Thousands of subreddits chose to go dark in an ongoing protest over the company's plan to start charging certain third-party developers to access the site’s data.
Wow. Front page of huffpost.com right now. Interesting…
It really feels like I’m actually exploring the internet. And the idea that I could turn an old laptop or raspberry pi into a server, adding to the fediverse: it feels like I’m living in the future
Is this how kids in the 90s felt when the internet was just gaining traction?
Yes. We could make our own little shitty website on a free server like angelfire, with a traffic ticker so we knew if anyone had been there. Mine was a stupid little parody website my friends and I set up for keeping track of acronyms and abbreviations we saw online. Didn’t realize we had something there, and could have been Urban Dictionary lol.
Echoing this, it’s a very similar feeling! We also had guestbooks for people to leave comments and these things called webrings that would let you explore more similar sites. I remember running a small fansite and forum. It was an interesting time.
Ah yes guestbooks. My first foray into actual programming (rather than just HTML) was when I wanted to add a guestbook to my silly little website, followed a tutorial, found out tutorial was borked and went looking for advice on what was going wrong (multiple things). By the time my guestbook worked properly I knew PHP(4 or 5) reasonably well.
Yeah I gotta say, “Webrings are back!” was not on my 2023 bingo card. But I’m not hating it by a longshot! It feels like a nice hybrid of the lil Angelfire/Geocities sites and yahoogroups/onelist. Usually fandom communities were hand in hand with those two platform elements, and I’ve missed that tight-knit community feeling.
Kid from 90s that grew up with the advent of the internet. It’s somewhat similar, but still very managed and controlled. Internet in the 90s was absolutely wild. Obscure corners, all sorts of content, free, open and you could spend days and days exploring it and still couldn’t enough of it. All of it was unique, driven by passions, curiosities, desires, people wanting to express themselves.
I sort of dislike what it has become and how everything is monetized. But I suppose, this is the cost of progress and innovation in the rest of the areas of our lives.
I think I have felt that way for one thing or another since 98.
Internet itself blew my mind, playing age of empires with my buddy with just one phone call, then finding about mIRC, peer 2 peer, torrents, stuff i cant remember, and video games getting better graphics at ever increasing steps. I still get a little shocked when I see PS2 games listed as retro games.
And now they are making advances way more often in quantum computing.
I just remembered the first time I heard about a terabyte and the story that “the only place that can hold that ammount of massive storage are the vatican servers” (whatever those may be) lol.
Non-internet Bulletin Boards would each host message forums but would exchange packages of messages (such as QWK files) via modem so that you could communicate with others connecting to different BBSs around the world.
Such a magical experience back then.
Then usenet newsgroup servers did much the same, (but probably updated more frequently). The peer-to-peer aspect was transparent to the users, so it was good to have just one “place”, a newsgroup, where everyone could discuss a subject. But numbers were low enough that it wasn’t flooded with messages.
I completely forgot how cool the internet was outside of corporate silos. And yes, the '90s internet was slow as hell, but there were so much of it to explore.
It really feels like I’m actually exploring the internet. And the idea that I could turn an old laptop or raspberry pi into a server, adding to the fediverse: it feels like I’m living in the future
Is this how kids in the 90s felt when the internet was just gaining traction?
Yes. We could make our own little shitty website on a free server like angelfire, with a traffic ticker so we knew if anyone had been there. Mine was a stupid little parody website my friends and I set up for keeping track of acronyms and abbreviations we saw online. Didn’t realize we had something there, and could have been Urban Dictionary lol.
Echoing this, it’s a very similar feeling! We also had guestbooks for people to leave comments and these things called webrings that would let you explore more similar sites. I remember running a small fansite and forum. It was an interesting time.
Ah yes guestbooks. My first foray into actual programming (rather than just HTML) was when I wanted to add a guestbook to my silly little website, followed a tutorial, found out tutorial was borked and went looking for advice on what was going wrong (multiple things). By the time my guestbook worked properly I knew PHP(4 or 5) reasonably well.
Yeah I gotta say, “Webrings are back!” was not on my 2023 bingo card. But I’m not hating it by a longshot! It feels like a nice hybrid of the lil Angelfire/Geocities sites and yahoogroups/onelist. Usually fandom communities were hand in hand with those two platform elements, and I’ve missed that tight-knit community feeling.
Kid from 90s that grew up with the advent of the internet. It’s somewhat similar, but still very managed and controlled. Internet in the 90s was absolutely wild. Obscure corners, all sorts of content, free, open and you could spend days and days exploring it and still couldn’t enough of it. All of it was unique, driven by passions, curiosities, desires, people wanting to express themselves.
I sort of dislike what it has become and how everything is monetized. But I suppose, this is the cost of progress and innovation in the rest of the areas of our lives.
Late night internet chats, dropping the A/S/L and expecting the person to reply honestly. Those were the days.
pretty much yeah, but with IRC
I think I have felt that way for one thing or another since 98.
Internet itself blew my mind, playing age of empires with my buddy with just one phone call, then finding about mIRC, peer 2 peer, torrents, stuff i cant remember, and video games getting better graphics at ever increasing steps. I still get a little shocked when I see PS2 games listed as retro games.
And now they are making advances way more often in quantum computing.
I just remembered the first time I heard about a terabyte and the story that “the only place that can hold that ammount of massive storage are the vatican servers” (whatever those may be) lol.
Non-internet Bulletin Boards would each host message forums but would exchange packages of messages (such as QWK files) via modem so that you could communicate with others connecting to different BBSs around the world.
Such a magical experience back then.
Then usenet newsgroup servers did much the same, (but probably updated more frequently). The peer-to-peer aspect was transparent to the users, so it was good to have just one “place”, a newsgroup, where everyone could discuss a subject. But numbers were low enough that it wasn’t flooded with messages.
I completely forgot how cool the internet was outside of corporate silos. And yes, the '90s internet was slow as hell, but there were so much of it to explore.