but wait there’s these spaces
Image description:
Young woman helping an old woman as she reminisces about the old web, “The web used to be open and distributed! Not closed and concentrated in the hands of a few companies!” The young woman, “Sure grandma, now let’s get you to bed.”
Anybody else here remember GeoCities?
Yes my knees hurt, how did you know?
Edit; Or MUDs?
neocities.org and I used to telnet into muds on vax terminals way back when.
I used to telnet into muds on vax terminals
Probably absolute gibberish to Gen Z and even young millenials 😄
Sincerely, elder millenial who understood MOST of it
Let’s go play Water Deep!
Anybody else here remember GeoCities?
Even had a web page there myself…
Yes my knees hurt, how did you know?
I feel your pain. Now where did I put my walking cane?
Anybody else here remember GeoCities?
What kind of newfangled geegaw is that? Kind of like a Free-net?
MUDs
I only heard about those in the late-90s when it seemed to be dying off. Were they like a telnet text adventure?
Pretty much, yeah. If you think of old school text adventure games and bring them to their multiplayer conclusion, you’d get an MUD.
I remember when it was common for ISPs to give you web hosting as a standard feature. I think my first ISP included 5MB, which was a lot considering most people were still on dial-up.
The web is still open and distributed. Its just that everyone decided to concentrate in a few areas (reddit, twitter, Facebook, etc) and the thing that excited us about the internet back in the day (the web) has become an ai generated, Chinese dropshipper ghost town or appified.
It doesn’t help that more popular websites all became the legacy ui for mobile apps.
I’m also saying this as someone who doesn’t really go to web forums or websites anymore and mostly uses apps for things since I’m on my phone a lot more than on a desktop or laptop when not at work.
I do go to web forums for my hobbies (brewing and growing things) but either those websites tried to optimize for mobile and became unusable on mobile or they haven’t optimized at all and its like reading text for ants.
And yes you can make your own website today but the signal to noise ratio of your single website among everything else out these makes the chances of anyone visiting you remarkably low.
It is what it is
I don’t want to circlejerk about Lemmy too much, but joining Lemmy did revitalize the “old web” feelings for me.
Seconded. I really like the fediverse. It has just a little of that wild-west old web feel. Just need people to make a geocities instance with family vacation photos and the like again.
While not entirely correct when reading the meme literally my feeling or interpretation is that the “distribution” applies to what you’re saying. The web used to be a lot “flatter” and egalitarian. Anyone could make a crappy html site for their family web page and everyone ran the same bbs software for hobby or other interest group forums.
But just like you said, the concentration of power in these megasites is huge. It really crushed what the web used to be - but they aren’t the only problem. The search engines that led us to these smaller sites no longer work the same or have vanished alongside the proliferation of SEO and preferred sites thanks to ad revenue. So the chance of a smaller site getting seen are next to zero. No ad revenue, no traffic to drive ad revenue, and too niche or low-budget to compete with SEO sites.
It isn’t difficult to optimize for mobile if you know what you’re doing. It’s downright easy if you use a mobile first approach to website development.
I guess. But doing forums on mobile is also aggravating af. I might just be too used to desktop displays when it comes to forums. I really hate contracting/expanding web pages. I hate workflows for typing on mobile devices.
It’s all just a shit experience for me :)
This is why I support places like Neocities. It isn’t great if you want to make a website for your business, but it is great for just making and maintaining a small website for fun.
💀
I wonder what the most-visited independent blogs are.
What a bizarre meme to post on a fettiverse site.
The whole idea of this place is trying to recapture the open and decentralized web in a new form, isn’t it?
Like for fettishes? Can i get an invite?
Or is it? One access point to many posts, regardless where they are hosted doesn’t sound decentralized. The backend might be, but the UX doesn’t feel that way.
So it is decentralized, but feels like a cohesive experience? And you think this is a bad thing?
You can just try a different app if you need a new UX. Have you done that, or are you just complaining for no reason?
Where did I say it’s a bad thing? What do you interpret as a complaint? Neither of these things were said or implied.
web 1.0 best web
“Now finish your bug and we’ll get you back to your pod!”
What does this mean concentrated in the hands of a few companies? Like social media?
Google, Cloudflare, Meta, Amazon, Aruba, Microsoft.
The web also used to be a minefield of gore/CP/snuff videos/porn links.
To the point clicking a hyperlink was a gamble between seeing what you wanted to see and seeing a child getting their heart cut out by the Mexican cartel.
Edit: Do y’all not remember the early days of the internet? After AOL but during Google’s infancy? The internet was the literal wild west. Everything was permitted and it was hard af to block shit you didn’t want to see. So if you saw a hyperlink, you had no fuckin idea what was on the other side of it. It could’ve been anything from a Rick roll to a fuckin snuff video. Not to mention the websites back then. Funnyjunk.com showed gore regularly. Live Leak was a normal viewing occurrence. You could even be scrolling on a forum site and accidentally watch the most fucked thing you’ll ever see.
