Asklemmy

Maybe not the early internet, but I do remember 2004-2009 internet when message boards were king, communities were smaller, and everything just felt so much more exciting. I miss those days of having one community with 100-200 or so users who posted everything from "What song are you listening to now?" to a fanfic some guy wrote about Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends.

I spent 95% of my time shitposting on one forum in the early 2000's. It was a similar experience to spending 95% of my time on reddit or one of the other major social media sites, except that crazy new ideas for social media didn't really exist back then. They were all traditional forums where everything is posted in chronological order. I remember occasionally sumbling across a threaded forum back then, where you could reply directly to a comment and start a new thread chain like lemmy and reddit can. That was about it as far as innovation went, or at least from what I remember.

The other 5% where I was browsing those old web 1.0 sites with basic html and flash and all that stuff, I don't miss that stuff too much. It would be nice to browse through an archive of stuff like that once or twice for nostalgia's sake, but the modern internet is good too. I have no qualms with the modern internet.

I miss usenet and webchats, mostly, and the fact that communities were smaller and you could feel you could actually contribute. Now it feels like you can already find what you wanted to say. And the opposite of it.

What I Definitely don't miss is: popup with ads, the HTML Tag, the "under construction" images on websites that would never be updated ever again, and images that would take minutes to download.

What I know I will miss from 2020 in 10 years: contents written by actual humans instead of AI.

90s, slow (56kb/s) and expansive (4$/h) connection, PC was an instrument to do a single specific search at day without distractions. That's all. Game change was the subscription to monthly plans and speed up to 2mb/s.

&TOTSE:

Q: What is TOTSE all about, anyway?

A: A lot of people have some weird idea that this web site is a Bad Place, a place for hackers, software pirates, and anarchists. The reason that they think this is that there are informational text files on here about hacking, piracy, and anarchy.
However, there are also text files on here that discuss politics; democratic, right wing, left wing, libertarian, communist, and everything in between, but this is not a political web site.
There are files on here that discuss Jesus Christ, Muhammed, Buddha, Crowley, John Smith, and "Bob", but this is not a religious web site.
There are files full of short stories, science fiction, humorous articles, and great works of literature, but this is not a literary web site.
There are files with information on rocketry, radio broadcasting, chemistry, electronics, genetics, and computers, but this is not a technical web site.
This web site is about INFORMATION. All sorts and all viewpoints. Some of the information you will agree with, some you will find shocking, and some you will probably disagree with violently. That is the whole point. In this society we go to schools where there is one right answer: The Teacher's. There is one acceptable version of events: The Television's. There is only one acceptable occupation: The pursuit of money. There is only one political choice to make: The Status Quo.
On this web site you are expected to make decisions all by yourself. You get to decide who and what to agree with, and why. You get to hear new viewpoints that you may have never heard before. On this web site people exist without age, without skin color, without gender, without clothes, without nationality, without any of the visual cues we usually use to discredit or ignore people who are unlike ourselves. All of these things are stripped away and the ideas themselves are laid bare.
You will change. You will transform. You will learn. You will disagree.
You will enjoy it.

It's a shame now the modern internet has switched from anonymity to identity politics, from freedom to cancel culture.

call me crazy, but I miss chat rooms and "A/S/L?"

'course I was a teen at the time, so maybe that's why.

I miss Usenet.

It was glorious. Websites made with a texteditor. Fansites for games and TV shows. Ever pic took a good while to load line after line (we mid-boobies now!). IRC chat and slapping fish around. Usenet for serious discussions and help. Picking up a girl on a X-Files messageboard. A while later my mind was blown away by MP3. You could do what?! Download music. A track for only 30 minutes?! Wtf! Oh yeah, and MP3 encoding was done on the command line without gui. The mid 90s internet was awesome.

When you jumped on to chat (IRC) you didn't get pressured into upgrading to nitro (Discord).. IRC is still around but all the nice free networks have been decimated in acquisitions and other things.. there are still a lot of great Niche communities if you look hard however.

Off the top of my head, I miss that games used to have LAN play built in, and you could use apps like Kali to play ipx games over the Internet with a built in community

I miss there being lots of pages people would go to, lots or things and communities to explore. I understand there's probably more pages in total now, but I still feel like users mostly gravitate the same ones.

I think what I miss is the novelty of the internet. The fact that it was fairly new was what made it exciting, whereas now the internet is old hat. That being said, a lot of the issues people complain about today's internet existed back then too. There were pop up ads that were annoying as hell, but fewer ad blockers. There was spyware and adware, which if you click the wrong thing would track your every move to add even more pop up ads. There was less security and awareness about that stuff back then, so it was easy to become a victim of spyware and adware. Hell, I remember when I first accessed the internet, it was through AOL, which was a major corporation back then with it's own browser and ecosystem that was designed to keep you on their webpages and seemed disinterested in letting you explore the web beyond that.

I miss text centric internet. I was interested in Linux from like age 12. But I only had one computer and was scared to install it. Well I got tricked on irc to fuck up my windows install. Left with some Linux install CDs and little other options, I went for it. My modem wasn't supported, but luckily I had a little bit of money stashed and went to office Depot to grab an external modem I knew worked.

And after struggling to get windows to work well on that old hand me down computer I was blown away. Especially when I found lynx. It opened webpages so fast. Got AIM working, got irc going, and had everything I needed. Started to learn more about the system and the internet was a wonderful place. Loads of information, but you had to seek out the things that interested you.

I made some really good friends that I would chat with for hours on end. Really helped me through an otherwise pretty not good childhood. Helped me learn a lot of stuff. And it wasn't ad filled, hyper tracking oriented, walled garden garbage.

Also, goatse.

expired

The internet peaked with gopher, tbh. Mosaic was the beginning of the end.

Static websites, they may have looked terrible, but all that dynamic loading nowadays is infuriating.

Also I feel like I can't find things on websites anymore. 9/10 times it seems easier to just use a search engine to find the specific part of a website, instead of using the sites navigation. I remember that being different around the 2000s.

@Provider Web rings, IRC, and forums. Actual personal home pages dedicated to niche interests.

i think most of what i did was play freddi fish, pajama sam, and backyard baseball/football

I remember going over to my buddy's place. He had this hovercraft game and it was the most unplayable garbage ever, but it was fun because you were racing against other people on the internet. You were lagging so hard and getting maybe 10 or less frames. Garbage experience, but an experience nonetheless lol.

I miss Netscape.

I remember my Technology teacher in high school (1998-ish) showing me what websites I could go to for downloading full albums for free. He initially showed me a directory just filled with Pink Floyd tracks.

You can still find things in open directories, but it doesn't have that same feel of being wild woolly and free.

I miss early social media like LiveJournal weirdly. 1999-2005-ish was wild times.

I also remember hosting DJ Dangermouse's "Grey Album" which was a mix of The Beatles White Album with Jay-Z's Black Album on my website as protest. The album was released for free, no money was made from it, yet Dangermouse was sued and banned from distributing it.

Traversing web and ftp sites by simple, progressive, suffix removal from the address. Sometimes very interesting what showed up that way. Security was spotty, an afterthought often.

it used to be more difficult for a smooth brain to tell everyone their opinion.

I don't miss anything about it. And certainly not the modem dial sounds I knew from memory/intuitively.

Imagine having to dial into the internet and having to wait 30s with beeping and whooshing sounds.

/e: It seems OP question was stated more broadly than the linked article addresses and people seem to reply to.

I would adore having 1990's Internet back. It wasn't about media. It wasn't about ads. Wasn't about all sorts of flashy, colorful, mind-numbing drivel. It was just information, pure and simple. We still communicated. We still made friends around the world. But it was new, novel, and simpler. I remember when pop-up ads were invented and introduced. We thought that was bad. Little did we know what it would all turn into.

IRC when it was truly big and building your own homepage at Geocities

@Provider YouTube gives adsense money for the effort. Your written guide on some trashy 90s website or Medium doesn't. The only people who write tutorials nowadays, are the ones that are getting payed by corps for muh SEO. That is why all guides start with "What is X?" instead of giving it straight to you.

I miss the days before it became all corporatized. The days of the early world wide web and gopher made the internet a whole lot of fun. I had a blast with usenet and internet relay chat as well. Even email was freaking awesome. I remember getting excited when I'd receive messages. Thankfully that excitement is getting rekindled due in a large part to corporate's own hubris. The growth of the fediverse is making the internet fun again.

@Provider
I miss Listerv culture. I grew up with mimeographed APA fanzines, and mailing lists were the most pure implementation of that kind of community on the Internet.

Seemed like any interest, no matter how obscure, had a welcoming Listerv community online. If you knew how to find it.