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.
this post was submitted on 29 May 2025
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Microblog Memes
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I miss forums. Reddit and discord and gb ruined it.
The new Internet is shitty. Like dirty meth.
What kind of pages get indexed?
Pages must be simple in design. Simple HTML, non-commerical sites are preferred. Pages should not use much scripts/css for cosmetic effect.
Bring back Livejournal. It was free therapy and you could be your messy self.
It was just the first taste of a sweet poison.
There's still rss.
There's still email.
There are still blogs.
And there's gemini.
In México very little News sources use RSS, at most they have Flipboard accounts or Twitter :(
This also applies to information about the government, where most of the politicians and other elements use Twitter :/
You can't even get regulatory bodies to have an RSS feed. In my last job I was really annoyed because the only way you could figure out if the EU had changed their chemical regulations is by being in either a very specific LinkedIn group or just checking their website again and again.
It's hard to write software for regulatory compliance when the regulations and data schema change seemingly at random.
Sometimes you just have to dig a little deeper because they don't really want you using RSS. If you give me some examples I can take a look
True elsewhere – there's no profit in RSS I guess.
It is still around though and you can RSS-ify some sites.
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.
They used to make you pay $100/yr for an email address.
Not custom. Just an email address
I can assure you, your email is throttled. You just haven’t noticed.
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.
We used to make our own WEB PAGES!
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.
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.
There's more computing power than ever but seemingly fewer services than ever.
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...
And it's not like there was any shortage of dummies that actually did, either!
No, there weren’t. But that wasn’t a problem because they could be avoided, or they were curiosities. Not like today, where social media keeps shoving them in front of you at every opportunity.
The Internet was once called "the Wild West" when lack of scrutiny was enabling all kinds of things like rampant copyright infringement and thinly veiled pedophilia (see "lolita"). As in the actual wild west, pioneers were inventing new tools to survive and thrive. Brief periods like this are probably normal before entrenched players - whether they're railroads or media giants - roll in and lay down an organizational layer that makes it a lot easier for typical people to participate. In doing so they also tell the government how to regulate the new world to make sure their profit models still work. Then they take credit for the whole thing.
...it's been the frontier of human condition for as long as we've wrought civilisation from the wild; always ephemeral; always pollinating, seeding anew, and burgeoning along the fresh meadowlands of social intercourse...
rss2email is great also... simple concept- run the program as a scheduled task, it checks for any updated css feeds, then sends you an email with the new ones.
I recently set up freshrss and have been digging it. It's not perfect, but definitely as good as Google reader was.
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