened to be online at the same time.
I remember the day that the Old Internet died for me.
I saw my buddy was online on AIM, and I messaged him looking to shoot the shit. But he had just gotten a smartphone, and was logged into AIM on his smartphone, and it was not a good time for him to be shooting the shit because he was out and about doing stuff. So he was like “what do you need? I’m busy”.
Which is not something anyone had ever told me on AIM before. If you were on AIM you were by definition bored and looking to shoot the shit.
I guess we grew up too.
Ouch.
Also it was made to be fun and chill. You logged on talked to a few people end of transaction. You weren’t mined for data. They weren’t pushing ads and content based on your history. Myspace and aim just did a thing and you did that thing. Now the thing does you.
I miss flash games like pogo.com and stuff
Check out flashpoint archive.
The balloon popping game or as a standalone, bloody pingu smash.
I have probably hundreds of hours on Yahtzee on pogo loool
Bullshit. The technology WAS better.
Text communication took like, 28 Mb of RAM and was blazing fast, and a single chat application like Pidgin could interoperate with ALL of them.
❤️
How accessable was the old internet for visually impaired people?
While I appreciate the heavy handed strawman argument, it was entirely possible to make the old internet more accessible to those with disabilities WITHOUT making the technology worse in every single other way.
Mixed and depending on the year. Hardware was available, (braile and speech syth) but it was expensive as hell. There was a bit of a crisis when we went from dos to windows. None of the early GUI supported any of the hardware. In 95 you could use JAWS screen reader. Navigator 4 and IE5 were shit for a while until they started supporting it. Graphic images were still a problem, even after ALT tags became available, trying to get content makers to use them was a fight.
To say nothing of Flash. Sighted navigation was nontrivial.
oh god yes, flash and shockwave were awful. When my company used flash they also put text-only versions of the site up behind the scenes, but we were in the minority
So many mid-century googie disasters with bitcrushed sound effects whenever you so much as looked at a button. Homestar Runner isn’t a parody, it’s just how the web was. Toons! Toons! Chawacte–! Stooore!
The most personally nostalgic version of this still accessible is surely some PC Gamer demo disc launcher. Coconut Monkey era navigation by bouncing around a starship to run the Final Fantasy VII installer. That presumably still works, too, since the most stable Linux API is Win32.
back when using your real name on social media was idiotic
Still is
My mom then: don’t put any personal information on the internet!
My mom now: I just need to put my social security, credit card info, and full street address and I can see which Seinfeld character I’m most like!
Not long ago, I stumbled upon a legal YouTuber who covered an astonishing revelation: it turns out that casual users on Facebook or Instagram can get copyright strikes for the music Meta suggests they can embed in their shorts and atory reels…!??
I was there on MySpace 20 yeara ago - it was so much easier to approach musicians, and embedding their songs on your profile page was just one of the cool features. I still keep in touch with a few artists and bands from that era and still revisit them from time to time, even though I usually tend to always seek out music that is still to new…
P.S. Maybe it’s because I’m autistic, but I really feel the take in the OP just screams normie. Also, having an intense interest these days in decentralized social media and the smolweb and the rest of the indie web revival out there, I think things are not so bad, in a way. It feels better now that we know we’re going against the grain with things that might have been taken for granted 20+ years ago.
MSN chatrooms are where I met the first person I had a relationship with, AIM is mainly where we got to know each other.
And MySpace was what got me interested in web design, back when crafting webpages by hand was still seen as a form of art.
Remember:
Products from Amazon will cost MUCH MUCH LESS because there’s no “big box” overhead.
And shipping will be FREE!
That’s not it at all. The internet used to be a multitude of small sites. A true bazaar made by individuals, visited by individuals in their web browsers.
Now it is all the 5 biggest platforms trapping users in their apps and doing their best to wall everything off.
Bring on NomadNet!!!
or Gemini Protocol,
They’re both great retro, but sadly they’re largely missing interesting content ;(
See, when you open the front (web) page for the Gemini protocol, it looks like an actual human wrote that. When you do the same for NomadNet, it looks like (and with your computer fans sounds like) an investor cash grab. That’s probably why I don’t recall about the latter despite researching adjacent tech a lot before.
https://unsigned.io/rnode_bootstrap_console/s_nn.html
nomadnet is a application that’s a subnet of reticulum
reticulum provides the mesh and ssl transport, nomadnet is a hosting platform built on it. no cash involved.
i think the easiest path to trying out nomad is liam cottle’s (meshtastic guy) meshchat https://github.com/liamcottle/reticulum-meshchat he added support for nomad net
Cool.
Actually, I have heard of it, here to be precise. I guess the front page threw me off so bad that my brain filtered it out like it never happened.
yeah there’s a lot of stuff out there. I’m in to meshtastic/meshcore but have found them to be wanting.
I’ve also been playing with HaLow and Reticulum (30mbps), but the price and availability of the radios are rough.
I’m also hosting a little i2p, but more just to stay up on the tech, i2p is a lot dodgier and the available Android app appears to have tracking abilities.
Everything you did on the Internet didn’t exist just to sell you something; you weren’t a commodity to be manipulated and packaged with everything you looked at.
I miss the old internet because it was a time you could meet up with old friends and connect and stay in touch with each other.
A few things changed, though. First, enshittification of services. You used to go on Facebook and just SWIM in the lives of other people. Now it’s just promoted content. Second–related to the post–is rage was recruited to encourage engagement. Third, people’s behavior online shifted towards tribal identification, towards rage baiting the other side, towards performativity; and I honestly don’t know how much of that I can lay at the feet of Mark Zuckerberg.
I also miss the old internet because truly random things had a chance to make the rounds. Cracked.com had some of the finest writing I’ve ever read. Nowadays with SEO and official tie-ins (Forbes.com has a deal with Google), the only way to be seen is to spend money, and the only reason to spend money is to make money, so most everything online is now directly or indirectly an advertisement. AI only accelerated this process.
I think this is why Reddit became as huge as it did, because the weirdness still had a chance, and because people want to talk to each other. And now we have Lemmy.
We keep making and finding new islands as the waters continue to rise, but we used to roam the plains.
Yeah, I want to interact with people who are making/sharing stuff for the love of the game, not trying to be influencers or sell me something.
Capitalism Enshittifies The Internet - Scammers and Influencers Version©®™ 😂🤣
That last line is a powerful analogy and exactly how it feels.
Internet tech companies have perfected the art of enshittifying a service. Internet services these days practically follow a playbook of, 1.) hook users, 2.) build a walled garden, 3.) exploit users. Basically the EEE of the user-driven web. Pretty much every company at this point, both old and new (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Reddit, TikTok, Discord, Twitter, Netflix) follow this exact pattern.
Modern UI design, dark patterns, deprecating services while raising prices, “install our app!”, etc. We didn’t have this in the days of IRC, Usenet, all that other good stuff before corporate web came around.
AKA, the Internet matured and became corporate like every other form of media before it.
Very nicely put
You’re not describing the old Internet.
So what are they describing?
The 2000s internet.
26 years ago is pretty old, in relation to the lifespan of the internet
What’s before then then?
That would be the classical era of the internet, just after the baroque internet which in turn followed the renaissance internet.
If you go back further you’ll find the internet of late antiquity, the ancient internet before that, then finally the pre-internet which we can only study through physical media since it was the era prior to the earliest known examples of the internet.
What percentage of people do you think had the internet in 1995?
The Internet in 1995 was an amazing place. You could find so many scholarly articles and weird funny sites, but every place to chat was full of creepy old men trying to meet kids. Which we thought was hilarious until we got a bit older and realized some of our friends were trying to meet them back. You’d accidentally find all manner of horrific shit, but there was information available. It wasn’t all true but it was almost all honest.
Which is wildly different from today where it feels like almost none of it’s honest. Even the stuff that’s true is only selectively true and trying to manipulate us into a worse place.
In the nineties fox news was strong and we were already experiencing a lot of it’s style of selective truth coupled with outright lies from other places, too. On the Internet at the time it was a lot easier to avoid that stuff.
Not 0? This chain is confusing. I guess a lot of you are young and me pointing out a truth really bothered y’all. Sorry gen Z.
Bullshit. Getright and bitchx said so.
If I was not banned from Facebook I would add this to groups and then argue with people about ☠️
Well, then the Internet wasn’t a capitalist shithole. It was only a shithole.
Also the Internet wasn’t crapped up with every moron imaginable that could pick up a phone. There was a minimum barrier to entry; you needed a computer and to have at least average intelligence to figure out how to use it.
We’re still living in the Eternal September. It used to be that there was a certain etiquette to being online. Don’t ask a question someone else already asked, don’t pretend to be an authority on something you’re not, and so on. Then September 1993 happened. Suddenly there was a much bigger new cohort of internet users who needed to assimilate to the culture. It was an endless cohort of people who didn’t know how to behave. October came around more new user, November, December were the same. The change didn’t happen quickly. It took decades but it started then.
This is the right answer. Also the internet hadn’t been overtaken by big companies and bots. And law makers was just starting to understand what it was, so it wasn’t censored left and right. It really was a magical time.
