The old internet died and we watched and did nothing

[EDIT] and wide success/adoption matters for those in particular because much of their utility is in "everyone's on it" (where "it" may be some other, but interoperable, service)

Even I, a nerd who otherwise loves the old internet, don't self-host my website but use a provider (Neocities). When you compare learning HTML/CSS to make your own, quirky, beautiful website with spending five seconds making a Facebook/whatnot page, convenience will almost always win.

There was a time when you could serve anything from a home ISP connection.

Different bubbles we've moved to

"The old internet" is what you got when only nerds were online. Replicate that and you got your old internet back. Cue the above mentioned decentralization work...

It's a noteworthy point. Over the last decade or two there has been quite a bit of churn and not much archiving. You can kind of estimate a default rate of social media bitrot, linkrot or whatnot...

What I find myself missing more than anything else is that news server was something you paid for, either as part of an ISP package, as a dedicated service or your university tuition fees. The commercial model was purely the provision of that resource - not selling your data, nor being a vector for targeted political ads. There was no incentive to make the basic mechanics of discussion worse or promote flame wars in the name of "engagement" or "monetisation", and while I'm sure the smaller community size played a part things seemed to bump along with a far greater degree of civility and allowance for misunderstanding.

Noise increased however by orders of magnitudes thanks to social media that's why you don't see the "old internet"

Replacing the occasional collapse of a big central service with the low-grade noise of a distributed service run by a thousand unrelated sysadmins isn't going to be improved UX for most users, so most users won't sign up.

There are more privately run servers, self hosted websites and bb's now than there were back then. Its cheaper, safer and easier to start and run your own network and service today than ever.

So in aggregate, there is 100x (1000x?) the niche, kooky, wierd, fun, specific internet that we had in 1997. But there is also 10^5x the giant consolidated internet that most people see.

Very few people did this. Unless you were at a university or paid for an ISDN line, you didn't have a persistent connect and could not host your own server. Even when DSL and Cable appeared, ISPs actively blocked hosting.

Also don't forget registering a domain cost like $100 and required mailing or faxing paperwork. Getting an SSL certificate required even more paperwork. It's not like today where and can get a wildcard SSL cert faster than it takes to squeeze out a fart.

People did build servers and host them in Data centers but that was the exception and they usually had a side gig or solicited donations for covering hosting fees. Again it was unusual.

I worked at an insurance company in the early 2000s and setup an old machine with NT and a bunch of those Emachine softmodems to work as a poor man's ISP for a few of the IT staff. It also had an FTP server hosting stuff for an IRC channel I frequented. It was unusual and coveted because back then it was very rare for people to get access to a server they could host anything on.

I hope so.

While I don't think the old internet is dead at all (it can look that way because the new internet has grown much larger), it is true that the web (for me) is getting less useful and more dangerous as time goes on. I 100% expect that the day will come in my lifetime that I'll stop using it entirely. I hope that something magical happens to change that trajectory, but I honestly don't see anything like that on the horizon.

But the old internet does still exist, and so the internet will remain very useful to me even if I stop using the web.

My completely uninformed guess says that more people are running their own servers now than ever before.

fewer in ratio/percentage or pure numbers. If it is later, I disagree. Running your own instance of federated platform or forum has never been this easier. I have a discourse, pleroma etc running currently. There are lot of people running them when you dig around. What you find the problem is noise and search - both of which are dominated by big companies and pesky marketers hijacking. Anything big with traction has people paid by companies in big sums trying to game their post to the top. If you don't have shit ton of traffic or content, you won't even get on google search unless you search for very specific keyword or direct name which very few do.

The search everywhere not just your search engine but on social media is optimized for the lowest denominator who searches for x when he wants y. The search learns the way to ignore your words or meaning completely.

So both social media and search are hijacked. What else is there for discovering things? specific niche forums which also needs to be discoverable for people to land on.

With so many gate keepers on what should be installed on your device - app store or playstore. I am surprised lot of quirky things still pop up from time to time. But then I look into my surrounding, no one else gets the same stuff that I do....which means I am living in an echo chamber.

Edit: example of companies fucking with search - https://ibb.co/Lzh5ktQ

We buy computers, but they are owned and restricted by others, especially and problematically phones.

Fortunately I used the URL to pull up a copy on Internet Archive, but there's a wealth of good info that isn't being archived.

Mass preservation of literally everything isn't custodianship, it's viparinama-dukkha. It's coming from the same place that resulted in my great-grandmother's house being fit for an episode of Hoarders. She thought that each of those items might be useful to someone some day, but actually it just created that much bigger and nastier a haystack to sift through when the time came to try and sort out a few family heirlooms and keepsakes.

And, once you take that instinct and apply it to massive, corporate-owned, centralized sites where people casually socialize, it becomes even more problematic. I agree, pre-sanitization Tumblr was a great place for young people - especially queer youth - to work out their sexual identities. But nobody wants to have that phase of their life preserved in perfect detail, for all perpetuity, and nobody wants it sitting around in a big public archive just waiting for someone else to figure out how to de-anonymize people's old Internet accounts. It's OK, even preferable for some things to be forgotten.

This isn't to say that we shouldn't preserve a record of our digital heritage. But it should be a curated preservation of a reasonable subset of the content on these sites, not an enormous trash heap of everything that's ever happened on the Internet being kept around for people to fripple through when they're in a voyeuristic mood.

That said, this article was exactly what I'd expect for an article from Buzzfeed.

I do agree that reusing the name must surely do their image significant harm.

I think my personal take is that the idea of “your content is your own” got lost in the process of sharing-everything culture.

Luckily it isn’t dead, this site and the people writing informative blogs is still available.

https://www.nytimes.com/1993/11/03/business/business-technol...

There are now over 4.5 billion Internet users. If even 0.002% of them make just one daily query on the web of the "old Internet," then it's still larger than the web before the Eternal September. Protocols like IRC and Gopher are more active today than late 1993.

It's true that data moving through centralized services is larger today, but that doesn't invalidate the continued life of the "old Internet" any more than the relative domination of analog communications over copper wires in 1993 meant the Internet was dead back then.

Good archiving programs came with the option of using erasure/error correction codes so that the archive would still be recoverable, even if some of the floppies were returning read errors or became unreadable altogether.

While I share your sentiment towards Buzzfeed and clueless millennials, I don't think it's entirely fair to say they have no right to write about the "old" internet.

I began to experience the web around 1997, and it was different in a lot of ways compared to now. More personal pages, less centralization, little content policing, Netscape, Real Player, etc.

I'm sure some old fart from the 80's would tell me that I didn't know the "old" internet because I'd never used Telnet to log in to a BBS. While there's truth to that, it doesn't mean I don't have my own perspective of what's "old".

The worst thing about social media is that it allowed toxic extremists like buzzfeednews, huffpo, etc to thrive.

While I am irritated by how much of the internet has been replaced by JavaScript, one advantage has been the exposure of APIs that can be reverse engineered, as seems to have been done in the recent Yahoo Groups case. So there might be some hope here.

Everything else is a house of cards, though. It's just software on a server, after all, and if no one cares to back it up, no one will.

While that's a common axiom bandied about on HN, as is your general tone of condescension towards "the normals" (Eloi and Morlocks, seriously? You know the Eloi were the villains, right?) I'm certain that practically no one who uses Facebook is actually unaware that the rest of the web exists.

Whereupon young Largo LOL'd almost hysterically and said: 'What? NO!" This is so fucked up it isn't funny anymore!'

He was very surprised and asked why, young Largo couldn't say exactly why and needed some minutes to collect his thougts and then began:

'This may come as a surprise to you, with me being an atheist, but what we have now reminds me of the story in the old testament of the bible about the building of the Tower of Babylon.'

That indeed raised some eyebrows!

Young Largo rambled on about the siloing of data in different non-interoperable applications for reasons of customer tie in, which is against the interests of said customer. About the bloat in software which requires ever more potent hardware in regular intervals with every new software version, while the old ones would be perfectly servicable if they only could read the data from the newer versions, which of course is a No-Go because it is against the interest of the software producers.

He rambled on about lack of stability and unintuiveness of UX while compairing that with kitchen- and general household appliances, which would be considered useless and broken if they required the effort PC's did then.

He fantasized on about something which combined the ease of use of Hypercard and Visual Basic in some hypothetic platform with the versatility and networkability of some Unix, extendable with modules available in countless variations like in DOS/WIN in a way every other 'module' would benefit from, because of extended capabilities and 'teaching' them new data formats, creating a bespoke environment exactly fitting your needs, while being able to run on ridiculously cheap and small hardware, nonetheless capable of reading everything you could reasonably throw at them.

Young Largo rambled on about the impossibility of this happening in our current society and economy with patents, intellectual property, and so on, that this was easy to see and extrapolate into not getting any better EVER!

Because even then bloat was a thing.

What young Largo didn't really knew at the time were Plan9, OS-9, QNX and TRON but he had dabbled in 386/FreeBSD, early Linuxes, knew some FORTHs and some Assemblers and paid a shitload of money for his ISDN to get onto the internet with his hot rod Pentium.

Young Largo concluded then that this all was nothing else but the biggest bullshit job creation program since the building of the egyptian pyramids, and at the end of the day almost as useless as them for society, with a few exceptions of research and simulation, CAD/CAM and such, but not applicable to the general public.

When asked 'But what for!?' he answered: 'How should i know? TO THE STARS!'

There could be a prequel to this, where an even younger Largo said in school that he wanted every computer being able to speak with each other, one big universal library, when being asked in class what the biggest thing he wished for would be.'

That was pre- or proto-internet

Anyways, in a purely technical way all of this is possible, and even has been realized in parts, or as complete proof of concept, except the ability of handling proprietary data formats by already entrenched market players behind their moats.*

So one part of the army of bullshit jobbers is pecking like vultures at the long rotten carcasses which were thrown out of some research labs eons ago for antimonopolistic reasons, producing nothing but bloated zombies in different paint schemes. Another part specializes in exploiting the bullshit jobbers with proprietary software and services which don't really run according to their needs, but clogging their toilets, while the part who feels like it is the airforce tries to simulate being intelligent while unable to reliably reproduce or even explain their cheap stunts, the part being the navy looming beneath the waves and snorting..err snorkeling every and any shit, while the real spaceforce which does solid engineering could have been up in the sky in O'-Neil cylinders since decades, if the rest of the retarded shitheads wouldn't have dragged them down so much.

Instead of the universal library with nice haptics i got craptastic movieplayers in different sizes, which i use like giant microfiche readers. So be it!

Aye häff SPOQQN!

That's not sad, actually, it's great. Being upset about that is like being upset that too many people use telephones who've never operated a switchboard or know morse code.

The internet (or at least the web) was never meant to be a niche redoubt only for nerds and programmers, it's supposed to be for everyone. The old hacker ethos was about liberating humanity from censorship and centralized control of access to information and communication, but now that that vision is actually coming to pass (kind of) people are complaining about how the normies ruined.

Fie. Fie, I say.

Also, almost everyone from the 'old internet' is watching Youtube and using social media as well. Your implication that everyone using social media is only doing so for entertainment or a dopamine rush is inaccurate. There are more hardcore, old school nerds on the modern web than there ever were on the old web.

>People who are just looking for entertainment or social dopamine think the old internet is "boring" or "looks dumb".

Nobody says that. Your can stuff your sorries into a sack, sir or madam.

I think that "pay what you want"/crowdfunding models can fund a lot of the stuff that used to be provided "free" back in the day. The thing about paying for stuff on the internet is that many people find it quite inconvenient. It's not about the actual monetary expense, that's a minor factor (although it is a barrier to causal browsing, in and of itself). It's everything else you have to deal with as part of paying for something.

I've found time and time again that something I thought wasn't important before can end up being very important later. That's only what I can remember, too.

Plus, there's a selection bias in what you remember. If you don't remember it, how would you know that it's important or not later?

If the cost is small then I think "digital materialism" is probably mostly okay. I've come to the conclusion that it's hard for me to predict the importance of things later, so if something appears to be ephemeral and has even a modest chance of being important later, I'll archive it and organize it so I can find it later if I want to.

Also, the old internet where everyone hosted, or at least coded, their own website still exists. In fact almost all the old internet is still around. It's just that most people are stuck in their walled gardens and can't see it.

That's just what they want you to believe. You won't fight because you believe no fight is possible. The good news is, that's not true.

(Gee, feel like I'm writing the V for Vendetta script or something!)

If they got one whiff of what the wild west days were like, they'd be writing their Congressmen. They couldn't shame corporations into taking down sites they disagree with.