• Lmaydev@programming.dev
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    5 months ago

    There were no front pages like Reddit or Facebook.

    Everyone had their own site and hosting was stupidly cheap.

    You could host your own videos for very little. You didn’t need to rely on external services like YouTube.

    You found websites by word of mouth or by links on the sites you visit. It was an age of discovery. It was awesome.

    As content was self hosted there wasn’t any private censorship of content. And as it was cheap people weren’t desperately trying to monetize everything to stay a float.

    It was so completely different it’s legit hard to explain.

    • gedaliyah@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      If you hosted your homepage through your ISP or a site like GeoCities, there were no bandwidth charges and no storage limits. You could just make an FTP and upload every file you own if you wanted.

      • merari42@lemmy.worldOP
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        5 months ago

        You could also you any jarring combination of colours, fonts, gifs, marquee tags, and anything that you desired with your geocities sites. There was no tyranny of design principles or minimal corporate webdesign.