205
How do you guys remember the early days of the internet? What do you miss about it?
(tim.kicker.dev)
this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
205 points (98.1% liked)
Asklemmy
43966 readers
1304 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
E-mail pen pals. I made friends from all over the world, it was a great way to get to know other people and their culture. Writing huge e-mails about where you're from and what life is like where you live. Because you usually only write one every couple of days, it was something to look forward to.
I guess social media kind of ruined that part, why write to someone when you can just post it for the whole world to see.
Where did people use to share their emails to be contacted by strangers?
Penpal websites. I guess they’re like dating sites. You made a profile, write some basic info about yourself, and people could send a message through the site. They’d include their real email in the first message so you could reply directly. It’s very basic.
There were tons of genuinely nice people to write with back then. I’m sure these days it’d be nothing but scammers and bots.