We’ve effectively eliminated boredom from our lives, and that sucks. Boredom is super important not just for our mental health, but in my view also for qualifying as sentient creatures.
The thing about AIM, was “OMG this person is available to chat instantly, right here, right now!” A lot of people didn’t have text messaging, or they did but it was expensive, so being able to chat remotely meant calling them on the phone, or you and the other person happened to be online at the same time.
I remember the day that the Old Internet died for me.
I saw my buddy was online on AIM, and I messaged him looking to shoot the shit. But he had just gotten a smartphone, and was logged into AIM on his smartphone, and it was not a good time for him to be shooting the shit because he was out and about doing stuff. So he was like “what do you need? I’m busy”.
Which is not something anyone had ever told me on AIM before. If you were on AIM you were by definition bored and looking to shoot the shit.
I guess we grew up too.
Ouch.
Also it was made to be fun and chill. You logged on talked to a few people end of transaction. You weren’t mined for data. They weren’t pushing ads and content based on your history. Myspace and aim just did a thing and you did that thing. Now the thing does you.
Bullshit. The technology WAS better.
Text communication took like, 28 Mb of RAM and was blazing fast, and a single chat application like Pidgin could interoperate with ALL of them.
❤️
How accessable was the old internet for visually impaired people?
While I appreciate the heavy handed strawman argument, it was entirely possible to make the old internet more accessible to those with disabilities WITHOUT making the technology worse in every single other way.
Mixed and depending on the year. Hardware was available, (braile and speech syth) but it was expensive as hell. There was a bit of a crisis when we went from dos to windows. None of the early GUI supported any of the hardware. In 95 you could use JAWS screen reader. Navigator 4 and IE5 were shit for a while until they started supporting it. Graphic images were still a problem, even after ALT tags became available, trying to get content makers to use them was a fight.
To say nothing of Flash. Sighted navigation was nontrivial.
oh god yes, flash and shockwave were awful. When my company used flash they also put text-only versions of the site up behind the scenes, but we were in the minority
So many mid-century googie disasters with bitcrushed sound effects whenever you so much as looked at a button. Homestar Runner isn’t a parody, it’s just how the web was. Toons! Toons! Chawacte–! Stooore!
The most personally nostalgic version of this still accessible is surely some PC Gamer demo disc launcher. Coconut Monkey era navigation by bouncing around a starship to run the Final Fantasy VII installer. That presumably still works, too, since the most stable Linux API is Win32.
back when using your real name on social media was idiotic
Still is
My mom then: don’t put any personal information on the internet!
My mom now: I just need to put my social security, credit card info, and full street address and I can see which Seinfeld character I’m most like!
I miss flash games like pogo.com and stuff
Check out flashpoint archive.
The balloon popping game or as a standalone, bloody pingu smash.
I have probably hundreds of hours on Yahtzee on pogo loool
Not long ago, I stumbled upon a legal YouTuber who covered an astonishing revelation: it turns out that casual users on Facebook or Instagram can get copyright strikes for the music Meta suggests they can embed in their shorts and atory reels…!??
I was there on MySpace 20 yeara ago - it was so much easier to approach musicians, and embedding their songs on your profile page was just one of the cool features. I still keep in touch with a few artists and bands from that era and still revisit them from time to time, even though I usually tend to always seek out music that is still to new…
P.S. Maybe it’s because I’m autistic, but I really feel the take in the OP just screams normie. Also, having an intense interest these days in decentralized social media and the smolweb and the rest of the indie web revival out there, I think things are not so bad, in a way. It feels better now that we know we’re going against the grain with things that might have been taken for granted 20+ years ago.
That’s not it at all. The internet used to be a multitude of small sites. A true bazaar made by individuals, visited by individuals in their web browsers.
Now it is all the 5 biggest platforms trapping users in their apps and doing their best to wall everything off.
Bring on NomadNet!!!
or Gemini Protocol,
They’re both great retro, but sadly they’re largely missing interesting content ;(
See, when you open the front (web) page for the Gemini protocol, it looks like an actual human wrote that. When you do the same for NomadNet, it looks like (and with your computer fans sounds like) an investor cash grab. That’s probably why I don’t recall about the latter despite researching adjacent tech a lot before.
https://unsigned.io/rnode_bootstrap_console/s_nn.html
nomadnet is a application that’s a subnet of reticulum
reticulum provides the mesh and ssl transport, nomadnet is a hosting platform built on it. no cash involved.
i think the easiest path to trying out nomad is liam cottle’s (meshtastic guy) meshchat https://github.com/liamcottle/reticulum-meshchat he added support for nomad net
Cool.
Actually, I have heard of it, here to be precise. I guess the front page threw me off so bad that my brain filtered it out like it never happened.
yeah there’s a lot of stuff out there. I’m in to meshtastic/meshcore but have found them to be wanting.
I’ve also been playing with HaLow and Reticulum (30mbps), but the price and availability of the radios are rough.
I’m also hosting a little i2p, but more just to stay up on the tech, i2p is a lot dodgier and the available Android app appears to have tracking abilities.
MSN chatrooms are where I met the first person I had a relationship with, AIM is mainly where we got to know each other.
And MySpace was what got me interested in web design, back when crafting webpages by hand was still seen as a form of art.
Remember:
Products from Amazon will cost MUCH MUCH LESS because there’s no “big box” overhead.
And shipping will be FREE!
Everything you did on the Internet didn’t exist just to sell you something; you weren’t a commodity to be manipulated and packaged with everything you looked at.
Also the Internet wasn’t crapped up with every moron imaginable that could pick up a phone. There was a minimum barrier to entry; you needed a computer and to have at least average intelligence to figure out how to use it.
We’re still living in the Eternal September. It used to be that there was a certain etiquette to being online. Don’t ask a question someone else already asked, don’t pretend to be an authority on something you’re not, and so on. Then September 1993 happened. Suddenly there was a much bigger new cohort of internet users who needed to assimilate to the culture. It was an endless cohort of people who didn’t know how to behave. October came around more new user, November, December were the same. The change didn’t happen quickly. It took decades but it started then.
This is the right answer. Also the internet hadn’t been overtaken by big companies and bots. And law makers was just starting to understand what it was, so it wasn’t censored left and right. It really was a magical time.
Well, then the Internet wasn’t a capitalist shithole. It was only a shithole.
What is this talk, like you cannot be offline anymore? You can still put the phone down. You can turn off the message sounds, and check them in the evening, or tomorrow. Is someone forcing you on gunpoint, to constantly browse instagram, youtube, lemmy or something? But but- no. Life requires making choices, and being online constantly is a thing, you have accepted to do, if you are unhappy with it, stop doing it. If you have an addiction, you can fight against that, you do not need to just accept it.
If you have an employer who doesn’t respect down time then yeah, you have the metaphorical gun of poverty pointed at your head. Boss called you at 10:30 PM to fix the slides on the Henderson presentation but you didn’t answer because you were sleeping, your phone was in sleep mode and didn’t ring. George did answer and started working on it all night. George will be in the room when the presentation happens, you won’t be.
I hate that this is true, I wish I could disconnect from the office like my parents did but if I’m not available whenever my Boss wants me, it’s the unemployment line. It sucks, I hate it. It should be different, it should be illegal but this is reality and the reality is my Boss holds most of the power in our professional relationship.
If you are on call, that does not require you to do anything else on the phone, though. You could even have just a dummy phone, so they can still call and text you - most people do not have to work 24/7 on their smart phone (or computer for that matter). Not being constantly online does not have to mean you have to return to pre-modern times.
It’s not that you can’t, but the social norms that filled that time have been replaced by short-form media.
If you want to put down your phone, there’s nothing wrong with that. But you’re just going to be sitting there with your thumb up your butt because everyone around you is going to have their nose in their phone.
That is part of the choice, too, yeah. But it is the question: are you happier constantly online and available, or would being more offline make you feel better? I think everyone should at least try for a while. If you (you in a general sense here) cannot spend a day, without checking your inbox (I guess I have to add, unrelated to work), or scrolling instagram, or the news, or youtube… you have a serious addiction. Is it worth it, to constantly take part in the addiction, just because others have it too?
Personally I am mostly available only via phone calls, if I am not sitting on computer. If it is urgent, they have to call me, otherwise it can wait until I remember to check the messages. That might take a while, but people get used to it.
Im unfortunately not your target audience, Intro verted in person to a fault, i’m relatively happy with the state of affairs. But you are absolutely right with many if not most people
This and the old internet was largely non-commercial compared to today. It was the “small” internet of passionate nerds, academics, and techies who needed an outlet for their passion. I remember being confused when I learned the “.com” was intended for commercial web sites only, because most personal websites people had were “.com”
The old internet was decidedly anti-commercial.
I remember very well people being revolted by online advertising and how it commercialized a free place.
They were right.
yeah once you found a niche community you had knowledgeable people that would at least reply by the weekend, and expert advice would be free just because some guy was happy a stranger liked the same things.
You just had to be confidently wrong enough to aggro the guy that actually knows his shit.
Maybe that strat was always around but I associate it more with the later 2.0 web
