https://whatyouseewhenyoudie.ytmnd.com/

Marquisssssssssss

I still have the html files for my first geocities site. It was a Commander Keen fansite with info that was already on every other fansite. But it was mine! And I used marquee tags and background midi files and gifs whenever I wanted to, and WordArt for the page headings.

Even then I was late to the party. My the time I joined, geocities was part of Yahoo. I remember when the URLs used to be cities and neighbourhoods.

Also, Onchat.com.

I think it’s kinda hard to find spaces where people are gonna be willfully ignorant of the issues currently plaguing our lives. Sure, everyone wants a break from it and not think about it the latest infringement on our rights but outrage fatigue is something we need to be aware of.

I opened Lemmy after like a year and this post made me smile. I don’t see this as ‘complaining’ considering I just arrived from the cesspool that’s reddit.

When I first joined Lemmy as part of the semi-great API migration it seemed quite empty, but it does feel like it has slowly grown, unfortunately I’m finding following Trump getting in I can’t scroll without seeing tons of Trump/Musk posts. Doesn’t matter how many things I block it is neverending. I just want to go back to when we were just here to have fun, not constantly be reminded as to what is happening across the pond.

“Play me off, Johnny!”

issue is it will collapse into neofeudalism, where the Czar Executive Officier of your network city will demand you work 16 hours every day, or he will send you to the wellness farms working 18 hours a day.

Is it me, or is this ironically old meme designed to dismiss whatever the user says?

Look up “indie web” and just start clicking links until you see URLs you’ve never heard of before.

Congrats, you’re surfing the web. Let us know if you find anything cool.

You never had to create an account to view anything in the website.

Mindless scrolling was not a thing because links were mostly nested.

It was also extremely easy to chat with perverts on mIRC, the Yahoo chat thing etc. Speaking of chats, all of your chat logs were stored locally on your PC as text files rather than on a cloud so you could delete them if you wanted.

Everything was somewhere in between https://slashdot.org/, https://ytmnd.com/, and 4chan.

The nostalgia is entirely wasted on anyone who lived through 90s internet. It was cool because I was 12 and getting to drink from the information fire hose was a daily adventure. But it had all the same garbage politics, slop content, and horndog users of the modern internet.

The biggest difference between then and now is that Then Internet was considered a kind of counterculture (which meant 90s Reichwing Radio DJ Rush Limbaugh screeching like a stuck pig every time he heard about a new fad or meme he didn’t like) while Now Internet has your Rush Limbaugh tier content and your Chinese Rednote apps bumping into one another in the same oversized wave pool.

It wasn’t commodified nearly to the extent it is now, so a large portion of it existed merely because of people’s passion. There were no super sites of information like reddit, so people would create their own websites and forums dedicated to one subject. Forums still had their arguments, but it wasn’t nearly as vitriolic as social media is now. Search really, really sucked until Google came along. Slow as balls.

You know how lemmy or xyz social media is people posting their thoughts directly so you kinda get a look into their brains? And maybe there’s a pic or vid or some other link to accompany it to support the topic of their post. Imagine that but it’s entire websites basically built from the ground up with what one lone person believed was aesthetically appropriate to communicate their ideas or passions.

And nothing was centralized so there might’ve been a hundred time cube variations but no one ever found them because they weren’t linked on anyone’s webrings. It was all beautiful terrible madness.

It’s not the early internet, but a lot of websites in the 00s (when I started using it) let you customize your profile. We all had horrible CSS and an autoplay song that only we liked on our Myspace profiles and it was great. Flash was both a buggy mess that could introduce viruses to your computer and an amazing outlet for creativity that I don’t think has been replaced. It was a lot less centralized and you were only being tracked across the whole internet by the NSA and not every internet company too.

Edit: I should say that I lose a bit of nostalgia every time I see forum posts from that era though, the casual bigotry was everywhere and so obnoxious

Liberalism is a capitalist ideology.

The criticism is that late stage capitalism corrupts itself and becomes fascism/technocracy/feudalism/whatever as the powers of corporation and state merge.

That or everyone dies from ecological collapse.

Of course, the idea that it’s not capitalism when the state does it is a core capitalist conceit. A lot of socialists are trying to have their cake and eat it too on the definitions.

There really wasn’t much online in the 80s, other than a lot of archives. After the invention of HTML and subsequently, the World Wide Web it became a lot more user-friendly and also got filled with a lot of garbage. After 2010 or so is when enshitiffication went into overdrive.

For those curious, just add “before:2010” (replace 2010 with whatever year you want) to your search query.

I looked up sixty fouurrr a few days ago and was shocked to see 18 years ago.