Using the internet like it's 1999

If it were 1999, most people would still be browsing the web on their US Robotics 56k modem (at best). This page is about 1 MB of assets (500kb gzip compressed if your browser supported it) , so it would have taken at least a minute just to finish loading.

This is going to come off glib, but I don't think you can believe any of this having actually used the Internet of 1999. As is so often the case, there are lots of real annoyances and offenses behind the sentiment, but still, the Internet of 2026 is vastly better than that of 1999. The amount of things you're just one quick search away from right now would break the brains of a 1999 netizen. We were still required to buy paper books for all sorts of routine knowledge work tasks.

How can we solve this problem, of the current state of the internet, without reverting to the compromises of the past? This has been on my mind for a while. The layer of trash some companies have built over the internet has been ruinous.

I'm not opposed to the message but it perplexes me the amount of people who bemoan the loss of the "old web" and then use a web page comprised of massive modern frameworks to deliver said message.

Just go to fark.com, a lingering glimmer of light from before the dead web. They are still aggregating human curated news and hosting reasonably civil discussions.

Then buy a Totalfark subscription so they don't need to bend over backwards to show more ads just to keep the lights on. See ya there!

I feel like 'Party like it's 1999' could become the slogan for a movement. Sure, the tech was a little less convenient, but overarching control was also less hard-wired into everything.

A lot of these recommendations seem prudent. I especially like the idea of POSSE for using social media without actually using it (every time you open a site to post is an opportunity to be ensnared). Completely stripping the browser from your smartphone is a bit extreme and excessive for me, but doesn't invalidate the other reccomendations.

Are there any decent webrings left, or newly existing?

Turn off javascript and use a text based browser? What? May as well not use the internet.

> On your router, you can and should setup blocklists for various malicious and nefarious domains, advertisements, adult content, etc. This is not “1999-esque” in practice, but is a requirement for the modern web.

I worked on a Geocities archive restoration. There was a boat load of porn (including illegal porn), malicious domains, spamvertising, malware, predators, political extremists, etc on the 1999 web, and you can find all of it within the raw Geocities archive that was made before it shut down. The idea that the old web was some kind of pure place of innocence is a weird and factually inaccurate take. If anything, the late 90s web was more dark than it is now, perhaps in part because nobody had any idea of how to police anything on it and things like PhotoDNA didn't exist yet.

If anything, my work on 90s site archival has taught me that the web has always been a place with a lot of dark places, and the narrative that the old web was some sort of pure innocent place that became evil is not matched by evidence.

It's just as plausible to me that the general "misbehavior" of humans on the internet hasn't changed all that much, but that we have, frankly, adopted a more puritanical and intolerant approach towards it. Nobody was talking about getting rid of Section 230, carding people for 18+ before they could use IRC (or install an operating system, what the actual fuck is wrong with you California), and Congress wasn't dragging evil Geocities CEO David Bohnett into grilling sessions where they were accusing him of hooking kids on digital cigarettes. Perhaps it would be wise to have a little nostalgia for some of that too.

To me the what we wanted/got distinction is something like:

1. A kind of capital that is widely available, so that people could exercise control and agency with machines that do what you want them to do for your own needs.

2. A distribution tool controlled by mega-corporations as they decide what you should be able to see or have.

One minor 'gripe' for lack of a better term, is that I feel like a push to go backwards in technology is a bit misguided. I feel like a lot if people see ads and trackers, then look to older protocols like Gopher/Gemini/IRC (or at least 'inspired' by older stuff like Gemini).

The issue isn't javascript, it's ads/trackers/algos/slop. I feel like tracker/ad/algorithm free static site on the status quo of http, or something newer like IPFS, is worlds better than trying to use arbitrary restrictions on something like a Gemini capsule.

OpenAI will love this article, noM nom nom

The best was the FTP search feature from alltheweb.com. You could find almost any software you needed.

I think it’s time to give up on the old web.

What made the old web cool, is that it was the first time we can communicate with so many random people in far away places digitally and share information through cool web pages.

That novelty has mostly died now. Communicating with people in distant lands is mundane now. And there is little new things to share that we haven’t already seen or heard before.

So what’s the point of the web now? Maybe the internet will become purely a utility for exchanging data for infrastructural and business purposes, and the idea of using the internet as a source of entertainment or recreation will fade away.

It would be nice to retreat back to an analog world, where the internet still exists, but only as a layer of glue in the background that orchestrates multiple technologies that power our world, and nothing more.

I don't know if I'm crazy but I think social media is pretty okay at the like, core building and enhancing social networks thing.

Instagram is probably my most used one these days and I love seeing my friend's stories and I don't think I've parsed more than a handful of ads in the last 2 or 3 years that I've been an active user, probably a few tens of hours wasted with dumb reels, not a bad cost at all imo. I have probably 400 irl people and 200 internet accounts I follow. It doesn't have the charm and honesty of navigating a webring or whatever, but the friction is so low so I get to see a lot of stuff my friends, acquaintances and especially just people i'm peripherally in community with share that I probably wouldn't otherwise.

I miss the old internet for sure, but I'm not convinced the current situation is as horrible as people say.