I’d like to bring back the absence of some things.
Nothing was “mainstream” because it was all still weird, and populated by people with a sense of curiosity and adventure. I’d like the absence of ‘normal’ back.
Corporate presence was minimal. They sometimes had their own websites, and a few had flash games and/or media sites mostly as a PR thing. But that was the extent of it. The main corporation involved was the phone company whose bill you’d have to pay. I’d like corporations to step back and to let people take over again.
And finally, customer service and other business functions. They moved those over to the internet to save a ton of money, but the quality of services plummeted as a result - hurting employees and customers. But they save enough money that they’ll never go back, and it also allows businesses to market to a far wider customer base than they can honestly provide for. Scamming people is the new standard because it’s so easy to get away with when expectations have gotten so low.
Not everything being about profit
Not being 1000% about data mining
No god damn pop up’s. Every fucking site I go to takes like minimum of 6 clicks to get rid of useless windows
Ads All.The.Time. At this point, if your ad even remotely annoys me, I will go out of my way NOT to use your product.
Real people. So much online interaction is with bots now.
Being able to believe more things. It used to be pretty apparent when you were looking at a computer modified image. With all the deepfakes, bots, AI, etc I assume absolutely nothing is real or accurate info.
Info. Like useful info. Secondary, niche communities you could relate to.
No god damn pop up’s
We must have been on a different internet, popups back in the day were atrocious, and this was before adblockers were effective.
Install Ublock Origin. Seriously.
Doesn’t look like an option for safari.
Don’t use safari, then.
You can install Librewolf/Firefox through Homebrew package manager. See: https://brew.sh for more information.
Yes, I know. Safari extensions are all through Apple’s App Store which sucks.
Use nextdns and popun some filters. Then use AdGuard for your safari. Worked wonders for me
Atleast the Fediverse is not about profit.
Yet.
Call me pessimistic, but with meta wanting to be here, it’s likely to ultimately be ruins/commoditized too. Eventually. It’ll be great while it lasts.
Partially yes, but never the whole fediverse. Even Meta can’t control all of it. Thats the beauty of it
To be fair, I only came online late 90s and all we had was Internet Explorer, no Adblock and a constant barrage of popups, ads and toolbar installers and even child porn. I remember downloading one song and having to close 20 windows.
Net neutrality
NO SOCIAL MEDIA. I belive that Facebook has made the collective humanity a lot stupider. Groupthink, sheeple, influencers, contrails conspiracies…
We had social media, it just wasn’t cancerous like Facebook. It was more fun like MySpace, forums, blogs, IRC, etc.
What we didn’t have was algorithmic social media. That needs to a die a fiery death in the depths of hell.
If it were up to me, algorithmic curation and promotion based on viewership history would be outright illegal.
Hope for the future, that the days of widespread ignorance would soon come to an end.
Fast forward 20 years, and misinformation is rampant and most people believe it without question. 🤦♂️
StumbeUpon
Feels like a good time to bring it back
There’s CloudHiker
Websites run by ordinary people, about things they’re interested in. Explanations in text instead of monetized YouTube videos dragged out so they can cram more adverts in. Decentralization, with lots of little hosts and sites instead of large walled gardens of corporately owned “content”. The absence of the concept of “content”. Places where people would chat just because they enjoyed talking to each other. Email that wasn’t mined for details of your personal life by megacorporations. Fascism still being universally reviled.
Yeah, I miss finding some very barebones website called like “Gary’s Favorite Garlic Breads”, just run by Gary, who isn’t trying to turn a profit or be an influencer. He just loves garlic bread and wanted to share.
I miss Gary :c
All those old websites with basic html were golden. Not always in quality, but in heart.
Yea
I work with Gary. He still likes to share, all the time, about everything. He talks a lot. F Gary
Great to hear… :c
For the whole “websites ran by individuals” thing, there is Neocities
Goofy, random flash videos. AlbinoBlacksheep was like the internet in its prime
A badger badgers badger badger badger badger badger MUSHROOM MUSHROOM!
Snaaaake, a snake. Oh it’s a snake
It’s a
The basic privacy. You could post on a forum and it was just you and the people on the board talking. Today you post anywhere and it’s the whole world looking at the conversation.
Privacy was worse back then but search engines got better since.
The lack of ways for cooperations to gather information about internet users.
Pretty much. I feel like everything is out to track you and to try and sell you garbage products. And if your in the US you have no rights to tell these companies to remove your data. Unless your in California.
I miss all the personal home pages. You could get a real sense of who somebody was based on what they chose to display. Maybe they had pictures of the favourite game or tv show, or their own little web diary. Now its all just santizied profile pages that have virtually zero room for creativity. It’s too sterile now.
Yes! I keep tumblr around for this exact reason. I want to have a billion cute pixel gifs all over whatever account I have. I know it’s not for everyone but it just makes me so happy.
One thing I enjoyed about myspace was how much you could personalize your page with even just a smidge of html-fu. I knew some people that got so good that you wouldn’t even know you were still on myspace unless you looked at the address bar.
It is very simple and inexpensive (pretty much free) to host a personal website on GCP (Google) or AWS (Amazon). They reach have a free or near free tier. Unfortunately, that requires some technical know how, but it’s nothing somebody that can write HTML by hand can’t handle.
Check out neocities.org if you haven’t already ☺️
I used to host my portfolio site through them actually.
Homestar runner
Demon Torrentz. Also, the absence of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Google-owned YouTube, and Threads. Did I miss anything?
Is that like XiaoXiao?
I just searched about it. It sounds like original newgrounds. Sounds awesome
Just search YouTube you stick death. You’ll find a bunch of stuff.
Oh! I remember that!
We used to receive more real e-mails than SPAM e-mails.
Same with phone calls
And snail mails.
We could create a personal website without having to pay and without giving up personal details. Everything was anonymous.
Search engines actually found what you were looking for. No censorship or bad suggestions or trying to sell stuff.
Always finding something new and interesting, not being limited to a few commercial websites.
People were much friendlier and open to share.
God i hate how utterly useless search engines are now
That’s why I just use a metasearch engine (a public searx instance). It’s not perfect, but it usually pulls what I’m looking for from the cached web pages of other search engines and doesn’t let them know I’m searching.
