Longtime webusers of lemmy, what’s your favorite memory from using the internet in the late '90s?What do you miss about the early web?
Longtime webusers of lemmy, what’s your favorite memory from using the internet in the late '90s?What do you miss about the early web?
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Forums felt like a real community. Even crummy little forums like my home forum Supercars.net were teeming with life.
Discovering websites that had highly specific purposes.
Going down the rabbit hole of knowledge of a niche topic on websites alone. Now Wikipedia has most of the information about something in one page. Because information could be so fragmented then, you could spend hours just learning about a topic through people’s personal websites and forum posts.
The old internet still felt very hobbled together by people and their simple efforts. The new internet feels very big corporate. Lemmy kinda feels like a slice of the old internet sometimes.
The rabbit holes was big for me. I think it started changing after Google Reader and other aggregators came along, but before then you’d go from one site, which would link to another, then to another site, until after an hour you’d gone across a dozen or more different sites and you were on a completely different topic than what you started.
It still can happen in the current web, but it all feels alot less connected now, every website is like an island almost, no external Links and completely separated from any other sites. Before, finding new sites and content from a site’s ‘Links’ page was a big thing, I feel like that’s how I found alot of stuff. You would just bounce from one site to the next, read what they had, check the Links, see something else, bounce to that and repeat.
I really miss webrings. You’d discover the most absurd niche shit people were into. Especially since everyone seemed to have their own Geocities page or something similar. Nobody has one these days, as we all just use social media and big sites.
It really sucks. You just don’t get that these days now everyone is inside their own little bubble on the net.