Resurrect the Old Web
stevedylandev.bearblog.dev
stevedylandev.bearblog.dev
The "old web" was McDonalds in the early 90's. This looks more like McDonalds today, maybe tomorrow it will be a Starbucks.
I run my own blog on AWS for ~a dollar a month.
The whole transformation stems from there.
I'd go as far as to say filesharing was a completely new, post-scarcity economic model. One that was ruthlessly crushed by capital.
https://web.archive.org/web/20010519112823/http://members.oz...
Sadly, or perhaps not, the Shockwave animation has failed to survive the internet geological record.
This bit made me grin:
N.B. this is an animation, but if you don't have netscape 2 or later with the shockwave plugin, you won't see it doing its stuff... You could try getting netscape 2 from netscape, and the plugin from macromedia if you really want
(Now I feel _old_, my regular internet username/handle is 30 years old next year...)
Honestly, I kind of look back on blogging unfavorably. Before that people made websites to showcase their interests and hobbies, and because of that even the most basic looking websites could have a lot of "color" to them. Then blogging became a thing and people's websites became bland and minimalist. Arguably blogging culture is as responsible for the death of creativity on the internet as much as the constraints of mobile-friendly web design and Apple's aforementioned killing of Flash.
Steve Jobs published "Thoughts on Flash" [1] in 2010; Flash was discontinued by Adobe in 2017. If Apple supposedly "killed" Flash, they sure took their time doing so.
The iPhone had about 14% marketshare at the time, so it's not like Apple was in a commanding position to dictate terms to the industry.
But if you read his letter, what he said made total sense: Flash was designed for the desktop, not phones—it certainly wasn't power or memory efficient. Apple was still selling the iPhone 3GS at the time, a device with 256Mb of RAM and a 600Mhz 32-bit processor.
And of course Flash was proprietary and 100% controlled by Adobe.
Jobs made the case for the (still in development) HTML5--HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
What people don't seem to remember: most of the industry thought the iPhone would fail as a platform because it didn't support Flash, which was wildly popular.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20170615060422/https://www.apple...
I’m really surprised anyone could say that. To my view, “Thoughts on Flash killed Flash” is about as true as “the sky is blue”. It’s fairly clear to me that without a strong stance, a less principled mobile OS (like Android) would have supported it, and probably Flash would still be around today. Apple’s stance gave Google the path to do the same thing, and this domino effect led to Flash being discontinued 7 years later. You say 7 years as if it’s a long time from cause to effect, but how long would you estimate it would take a single action to fully kill something as pervasive as Flash, which was installed on virtually every machine (Im sure it was 99%+)? You correctly cite that iOS penetration was low at the time, but mobile Safari grew over the next few years to become the dominant web browser, and that was sufficient.
First, there's no way Flash would still be alive today; Apple might have sped up its demise but it had so many disadvantages, it was just a matter of time and it was controlled by one company.
Remember that the web standards movement was kicking into high gear around the same time; we had already dodged a bullet when Microsoft attempted to take over the web with Active X, Silverlight, JScript.
The whole point of the Web Standards movement was to get away from proprietary technologies.
> You correctly cite that iOS penetration was low at the time, but mobile Safari grew over the next few years to become the dominant web browser, and that was sufficient.
Safari has never been the dominant browser; not sure why you think that. Other than the United States, iPhone marketshare is under 50% everywhere else.
Even in 2025, Safari's global marketshare is about 15% [1] and that's after selling 3 billion devices [2].
[1]: https://backlinko.com/browser-market-share
[2]: https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/31/apple-has-now-sold-three-b...
Silverlight was a responsive to flash.
It was also remarkably open for the time, ran on all desktop platforms, and in an alternative universe Silverlight is an open source cross platform UI toolkit that runs with a tiny fraction of the system requirements of electron, using a far superior tool chain.
Safari is lagging on HTML5 features for decade far behind Firefox. And any features useful for "PWA" is just sabotaged. E.g like Screen Wake Lock API finally implemented in iOS 16 but to this day broken on Home screen. And like not quite obvious to use in Safari too.
Because working web standards support would make cross platform mobile apps possible outside of App Store.
I don't think it's lagging behind that much, and you could also argue that you don't need to implement every single feature blindly. A lot of features are strictly not needed, and if you do decide to do them - it needs to be done in an efficient way.
There's a reason why Safari is considered the most energy efficient browser.
From "Every site can be a web app on iOS and iPadOS" [1]
Now, we are revising the behavior on iOS 26 and iPadOS 26. By default, every website added to the Home Screen opens as a web app. If the user prefers to add a bookmark for their browser, they can disable “Open as Web App” when adding to Home Screen — even if the site is configured to be a web app. The UI is always consistent, no matter how the site’s code is configured. And the power to define the experience is in the hands of users.
This change, of course, is not removing any of WebKit’s current support for web app features. If you include a Web Application Manifest with your site, the benefits it provides will be part of the user’s experience. If you define your icons in the manifest, they’re used.
We value the principles of progressive enhancement and separation of concerns. All of the same web technology is available to you as a developer, to build the experience you would like to build. Giving users a web app experience simply no longer requires a manifest file. It’s similar to how Home Screen web apps on iOS and iPadOS never required Service Workers (as PWAs do on other platforms), yet including Service Workers in your code can greatly enhance the user experience.
Simply put, there are now zero requirements for “installability” in Safari. Users can add any site to their Home Screen and open it as a web app on iOS26 and iPadOS26.
[1]: https://webkit.org/blog/17333/webkit-features-in-safari-26-0...
Really?
Safari was first to ship :has() in March 2022; Firefox couldn't ship until December 2023.
I listed a bunch of web platform features Safari shipped before Chrome and Firefox [1][2].
Even now, Firefox hasn't shipped Anchor Positioning, Scroll-driven animation, text-wrap: pretty, Web GPU, Cross-document view transitions, etc. but Safari and Chrome have.
Not on iOS. On iOS, it's all Safari, all the time, for every web browser app. Apple forbids any web browser engine other than Safari on iOS.
I don't think it was about saving battery power. Jobs was smart in convincing people to focus on web stack for apps - Flash was king of rich app experiences, and java [inc applets] for corporate apps. Apps went iOS native batteries got drained in other ways (large video & photos, prolonged use). Just think of the costs, energy and time spent over the next 15 years maintaining multiple code-bases to deliver one service. The web remained open, where as mobile went native and closed-in.
That's a ton of ram. I recall spending a lot of time on flash websites in the early 2000s in college on the school issued laptop with maybe 64 mb of ram (and I think maybe pentium iii 650mhz so more cpu oomph)
We should also consider that, having Flash support, would have opened the door to non-Apple-approved apps running on iPhones, something that Apple has always strenously opposed. All-in-all, at the time I got the feeling that the technical reasons provided by Jobs weren't the main reasons behind the decision.
Flash was never supported on iOS; Steve's letter was to confirm Apple wasn't ever going to support Flash on iOS; it remained available on MacOS.
I don't think the Photoshop thing had any affect on supporting Flash on iOS.
[0] https://9to5mac.com/2021/04/27/apple-tried-to-help-adobe-bri...
I agree w/ your take on blogging... kind of a bland "one-stop-shop" for everything a person thinks of rather than an experience tailored to a specific interest. I used to make Dragonball Z fan sites mostly... even within a single domain I would have multiple websites all linking to each other, each with a different design, and subtly different content, but now I have a bland blog that I don't update regularly lol. Maybe building a retro site is what I really need to do.
Based
I'm working on a revamp of my personal site. I do a lot of creative coding, most of them are throwaway experiments, so I thought I'd showcase more of them there. Besides that though, I have some "rare pepes" that I've been meaning to put somewhere. What I like about these is that they're highly polished, animated gifs that imitate the sort of "holographic" effect you'd find in rare collector's cards, but at the same time you can't track down who originally made them, they aren't part of some professional's online portfolio. In that sense they feel like a special piece of internet folk art, made by some complete rando.
Nowadays we have Pinterest and the like, but I really like the idea of creating my own little online space for images I like.
I’m guilty of this but at least it’s a different kind of boring (plain text files).
> Maybe building a retro site is what I really need to do.
YES.
That's exactly how I got into programming :)
Static websites that were updated only once in a while were far better at showing a cross section of someone's life In that respect, StumbleUpon and browser bookmarks were superior to RSS.
What a glorious product.
The blogging pressure got so out of hand, that even some EU bureucrat thought it would be a great idea for each FP6 funded project to have a blog besides its static website. At least with the influencing trend they don't ask researchers to do glamour shots with their food.
HTML5 is when the web stopped being the web. It has no legitimacy in calling itself "hypertext", it's an app-delivery mechanism with a built-in compatibility layer. In this regard Flash is just as bad and probably even worse, but since it wasn't in anyway standardized or even open-source there was a fair amount of pushback from all fronts. HTML5 had no such pushback.
McDonald's then vs. now: https://x.com/JamesLucasIT/status/1903891272496029709
Millenial gray.
Check? More like actual dollar bills stuffed inside a piece of paper inside an envelope, so nobody could see what it was
Can I read your blog? Mine is https://blog.webb.page.
You mean 80. Ports after 1024 were for wimps.
If anything else, if one wants to resurrect the "Old Web", one shouldn't do it on someone else's platform.
Parts of the "Old Web" disappeared when the platforms hosting it stopped.
The brutal shutting down of Typepad should be another reminder of this reality: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/08/one-time-wordpress-c...
I think as long as platforms have an easy way for people to backup and migrate, that's fair.
Additionally, part of the appeal of Bear is that I've made it my personal mission to get the platform to outlive me. Take that as you will. I can't prove that Bear will live on in perpetuity, but I can try my best.
I want to clarify one thing first: I don't have anything special against your platform, it's just that it seems I see at least one article a week about it on HN lastly and I'm wondering why.
I'm sure you are well intentionned and you'll do your best to keep the plaftorm as true to the mission you have chosen to take and described in your manifesto, no doubt about it.
But having been through a certain number of hype cycles around tech, I tend to become suspicious when I see too much people pushing something. That's why I understand people complaining about Kagi's omnipresence here, even though I'm totaly on the hype train here.
Furthermore, the article looks like a promotion for the platform. It probably isn't, and you don't control what people publish, so it's not your fault. Yet, it reads like "bearblog is the solution to "Resurrect the Old Web".
Which, to me, can't be, since it's a platform like the hundreds that previously came and went, no matter their creator's promise.
So, sure, bearblog exists, it offers people a way to publish content in an _old fashioned_ way, and, according to its manifesto, it will stay like this as long as it exists. Which is nice. And can be part of a solution, but it's not the solution. I don't think there is, actually.
We're at the end of communication in this symbolic era. You can see it in politics, climate policy, fiscal policy, trade policy, media, everything is at an end-point or a breaking point.
So lacking an awareness of the end-game for the symbolic, we retreat to an easier, earlier state, which is nostalgic. But its nostalgia for a system already on the way out.
We don't blog about it in our team since this is about a post-symbolic era, which has some proprietary elements.
But we keep two with papers active exploring the ideas with updated citations.
I stumbled across this whole dimension of arbitrariness in the aftermath of a successful game which the users took as non-narrative. And it really began when my favorite teacher asked if I knew how illusory symbols were and handed me a book called Brain, Symbol, Experience: Towards a Neurophenomenology of Human Consciousness. From there the threads led in all directions.
Words as arbitrary control.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cXtU97SCjxaHCrf8UVeQGYaj...
Storytelling as arbitrary control.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1d-ODky2MzGuTCoFCKWPw6Jx2...
What does this mean? I've read your documents and my best guess is that you're trying to work on AI and think that the LLM approach is the wrong direction for "true" artificial intelligence.
"..words are a terrible straitjacket. It's interesting how many prisoners of that straitjacket resent its being loosened or taken off." Stanley Kubrick
Once one sees how much of the current tech-economy relies on lock-in and switching-costs, it's hard to unsee.
Deploying an astro blog template to netlify is literally 1-click. An instantenously superior option if you dont want to host/pay/code yourself.
> Parts of the "Old Web" disappeared when the platforms hosting it stopped.
The key is to put everything under our own domains. This turns the platforms hosting it into mere implementation details. If the host goes down, just move the data elsewhere.
I use GitHub Pages for my static site but I could trivially move everything to Cloudflare Pages if needed. I could also pay for a VPS or make my own server somehow. Moving away from gmail to my own domain was also one of the best things I've ever done. I'm a happy Proton Mail customer now but that's just an implementation detail, I could switch by simply reconfiguring DNS to point to new mail servers.
DNS is the ultimate layer of indirection. We must own the domain. If we don't have a domain, then we're just digital serfs in someone else's digital fiefdom.
And that includes sites such as this one. Make it yourname.com, not ycombinator.com/threads?id=yourname.
Buy a cheap domain, lay off the avocado toast for two days a year and you're set. It's far less likely to run afoul of the TLD registrar than X.
Yeah, because they want you to feed them content. They want your "engagement". They'll ban your free name just as easily as they handed it out to you too.
It usually takes court orders for domains to be censored. Quite the contrast to the corporations that reserve the right to ban you for any and all reasons including no reason.
> persistent fees to keep your name
Yeah, about 10 dollars a year.
I'm not deluded at all. I also pay the government their taxes every year. If I don't, they will litetally take away the house I live in which is worth several orders of magnitude more money.
We do what we can.
Most are taken away without a court order, like X they have a set of rules. People who break these rules can have their domain suspended. There is no due process, your domain can be taken away for any reason too.
Let's not forget ISPs and schools offering hosting. Universities even used to let students and faculty have routable IPs and DNS entries on the school's domain.
I'm a HN Heretic. HN says dark patterns, money, power, corporate interests.
I think it was very simple: Proprietary platforms solve real-world problems the more "open" web doesn't and did not effectively solve: discoverability, spam filtering, content filtering, community. Regular people don't want the open web, and never have. They only tolerated it when it was given to them without alternatives.
For that matter, your maxim also applies to the open internet, and watch what's happening. It's not profitable, so sites are packing up.
In a nutshell, content costs money. People make content anticipating money. Doesn't matter if it's on Discord, on YouTube, or a private blog. No money, no investment.
It's really questionable whether any old web revival project could work without someone picking up the torch of the likes of geocities. Thankfully there are such projects, which may or may not shut down at some point, but then someone else can pick up the torch. I doubt anyone put stuff online in the nineties expecting them to be around thirty years later.
I don't know what "Old Web" the author is remembering but when I was first paid to make a website in 1997, it had banner ads on it.
Want no ads, start browsing gopher sites. No ads there. Or find people making blogs just because they want to. They exist. Github + Jekyll is a great option for free static blogging if your willing to spend a little time getting it setup and learning something new.
Same thing with the "old web." It was about the very early 90s before Netscape Navigator (the Mosaic days) and when everyone was just throwing up a single HTML page with a bunch of links... that's the "old web".
The modern WWW kicked off with the ability to make credit card transactions online (1994). That... and porn (1995).
For "old web" sites that still exist, check out wiby
"The Summer of Love" literally refers to one summer in 1967 not the whole of 60's counter-culture. Even Woodstock was in '69.
In terms of the various cultural strands then of course they lasted longer with many roots in 50's beatnick culture (bohemianism, poetry, LSD, Buddhism) to today where bands that played Monterey '67 and Woodstock are still touring and a "definitely not a hippy" in San Francisco might live in a polycule, micro-dose psychedelics while using a meditation app before writing a blog about effective altruism.
But the author isn't entirely wrong. There were/are a lot of websites that simply did not run ads. Hosted not for money, but "for love of the game".
This is something that was lost with the shift to exclusively platform-based hosting. A facebook page or subreddit simply is never going to be ad-free in the way that a lot of former or legacy forums were and are.
Like when walking down a street, you may see some posters advertising something, but they are clearly ads, because they are noisy rectangles bunched up with other noisy rectangles.
On the older internet, ads felt more like that, and seemed to stay in the corner away from the content. However, on the modern internet, ads and content feels entangled.
It's a bit like visiting a touristic area. It can feel like everything is trying to grab your attention to sell something and merchants become untrustworthy.
My point is that there seem to be more things to "skip over" these days. Search results being the worst place.
What you’re talking about was geocities or aol’s members sites that anyone could build a site with. Anyone running CGI wishes for that sweet ad revenue to pay for the Sun servers…
I am not disputing that ads were a thing. I am not disputing that ads were common.
I said that there were a lot of sites that chose not to run them.
> They all wish they had the viewership for ads.
This is just not true. Like, c'mon man, the very site you're on right now takes this approach.
The other rules are actually pretty cool, too. Zero commercial use allowed. This probably singlehandedly ensured the most diverse and interesting content.
edit: Wikipedia claims that happened in May 1997.
To be fair, Geocities did get done by the FTC for secretly selling users' PII to third-party advertisers almost 30 years ago, so it wasn't just our own faults. But I think rather than the FTC actually putting a stop to the behavior, the outcome was just that websites had be more honest in their EULA that users would be giving up their privacy rights, so here we are.
I remember the big decision on if adverts should even be allowed... Well here we are. Users get free things. Advertisers pick up most of the bill. The second that model doesnt work sites pack it up. The 'before time' could be there but servers/bandwidth/people are not free. You can minimize those but in the end someone needs to pay the electric bill.
Advertising networks: the exact evil for why we can't have nice things on the web.
Unfortunately sustainable is somewhat equivalent to money. Whatever work you do, and even if you love it, in general it needs to have a functional business model. Businesses that can financially support the people who provide them, tend to continue.
Personally, I believe this is the fundamental problem with many of the things that we now fondly think of as "old". Google groups? What was the business model? Did it make money? How could you make money from doing something like that?
The fundamental business model IRL used to be "fee for service". Not lock in. Not subscription. It works, because if people want the service they can pay for it. Okay, so hint: what are the issues of implementing fee-for-service on the internet?
hint number 2: someone mentioned banner ads in a comment. Is that fee for service? If not, for extra credit, what would be the side effects of a banner ad type business model? Are there useful services that could be provided with an alternative business model. Etc.
If you aren't selling porn or whatever credit card companies can't stomach, there's no problem. I recently stumbled upon a way to accept payments without the credit card companies (crypto): https://www.x402.org
> what would be the side effects of a banner ad type business model?
I remember Carbon Ads and BuySellAds being tasteful banner ad companies. I think one or both folded in recent years. In today's era, respectful banner ads probably have a niche market, especially with the prevalence of ad blockers. You'd be better off implementing x402 instead (paying for access to a resource).
But then your end-user needs to already have a crypto wallet, understand what USDC is, and so on...another niche market.
So the "old" web that I fondly remember is smaller communities. Some of course had abject shittiness, but the communities were contained -- so shitty groups (every community can figure out what shitty is on their own) are less likely to invade your conversations.
There are, of course, significant forces working against this. Small communities require active administration and moderation. Someone technical has to maintain and pay for the service; someone has to define what an asshole is and give them the boot. And since people seem averse to paying for privacy, I don't think there are enough volunteers for this to scale. There are also huge undeniable upsides to large communities that you simply can't replicate at the small scale.
But it's the web I remember and like. Where I feel like I can get to know people and don't feel like I'm shouting into the void. Where I don't feel like my conversations are constantly interrupted by jerks that have nothing to keep them away.
Nowadays the main issue for me is that there are too many people in the room. Pick any social network and forum and you're an immediate misfit there. Make one edgy statements and trolls, flamers, live streamers will tear you apart. Not to mention AI tech advancements are making a not-great situation slightly worse. The internet is no longer a happy place. Its a good question if it ever were.
I still remember being excited to “go online.” So yeah, it was (for me).
I think it is good to separate the nostalgia from the actual valuable nugget you want to revive. Nostalgia is great for marketing but parsing the missing nugget is the important part.
I have hundreds of CDs I never got rid of and last Christmas I got my son a cheap CD player. Yes, he could have infinite music through Spotify, but what I wanted to give him was that sense of control over music. The physical element has value, which has been appreciated for a while - a lot of that comes from the purposeful interaction required to select, set up and play the music. To listen to entire albums instead of individual songs. An avenue to explore music you only sort of are interested in but give more time because of switching costs.
But more specifically, I remembered the feeling of being a kid and having my own cassette player, walking around with it and bringing music with me. It was one of the first things I owned that could modify my space and change my mood and affect those around me in a positive way. That is a powerful concept when you are little!
I think the missing element of the "old web" is having that sense of control and influence. Not huge control or huge influence, but self-directed and with some friction. Sometimes, the friction is the most important part!
The problem with blogs, though, is that there is no great solution to limit the visibility to certain audiences. It really limits the types of things you can share. At least with Facebook, you can limit posts to your friends or groups of friends. But even that is not really practical—it's too much effort to have every person curate every other person they know into groups for access control (Remember "circles" on Google Plus? It didn't work).
I think the right model is to allow distributed communities to form organically and then use those communities for sharing permissions. By "distributed communities" I'm thinking of things like email lists, Discord servers, phpbb forums—communities where membership is symmetric and there is a shared sense of who is in the community. Blogs don't have anything like that.
There's an important sense in which you are very wrong here because nothing on the internet is actually hidden. Everyone can see everything regardless of the visibility you think you've put on something.
But there's another sense here where audiences do tend to self select into groups and do tend to see and (crucially) engage with things in niches. The early web was very much this first kind of social network where we all could go and read random stuff but we all found niches that we fell in love with. This gained more structure (and convenience) with web forums and then perhaps MySpace and Facebook and other social media added even more structure (pictures only with Instagram, short messages with Twitter, video on YouTube, etc). The structure has also morphed so that these platforms all start to look a bit like each other too.
All this to say, for the "old web" to return, it would need to be as "structured" as the one we have now but give us back the freedom to build whatever really cool thing we wanted. I think the only way to do this is with progressive enhancement of some kind.
I'm impressed with how confidently you disbelieve in the field of computer security.
I think a big problem is desensitization. When I was young, MSPaint art looked good, bitcrushed music sounded fine, and simple flash games were fun. Then the art, music, and games kept becoming more complex and higher quality, so the novelty and perceived opportunity was sustained. Now it has tapered off, so the novelty has run out and the next improvement is hard to imagine.
However, the world is so complicated and technology is still improving such that I suspect (and hope) we'll find more breakthroughs within the next decade. Personally, I'm still optimistic about VR: right now good VR is too expensive and development is too hard, but those are incrementally-solvable problems, and few people have experienced good VR (especially with motion) but I can imagine it.
On top of this we also have to be honest about what is a good old web value and what is pure nostalgia.
The point is that this never scaled and it started to break down almost immediately as more people started showing up. The moment Facebook broke for me was when I realized my mother, aunts, distant cousins, etc. were seeing absolutely everything I posted there and would be gossiping about it endlessly. Same with linkedin. Fun informal way to keep track of old colleagues and pimp your CV. But then everybody you ever reported to started showing up, and their secretaries, and that annoying guy that you never liked. And it became a cesspool of marketing drivel, up-beat management cliches, and worse. So, I disengaged there as well.
The old internet was only fun because most of those people weren't there yet. It had nothing to do with the technology. The technology was mostly not that great actually. RSS was a bit of a dumpster fire if you ever had to deal with parsing that. It was all a bit hand wavy. Titles go there but sometimes they go there. Dates might be iso timestamps. Sort of. Maybe. Sometimes. But definitely not always. Nominally XML but not guaranteed to be valid XML.
As a standard, it's pretty crap and hand wavy. But it was simple enough that you could make it work anyway and there was enough RSS out there that it was worth trying to parse and make sense of most of it, deal with the encoding issues, try to normalize the timestamps, etc. And do useful things with it (aggregating, pinging, linking bag, and all the other wonderful stuff people did).
The tech was just a (very limited) enabler. What made it work was the relatively homogeneous groups of people using that stuff.
That can still work. But it's not really technology dependent. Without people you have an empty room. Empty rooms are boring. Solving the empty room problem is the key thing. How do you get the right people to show up?
I remember gametrailers.com, quirky little site for hosting game related content, it folded once YouTube was the platform for commercial video uploading.
This doesn't sound like blogs + rss, this sounds like phpBB + AOL instant messenger. Social media is at its best when real people are interacting with real people, not when real people are interacting with a blog post/tweet/etc., (and definitely not an algorithm)...
Man, what a time.
Why can't at least tech people use only traditional forums which are easily searchable, readable without login, etc?
And Discord, which is terrible for that.
I'm building a short-form video platform with R2 as the storage backend. I figured out transcoding but I definitely need a better server for it. The old web isn't coming back because "free" is rife for abuse.
I've embedded a video on my homepage from my platform (dogfooding). Not sure I'll share the platform here when I soft launch next week or so, HN doesn't like incomplete products.
All this to say, video with decent quality is possible for the average website.
so .txt costs money; .zip costs money index.html costs money.
This reflects on another problem: the sorry state of journalism and willingness to turn press releases into news. That story ran in a wide variety of media outlets, and a Google News search of "children landline phones" turns up a bunch of these.
It turns out that these articles were really ads for "Tin Can," a VoIP phone for kids. Not really a landline at all, it's seriously nerfed, and I'd assume that if it's SIP, it's locked to their service, or else it's their own proprietary protocol. Not really a surprise, given that real landlines are almost extinct, and expensive where available.
Like someone else mentioned, things like GeoCities, but also stories like Ted The Caver, neopets, etc. Blogs are great but to be honest, I get most of my stuff from mailing lists and hacker news and feel quite fine with that.
What i'd love to see more of is people building interesting experiences for the love of the game, that's what feels like builds passion and interest. But there's no returning back to the old internet in the same way, because what's interesting and what's fun to read has changed.
I miss the old web, but I'm not sure it's coming back. You can still go on Usenet as well, not sure why anyone is spending time keeping the servers running, because I can not find an active newsgroups anymore. It was nice for a time, but the future has lost it's appeal to me.
Maybe the author, and some the comments are right. I should go build an silly personal website, just in HTML, have all the pages be different styles, have silly buttons, weird Perl scripts all over the place and link to like minded people.
Something I did notice is that Google recently added Discussions and forums as a metric in the Google Search Console, and forums is now an option in the More dropdown menu on Google.com.
How long did it take before the first user signed up and posted?
The current FeedLand gets close, and is nice for reading, but there's not a huge "social" aspect to it.
Luckily there are lots of people who still just make and post cool stuff, for the purpose of creating and sharing.
And there are plenty of likeminded individuals, many who have posted here. It may not seem like it because linking with hrefs and webrings is much more fragmented than services that beat you over the head with engagement metrics.
I think the distributed linking model coexists well with centralized resources like: (https://indieseek.xyz/links/internet/blogging/) and (https://outerweb.org/explore/category/indieweb) (mine)
What about people? Well some of them, as most of you pointed, want to monetize your attention, so it is not necessarily that they create something from passion, but to use you.
Besides that most of content is Audio-Video now, so it has two outcomes. One is that most of people chasing attention will create Audio-Video. This allows us to find niche and simple blogs, which is difficult, because Google will not index them, or not rank them.
What we are left are curated list of blogs. There are some.
Today's internet is wage slaves on prepaid phone plans using apps on cheap cell phones that want a cheap/free distraction from their lives.
This was such a drag and it kept getting worse as the popularity of Facebook increased.
These should include:
- Bring back the old web but only the good parts that my nostalgia filter remembers
- Software used to be fast and now it's not, look how long it takes for my magic pocket computer to transcode 4K videos and perform facial and object recognition on it
- Large download sizes have ruined everything, it takes my phone 1 minute to download a 500MB app over my 5G connection
- macOS is buggy and too much like iOS now, just like last year's release
- RSS feeds are the best
- iTunes/Apple Music is a bloated and horrible app, and I have been complaining about this for 20 years and I still use it/never used it in the first place
- React is bad because everyone is using it
- Electron bad
Did I miss any?
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If people want a mechanism of connecting with their friends who are far away, why not create a dedicated forum for this purpose? Either with something like discord, or even with something like phpbb?
What's needed isn't a nostalgic return to the 90s, blogging and all, but a completely non-corporate internet, probably using a separate set of protocols with novel reader/browser tech - self-hosted and/or distributed and/or torrented, simple enough for anyone to set up a server at home, no ads, no tracking, no corporate hosting or influence of any kind. And no "open source but impossibly complicated for normal people to use."
It doesn't have to be fast, it just has to be available with minimal friction for set-up and content management.
Let ten million private sites bloom and see what happens.
I have an old Wordpress blog I used to run and that I backed up but never restored when Hetzner needed to migrate the VM. It's been almost a decade that that backup was taken. I wonder if I will be able to resurrect it. It's somewhere on all these hard drives...
Blogging died IMO because its authors felt (and still feel) entitled to compensation for practicing a hobby, and started forcing advertising down their reader's throats as a means to extort them for money.
Added this to other comments: old web had ads (iframes, banners, popups!), and also was completely self-hosted, which gave you more freedom than any other cloud platform. If you want to resurect old web, just give a free hosting with FTP.
Also know as: How to get a visit from the FBI or a state agency equivalent once someone discovers you're a viable conduit of unsavory content.
The old web is dead, it will never come back because it relied on ignorance, naivety, charity, and good faith. Those are mostly all gone. You can still stand up one of these hosts and pages for yourself but you must still be incredibly vigilant because automated attacks on your host will be happening non-stop. Jumping into hosting for others is no longer a hobby and it never will be again.
Blatantly false information? Internet Explorer required for everything? Adobe Flash and Java all over the place? Websites that frequently actually could hack your computer? Geocities and AOL being the meeting places, reincarnated as Discord? Terribly slow, low-resolution imagery that our brains filled in the details for? The worst font and font color choices known to man? Shock content being absolutely rampant? Constant pop-ups? Every company wanting a toolbar?
That's what I remember. It's the same phenomenon where people think their Nintendo 64 or PlayStation 2 was a masterpiece never paralleled, revisit it in 2025, and realize: "wow... this... sucks actually." It's the same phenomenon where people think cars were better in the 80s, but they sit in an 80s car, and realize we've come a long, long way.
On a CRT display, a game’s aesthetic could thrive but fall flat on modern displays.
Learning patience for slow internet speeds versus immediacy to see stuff you actually don’t wanna see anyway.
It’s all perspective, really.
Sure, a lot of them suck, especially on Nintendo 64, because of the 3d transition, but from the NES onward there are timeless classics.
My kid beat super Metroid several times, he decided to play it on his own on his switch, and he loved it. He plays the old pokemon games too. In other words, that's a terrible analogy.
You said
> It's the same phenomenon where people think their Nintendo 64 or PlayStation 2 was a masterpiece never paralleled, revisit it in 2025, and realize: "wow... this... sucks actually."
I actually tried re-playing PS games I remember enjoying, and I still enjoy them.
I see what you mean about the fact that people look at old stuff with rose-tinted glasses, but really some things did age well (including parts of the early web).
On Android there's the open source Feeder from F-droid.
There's no rule that says a feed reader HAS to be a webapp.
It's just as much about the outreach as it is about the writing. Email authors you like. Give them thoughtful feedback. Be generous. It's hard work. It's a relationship and community building.
The lesson: Embrace change, and accept that your kids are independent with their own identities and experiences.
The old web is still there, almost invisible under the piles of corporate javascript applications. There's probably more old web now than there was when the old web was new. It's just that in terms of relative ratios it's buried under so much crap and search engines are so bad no few can surf it. Heck, there's even still usenet and people posting there like myself. It's not dead and it's not spammed anymore, and it's a true federated protocol.
But it is easy to be the change. Self host your website from your home computer. Don't use Chrome or Chrome derivatives. Don't put computational paywalls in front of your services like cloudflare or even Anubis. The truth is that for most websites in most situations, all that is not needed. And most importantly, surf the web. That'll require setting up the modern version of webrings: feeds. And sharing feeds with your friends and peers.
Internet has become dogshit wrapped in catshit.
Billions of dollars still being spent polishing turds like this.
I ran phpBB boards, my own blogs, an instance of a German php-based MMORPG I long forgot the name of. But it simply wasn't fun any more to keep up with the bad actors, to wake up and find someone found yet another bug in the MMORPG software or phpBB and in the best case just spammed profanities, in the worst case raze the entire server blank.
It's just not feasible any more to be an innocent kid on the Internet with a $5 VPS. And that's not taking the ever increasing share of legal obligations (CSAM and DMCA takedowns, EU's anti terrorism law, GDPR, you name it) and their associated financial and criminal risk into account - I know people who did get anything from legal nastygrams for thousands of euros for some idiot uploading MP3s onto a phpBB to getting their door busted down by police at 6 in the morning because someone used their TOR exit node to distribute CSAM.
The only thing that's somewhat safe is a static built website hosted on AWS S3. No way to deface or take down that unless you manage to get your credentials exfiltrated by some malware.
I’ll admit that when I lament the web we used to have, I’m never thinking about viruses, malware, pop ups/unders, &c. Seems like all that stuff was just a small price to pay for connecting with likeminded people.
I have a slice of that with Mastodon but maybe being 20 years older and jaded is making me wistful, yearning for something that is never coming back.
These days it seems like abuse@ is routed straight to /dev/null, and that's not even addressing enemy nation states that willingly shield and host bad actors.
This point is made very often, and I do believe it was true for many people, but I honestly didn’t care about individual blogs at all when I was a young net user.
I didn’t care about the 1,000 words a single person wrote about their trip abroad. There was no way to interact with it? All the action for me was on forums and chat rooms. Like the author mentions, it’s exactly the type of excitement that naturally led to early social media, which I was also a huge fan of for the close friends I already had.
The defeatist in me feels like I will just never have that same feeling again online. In part because I am no longer a child, in part because there are just too many people online now, in part because too many of those people’s brains are twitter-rotted.
It’s fine, I have my close circles to keep my human social spirit alive.
I wonder, have you ever read a novel? Hundreds of pages a single person wrote about a story that happened (usually) entirely in their head, printed on paper, no way to interact with it. It's a great experience if the author has some skill at this.
You said you didn't care for 1000 words that someone wrote about their trip abroad, and that's clearly an example to illustrate something, but it's not clear what, because it's contrived and falls apart easily: nobody else really read those blogs either, people read blogs from people and topics they're interested in.
So what about 1000 word blog from an a single individual that does interest you? Or more than 1000 words from a single individual on a different topic, like a novel?
Wow. This was me too. I was excited to hop on the Rockman.EXE Online forums and tell people about my homepage I was constantly redesigning/rebuilding.
> The defeatist in me feels like I will just never have that same feeling again online.
I feel you, but I’m still chasing that. Close circles are where it’s at though, maybe we gotta be happy with that. SIGH
What we also need is privacy. I only want my friends to see my blog or rss feed. Not the entire planet and every greedy spyware.
I don't mind the entire planet of human beings seeing my blog, but I don't want what I write to be monetized by grifters and trillion-dollar companies.
For that reason, my personal blog is behind security so only invited people can see it.
It works very well, but no, I'm not going to explain how it works because there are plenty of people on HN who have no morals, work for crappy companies, or are part of the trillion-dollar machines that are destroying human creativity so some C-level can buy a third private island.
Be independent. Running your own website is not that difficult. And seriously, spending the minuscule amount of money on hosting should not be a problem. It's a hobby, hobbies cost money. If you own your website, you can move it anywhere quickly. Nobody will start showing ads. Nobody will pester your users with annoying "SUBSCRIBE" modal popups. Nobody will sell the platform along with you and your content to a new owner.
I do not know enough about this particular platform — maybe it's different from others, maybe not. But I have seen enough platforms undergo progressive enshittification to be wary of any place that wants to host my stuff under their domain/URL.
They don't neglect to consider that at all - what people are nostalgic for is the web before it became mainstream and got ruined by muggles and corporations, when was just an exclusive club for nerds. Implicit to the concept of resurrecting the "Old Web" is recreating spaces that will never appeal to the masses. That's a feature, not a bug.
Yeah, that's not going to be a workable solution for me. I wish they would stop using iCloud and switch to a different provider that didn't have those limitations.
Let's go back to Gopher/Gemini or plain HTML.
Outlaw HTML+JS combo.
I’m curious about the personal lives of the authors of these kinds of posts and whether there’s any shades of the film American Beauty in them.
> Instead it was just people, the whole reason you started in the first place.
I fail to see what a new protocol would bring to the equation. I see it more as a human behaviour issue, network effect, worse is better etc etc.
My grandma uses Facebook because someone taught her how, she doesn't have the capability to explore technology on her own. That honestly goes for most people, they treat their computer as necessary for getting along in modern society and nothing more.
Facebook is the internet.
New web literally makes Google worthless for 80% of my searches.
q: What will the web / social media be like when the only people using it are idiots and the poor?