alt Hacker News>I would love to return to a smaller Internet without the masses.
Really? I would consider myself an "Internet person" in the sense you're saying. I spend most of my time, if not on old-school forums, certainly on discussion forums like this one and imageboards. I don't find that the existence of those other platforms affects me much, besides allowing me to use them when I'm the mood to do so, and if they went away I would neither mourn it nor cheer it.
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The early internet predates imageboards. You found GB/SNES/MD emulators in personal pages. JS was almost not used, active X crap was everywhere. Installing GNU/Linux was really difficult, but you could set it all offline. Getting a multi-CD or DVD release was a bargain instead of downloading everything.
*BSD where for corporations or universities with ISDN/broadband and tons of time to build ports, because OpenBSD CD's were copyrighted. You could get a floppy and netinstall, better if you had a fast connection.
Fora were far more ubiquituous and streaming as they said was so-so. Even 480p was something like "HD" for its day, at least for streamed video for 1024x768 resolutions. The rest was a blocky mess with low bitrate DivX videos. You know what DivX/XVid is right?
The 2000's were more like bridge era as tons of people still pirated tons of good 90's series such as Northern Exposure and The X Files among blockbusters.
Lots of people escaped to the internet to get what they coudln't IRL. Movies, scifi-books, GNU/Linux and indie games, manganimes, a truckload of them.
After that you just got the corporate internet with streaming platforms offering even worse products than the ones we got in the 90's and not to mention the shitty cinema and subpar from the mid 2000's anywhere modulo HL2 and a few exceptions.
You have bug ridden games with DLC's, bot infected propaganda sites like X and walled gardens as Discord and the like.
The early Internet had many more small personal and hobby sites, and it was easier to find them. Some are still there, but they get drowned out in the noise. If the commercial noise were gone, in some hypothetical new web, personal sites would be all that remains.
The Gemini protocol space is somewhat like this now, it’s very cozy. (But I’d prefer a Gemini-like web with guaranteed privacy and anonymity.)