Widespreadness of local provider networks even if you have not paid for the internet access. You could literally download and watch movies, play games and etc by just using DC++ for local provider network file sharing, servers of which they freaking hosted by themselves.
this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2024
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Ask Lemmy
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user customisability. online profiles were awesome until like 2013 where it all became plain black or white backgrounds with a banner. you could have custom backgrounds or even entirely custom CSS in a lot of websites. I really love the theme my instance uses because a lot of Lemmy instance themes are plain and dull too, just default black or white with no creativity, unlike db0 with the crazy outer space and fire and shit. makes it feel more human.
It's one of k my biggest criticisms of Lemmy. No ability for communities to customise themselves. Reddit's redesign is awful, but at least allows a little customisation, and classic Reddit with its custom CSS was awesome. It hurts rpggreentext greatly not to be able to use CSS to show…the eponymous greentext.
Geocities. A platform where anyone, regardless of technical skill or any design sense could go wild about their passion.
From online community to a meetup.
Having to turn it on to use it. Now it’s inescapable.
I am going really old internet here but the sense of adventure. I had something called the Internet Yellow Pages because search engines didn’t really exist yet. And going to these sites using ftp, Archie, gopher, etc., you never knew what you were going to find.
1900HOTDOG from two of the Cracked diaspora, TVs Seanbaby from the internet and Beef Digests runner up for Salami Slab of 2014, Robert Brockway!
And the associated podcast, The Dogg Zzone 9000.
The ease of piracy. Literally type whatever you want into any search engine.
Lack of privacy invasion and surveillance
Blank html Pages only containing pages of blue links to various SWF(flash) movies. Purple if I watched them.
Infoseek
Legend of the Red Dragon
The send of novelty and usefulness that came with the use of the internet. Especially with things like messengers. Irc. Forums and online multiplayer games.
Almost everything except the fact that it was dominated by one language, from a culture with an emphasis of computers being an interest that was unnecessarily gendered, and that the internet nd the tools used to create it were only accessible to the wealthiest able-bodied people from a specific demographic due to systemic inequity. And the speed. I don't miss the slow speeds.
Just about everything else about the early internet was better than today by huge margins. Imagine being able to search for a niche topic and not turning up thousands of seo-optimized paid-advertizing affiliate-link-program ai-generated tangentially-relatedish user-tracking sales links. Sure, there were times you found nothing, and it was ugly, but that was better than wasting time sorting through total shit.
Edited to add nostalgia: video of The Simpson's comic book guy attempting to view naked Captain Janeway from Star Trek
You’re right on the money.
The reason why the early web worked so well is exactly BECAUSE of that early adopter profile. Getting online was a nerd thing; it had a filtering effect of who could get online. And the ones that did all shared that same passion for the platform. There was an assumed baseline of shared knowledge and shared culture.
Today we consider such things problematic. Back then, that was just how it was. And why it worked.
Personally, I miss it.
I'll go with the algorithms. Google was greater than god, twitter and reddit were endless scrolling. YouTube is being pretty great still, except when shorts wakes up and chooses violence for the day.