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.
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.
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.
The more animated gifs the better!
Having been online when the web was invented, I remember an internet where people simply trust each other. Mail servers acceped mail for anyone without authentication, you could upload files to public servers without problems, and if you needed a machine to host something, you asked around for someone letting you do this. Imagine that today!
SPAM still was processed meat and not the bane of your inbox. It actually had not been invented then! No ads, no cookies, no subscriptions, no paywalls. OK, ordering pizza online was not a thing yet, too.
When you did something stupid because you were new, someone took you by the hand and educated you (eiter not to do it all, or do it the right way), and you learned to be a good netizen.
It used to be exciting. They weren’t trying to earn money with every click and game the system. You got to explore the world and meet interesting people. I miss that, it’s all a lot of anger and social bubbles now.
It was separate from real life. Like, you had to make a conscious decision to “go online”, because otherwise you were always offline. Now it’s harder to be offline. I guess I’m saying I miss the days where we weren’t expected to always be reachable. The phone and the internet were at home.
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.
I really like the age of discovery description. Every web site was different and there was web design web sites where designers tried to impress eachother and really push what was possible to do.
There was hardly any corporations on the web. There was some ads in the beginning but ironically enough, Google built their empire on having a clean search page without ads, which made people flock to them.
See where we are now…
I still have the same mindset though. I build open source projects and use mostly open source technologies. I’m not interested in making money from any of that. Money is from work, not from passion.
There wasn’t anything resembling influencers, and mostly you were talking to other nerds.
People were much more technically savvy, and creating their own homepages with guestbooks and construction gifs.
Downloading music… I was discovering so many cool bands by downloading shitty quality mp3s!
Even before filesharing, you could just type the name of a song with .wav or later .mp3 and there was a good chance someone had it saved on their personal site
Geocities. That’s how I lerned HTML. Used their WYSIWYG editor and then tinkered with the code. Built several pages close to my interest, and even scored some free stuff from marketing early online retailers like CDNow.
Also spent a lot of time browsing other Geocities pages and contacting people with shared interest.
I was interviewed by Entertainment Weekly magazine because of my Geocities account haha.
A huge portion of websites were labors of love, just someone putting something up as a joke or doing a deep dive into a hobby. Nobody was shopping online in large numbers so there were basically no ads, no SEO, no listicles, no influencers.
A lot of this thread is hugely familiar and a nice memory.
I’ll just add one little thing I remember from 96/97ish, the “… ate my balls” phenomenon. I guess nowadays you’d call it a meme format.
The gist of it was that you would take some cultural icon/celebrity/whatever and add their name to the phrase “…ate my balls”.
For some reason I remember this as being hilarious at the time. Not so much when recounted in the here and now though :-)
Well not late 90s but pre 94 was the best times on the net. As for late 90s internet was not a commercialised mess of brands and much more fun.
Totally. I spent a lot of time on Prodigy bulletin boards.
Yet another thing I remember from the 90s Internet was Church of the Subgenius. It was one of the first viral memes and when you read about it, you might just discover a thing or two about a thing or two.
Not every single last gonk was online. It was mostly nerds who had something interesting to share. So many different places to go to…
Hmm, the adventure of surfing the web? That forums and such were filled with nerds and quality advice. And the lack of monetization.
I remember (illegally) downloading lots of music, trying webbrowsers and them being super slow on my machine and of course pictures would load even slower. Alter (I think after the 90s were over) discovering Linux, reading forums and everyone was helping each other out. Or discussing detailed things and niche interests. And it had a distinct culture. A suggested/mandatory way of writing and replying so things would be organized and easy to follow.
I did read about Linux on the internet. But i wasn’t crazy enough to download something as gigantic as a Linux distribution with my limited DSL connection in the early 2000s. So I did go to my local Mediamarkt (German electronics store chain) and bought a copy of Suse Linux 6.4 which had a bunch of CDs that i used to install my first Linux system. The first time I installed linux from the internet was around the time Ubuntu was already big (I think i installed Breezy Badger then)
Yeah and there were also lots of PC magazines around then. I’m from Germany, too. I bought some Suse version with a similar version number as part of a (to me kinda expensive) PC magazine. Proceeded to wreck the bootloader, then delete most of the files on the PC by accident. Had to copy lots of things from my friends on the next LAN party to get everything back. Took me several attempts and re-installations to get a proper dual-boot. Mainly due to hardware woes. But it convinced me immediately. I’m a Linux user since then. I remember playing all the small games that were either on the CD or small enough to download. Like KTuberling(Kartoffelknülch), TuxRacer, some billiard and marble games, clones of arcade games, Sokoban… Every day a new enticing game to explore. (I was a kid back then.) And I also drew pictures, did the 10 fingers typing lectures and read a lot of books and documentation about the inner workings of Linux. And I was always interested in programming and messing with computers. I already had a C++ for Dummies book at that point. So eventually I got more into programming and constructing silly HTML pages. But I think that was early 2000s. And I remember playing lots of CounterStrike at that point. Just at friends places, because at home we still had dialup and it took us a bit into the 2000s until we got that PC that was able to run Windows 98, ME and then Linux.
Waiting for a BMP to load a few lines at a time before jpeg became ubiquitous!
As a Windows user in the 90s, I remember downloading Slackware. It took a long time for me to understand what it was and how to install it. The idea of a different OS that I could install on my PC was bizarre and not at all intuitive at the time to a computer novice.
