I’ve been exploring the fediverse and subbing and posting all over the damn place. Realizing lemmy can federate with kbin blew my mind. Not to mention the possibility of turning my old laptop into a personal server to host my own instance. Is this what it felt like to discover how the internet worked in the 90s?
It’s way better. For instance this picture didn’t take 3 minutes to load.
Not to mention the whole time the phone line is tied up. The only phone.
Very true. And when my parents didn’t want me online anymore, rather than just coming in and asking me nicely to hop off while they make their phone call, they would click the hang up button repeatedly until the signal was lost and I was disconnected. Then they would make their phone call.
I clearly remember when I first got broadband installed, yes faster downloads were nice and all, but what I really cared about at that point was that sweet release from the tiranny of the freaking phone line. Not ever having to worry again about people wanting you to disconnect because they want to use the phone. Connected 24/7, baby! What a revolution, lol
It’s like I’m looking into a mirror!
I remember one of my friends had TWO phone lines, so they can use the phone AND the dial-up at the same time.
I was so insanely fucking jealous. I hated that kid so much, because he could be online all night and he would FUCKING RAID MY KINGDOM IN UTOPIA WHILE TALKING TO ME ON THE PHONE! FUCK YOU ADAM!
yep. it got to a point where my folks had to get a computer only phone # as either me or my sister were constantly online.
Tell me more, I think that did not exist where I live.
twas the year 1996, I had been online for 3 years, 28.8kbps wasnt doing it anymore, got a 56kbps US Robotics modem (wikipedia says 56k wasnt available until 1998 but that’s wrong, 1998 was when I started college and I had a 56k modem at least 2 years prior to that).
internet access was run by the county, so we dialed into a server (named “homer”) and then it either acted as a proxy or basic NAT to provide access to the public internet. speeds were glacially slow compared to modern day standards, I played a lot of MUD’s (smaug codebase mostly - Realms of Despair, etc). the internet was very much a different animal back in those days.
I remember having a c64 with a 300 baud modem in the 80s, then Amiga500 using 600 baud modem, then after that PC 1200/2400, then went cable. Honestly i don’t miss the hardware limitations, but i “get” the feeling of new frontierness.
3 minutes… lol
I remember a long time back, I wanted to download a game on the internet. The game, was street legal racing.
350MB or so.
It took me almost two weeks to download that damn thing. Internet disconnects would completely restart it… I don’t miss those days.
Aaaah, those were the days. Not good ones, but days for sure. Remember before download resuming was a thing?
I don’t wanna remember. It was horrible…
heh I remember downloaded a shareware version of Tyrian2000 from a dodgy ftp site, took a few hours. worth it though
Internet disconnects would completely restart it…
I used download helpers that restarted from the failure point up to… 2012 I think. At the end I was rolling my own because nobody distributed it anymore, but restarting a download from the beginning is just horrible.
I think I used rocket Downloader or something along those lines… after it failed twice.
Early 2000s
I feel nostalgia for the days of anxiously waiting for an image of Anna Nicole Smith or something to load from the top down, only to learn after 2 minutes that she was wearing a swimsuit 🫠
I was ready to put on some rose colored glasses and be all contrarian, but nah, you’re totally right
I feel like this picture right now
In the 90s it always felt exciting to go online and see what interesting things you could find. There was no AI driven dopamine feed to keep you doom-scrolling passively for hours - you had to actually go looking for stuff. You’d stumble an interesting website, then follow links from there to other things. Finding a cool website felt like an accomplishment. It really felt like something special.
The internet has now turned into half a dozen walled gardens blindly trying to “maximize engagement” at all costs. They’re all competing to just retain eyeballs as long as possible with low effort content shoved down your throat.
The rest is a bunch of blogspam fighting for the top page of Google. There’s no use even bothering to search for things anymore, because no matter what you search for it’ll be a bunch of low effort “Top ten” lists, probably written by AI, containing just enough superficial bullshit optimized for SEO to make it to the front page of Google.
Wikipedia is probably one of the few places you can still experience what the 90s internet was like. You can spend hours going down a rabbit hole, but it doesn’t push anything on you. It’s just there, waiting to be discovered, if you want it.
When i first heard about the fediverse, my immediate reaction was “What a novel idea, but that won’t work” before taking a moment to remember that’s just how everything used to work. The Fediverse is just Usenet.
I’ve just become so brainwashed by the dystopian hellhole of the 2020’s Internet that I forgot what it was, and what it could become again.
This is the thing that excites me the most about the fediverse. If we can keep it from being monopolized by corporations, it will become a reflection of what the old internet used to be.
I think one of the key things that will prevent the capture of the Fediverse by corporations is never ever allowing whitelists for instance defederation and blocking to happen.
If that ever does happen, it becomes trivially easy to break the decentralized network up into a few centralized silos that are all disconnected from the rest of the network completely, whereas, the way it stands now, you have to explicitly block anyone you don’t want to be connected to, so it’s a great way to deal with bad actors and nasty instances, but makes it extremely hard to wall off your instance completely, because if you block another instance it’s trivially easy for the people that are unhappy with that to find or create a small new instance that flies under the radar and allows them to see the content on both the instance they left and the incense it blocked. It also makes it incredibly hard to capture people on your instance because they can always create a small instance and use that instance to see the content on the instance they left.
I think also limiting block list size for instances (but not users!) Could be a really good way of doing this too because then any instance I want to block a ton of other instances is going to have to fork lemmy to lift that band and then everyone will know they did that and know to get off it.
I agree, but take a small look at email. Email is the way it is currently (basically 3 providers, if you aren’t on their specific “good people” list then your emails get nowhere, residential IPs are considered bad by default, a single configuration miss dooms your server forever) because it was hard to maintain an email server, and even harder to combat spam. The fediverse is not immune to spam, but it does have the advantage that there is no expectation of privacy, and thus it is possible to have moderators filter spam. But that’s a hard ask. Email became that way because only large corporations were able to write good filters.
I won’t argue that there is a possibility that things could go wrong for federated and a decentralized social networks like Lemmy and Mastodon, and we are going to have to fight a cultural and technological battle against that, but I think at least this is a very good start, and I don’t think it inherently has to go that way either.
Thank you for articulating what I’ve been trying to. I had the same knee jerk reaction to the fediverse, but you’re exactly right. Yes, it’s easier to find things to doomscroll in the corporate “web 2.0” glossy version of the internet, but it’s also designed to make us forget that comes with a cost. I’m realizing that so much has become like the blow molded plastic Step 2 brand Cozy Coupe version of what things used to be. There are fewer sharp corners, but the trade off is that it’s a simplified, AI curated version of the whole.
I don’t exactly know what this is yet, I’m not sure how it’s going to evolve, and a lot of it feels very raw… but that’s also part of what makes it exciting. It’s going to be fun.
I feel like the fediverse is similar to email servers. No one company controls email. Each email provider can set up their own rules, etc.
Let’s not forget reddit was also like this for a very long time, that’s why many loved it.
I also have good feelings for the fediverse, really hope this will turn everything around and last.
+1 on Wikipedia, I still love browsing it. The amount of interesting things you can learn is amazing! The world is a wacky place.
The difference is that wikipedia still has this “all of the hallways look the same” feeling (which to be clear is good for an encyclopedia), to me it doesnt really feel like the old web. IMO, the fediverse and Hacker News (news.ycombinator.com) are the only things left of it.
I miss the old internet before it became the bland corporate landscape we have now.
I think this is the thing that made me stay on Lemmy and don’t look back on Reddit. I’d imagine that the federation is not a totally new concept, but since i discovered it i’m feeling just like when i discovered the internet when i was 5 years old, i posted more here in the last 5 days than what i used to post on reddit in a year.
Could you talk more about how your experience with Lemmy has brought back those feelings? I remember the sense of wonder I felt when browsing the web in the early '00s, when every personal website, PHP board and IRC community was unique and discovering a new website/community was really exciting. I still feel this sense of wonder when I visit content-rich websites from that era, such as amasci.com, https://atlas.limsi.fr/ and https://sciencemadness.org/talk/.
What I’ve seen from Lemmy brings me back to the early years of Reddit, but I’m yet to find anything that really brings back the way I felt when I started browsing the web. But maybe I just haven’t explored enough?
The whole fediverse thing is what really takes me back to my first days on the internet, because after some years, the way the internet works in general became common knowledge, so nothing felt new, or the things that were really new, were actually just stupid concepts (Take for example NFTs that rised in popularity last year, people said it would change the future and the way the internet works, but it actually was just a dumb pyramid scheme and it led to nothing, even to this day i have no idea how it works.)
But the federation is a genuinely interesting system that is different from everything i’ve seen in the past years. The concept of anyone hosting conglomerates of communities in their own house or even in a dedicated server, while all those instances communicate with eachother is mind boggling for me, and the fact that none of this is owned by a company truly reinforces the feeling of community. The fediverse feels like a part of the internet that is yet to be explored, and while i don’t understand it completely, there’s still much to learn and discover. Browsing through Lemmy doesn’t feel just like a daily dopamine rush activity just like Reddit, it genuinely feels like i’m interacting, contributing and being part of it, something i haven’t felt for a long time tbh.
The feeling of ownership, of oh I can go host an instance at home and knowing that you aren’t at the whim of corporate admins or a company’s poor fortune, is so incredibly cool. I really hope more decentralized/selfhostable alternatives to major services start to take off.
Absolutely agreed
I think for me Lemmy is providing a portal to those places because the content posted here tends to be more 'high effort digital garden’ type links than low effort attention grabbers.
I dont think lemmy is necessarily doing anything to make this true, its just that its new and the people participating are more likely to be motivated by altruistic reasons, or just everyday human behavioral reasons, than the profit-making or attention-seeking we might see on ‘popular’ sites like reddit.
edit: however maybe the ‘federated’ nature will keep influence spread enough that the big system-gamers won’t try to setup shop? we will see. Either way I like it here for now
Also, to be fair, there’s much less of a system to game in the first place, because you don’t have an overall karma score, so there’s not really any incentive to karma farm.
I didn’t realize that. Thats nice, no one liked karma farming.
I think kind of depends on how deeply you explored the instance list to find and instance that really vibes with you and makes you feel like excited to join. If you join one of the major ones like lemmy.ml or lemmy.world or shit just works or another one of the big instances, it’ll just feel like the early days of Reddit — young and active and exciting because it’s a new platform but not particularly unique feel or culture or anything because they’re just general purpose instances that let anyone in and so kind of end up with a common denominator internet culture. If you really go far down the instance list, though, and find an instance with less than a hundred users that has a really particular theme, target audience, and user culture, like I did, then it feels radically different than any other social media platform. I think that being on the big instances kind of hides the fact that Lemmy is super decentralized, just like the early internet, and so can give rise to really niche, unique, diverse, and interesting communities.
Lemmy reminds me of discovering Usenet and experimenting with various Usenet clients, going down rabbit holes in the communities and so on.
Or discovering a good mailing list back in the day.
That’s the bilbo baggins effect. That yearning for a past that doesn’t exist because you’ve grown so much and it’s changed and maybe it was never how you remembered it in the first place.
It existed and still exists though, it’s just that there is less incentive to produce this kind of content and leave it open. It’s a natural result of how the system changes as people learn to game it and find ways to gain power or make it profitable.
There are modern websites that still bring those feelings to me. For example, this blog has impressed me with its content and creative visualizations: https://ciechanow.ski/ Personal websites and web forums just don’t surface anymore when searching the web or browsing large communities/aggregators, but I can find them on places such as https://curlie.org/ (A modern-day web directory) and https://search.marginalia.nu/ (a search engine that focus on non-commercial websites).
Discovering the internet in the '90s was… different. Let me see if I can paint a picture for you.
Initially, many people used dial-up BBSes to get their fix of “Usenet” groups… which I think may be the best analog to the “federated” communities on Lemmy/kbin and such. If you looked hard enough, you could find groups for just about anything surprisingly easily… and I do mean anything. ISPs like Prodigy, CompuServe and AOL, along with some of the more sophisticated BBSes, would all connect to each other periodically – in some cases, not necessarily by way of live continuous connections – and the groups that the service provider had chosen to subscribe to would be mirrored to their server.
Those dial-up modems eventually topped out at 56Kbps – long before blazing fast 384Kbps DSL became a thing – and you had to disconnect if Mom or Dad needed to make a phone call. Worse, if they were expecting a phone call, you just had to stay off until they gave you leave to get back on… but really, the “addiction” phase of the internet hadn’t even kicked in yet, so that just meant you went and did something non-internet related, like ride a bike or watch a VHS video tape – or just whatever happened to be on TV. (Uh-huh… I can already feel you shuddering at the very thought of actually disconnecting for a while…)
The entire concept of a “web browser” was brand spanking new; my first exposure to a web browser was the AOL browser. It… wasn’t great. Discovering Netscape Navigator (the predecessor to Firefox) was a night-and-day difference… way better at pretty much everything. Geocities, Ask Jeeves, Yahoo… all the things were at your fingertips, at that point.
But really, once TCP/IP and “web browsing” became a thing, the nature of the internet has remained relatively static in some very significant ways, since. The speeds cranked up periodically, and the websites have changed from time to time, JavaScript and stylesheets were added to the mix, and the most popular web browser has changed several times… but the fundamentals are still much the same. If you dropped late-'90s-me in front of any web browser today, I’d have to learn which websites have replaced the ones I used to know… but that would essentially be the full extent of the browser learning curve. I suppose it might also take me a moment to grok that all of my favorite newsgroups have been entirely replaced by web-browser-accessible systems at this point… but in the end, I’m pretty sure that I’d quickly get how that makes far more sense from an end-user usability standpoint.
So yes… many things have changed. And a few things haven’t.
Good summary, but I would add the history of BBS in the beginning :) I “grew up online” with a 2400 Baud (I know I know, luxury vs. the self-built 90 Baud acoustic couplers some had) internal Express slot modem, Telix as a first terminal program and a print-out (9-needle printer of course) of all local BBSes numbers, which I then proceeded to test out. I found a bunch of home-installed BBSes which had only a single port (probably the parent’s phone line) to dial in, and where you would instantly be greeted by “The Sysop wants to chat with you”, because there was an enthusiastic kid sitting at the computer, being super happy that someone had finally dialed in to “their BBS” :D
Then eventually I ended up using the three popular BBSes (which we also called mailboxes) of my hometown, we had real life meetings in pubs for beer and sweet baguettes or Schnitzels, made a bunch of nerd friends and enjoyed life. We had email & usenet, and eventually, the first time I dialed into the WWW, it was through a routing by one of those mailboxes, using Netscape and it was a “wow” to open the colourful http://www.altavista.com :D But I used up my quota on that day and didn’t return until I entered university and ended up having only to pay for the telephone calls, but without a quota.
I hear you… but imho, you can usually only go back so far before you lose your audience. ;-)
I think my first modem was either a 1200 or a 2400 baud as well, and if we’re going back that far… I can remember logging into BBSes that turned out to be outside of my “billing exchange” or something. That meant that they weren’t technically long distance calls – so you didn’t have to add 1 and the area code when dialing – but they were nonetheless an extra charge. My dad was very annoyed with me when he got those bills. He finally made me dig into the phone book to find out which exchanges were an extra charge for our area, and I printed a list of those exchanges and posted it on the frame of my monitor. Henceforth, I was no longer allowed to call any of those exchanges. (There were still dozens of BBSes that I could call within my area.)
And of course, at some point after that, Dad went ahead and subscribed to a second phone line to the house, so that I no longer monopolized the main house line.
And yeah… Altavista, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves… I had almost forgotten how many search engines we had, back then. Your mentioning that reminds me of one of my first experiments in writing my own html files: I created a miniature bar that had a select box listing a bunch of different search engines. I could select one, type in my search term next to it and hit the Search button to immediately be redirected in the frame below the bar to that engine’s results.
Good times.
ohhh… frames in web pages, now THAT brings back memories! I had almost forgotten that on today’s framework-built websites those are no longer a thing
I lived in the sticks, when we first got the internet around 99 I never saw it go past 14k download haha. The stupid shit my friends and I did instead to entertain ourselves would probably make us youtube famous nowadays.
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That’s what BBSes and some parts of the internet felt like. Then it all just became a shitty megamall.
we’re returning now. all hail ActivityPub and personal blogs and self hosting.
I kinda wish usenet was still popular for more than downloads :/ I used to forte agent and slrn like a motherfucker
be the change you want to see in the world
The global village is a company town.
Depressing
I miss the days before search engine optimization.
Used to be able to find amazing stuff. Now, searches only get you the top paid for content.
I remember in high school I found this guy’s blog that detailed how he built this amazing looking house off grid by himself (besides pouring the foundation). I dreamt of one day doing the same thing, following the plans he provided.
In college, years later, I met my fiance. Late night I shared this dream with her and she was encouraging. I went to try to find that blog, thinking I need to save that info for my future self. I couldn’t find it. I searched for weeks trying to find it, but never did.
I know there are resources on building your own place, but I absolutely loved his design. It had high ceilings, wrap around porch. Used geothermal heating, solar panels… Still makes me sad to think about.
Web rings rise up.
100% agree. I work in web and I hate the trend of SEO-bait articles. They’re largely totally unhelpful, too! I bet you could still find that blog, though, with enough time – if you remember anything about it, that is!
I remembered a lot better in college and I absolutely could not find it. I’m convinced the blog isn’t hosted anymore or something
If you remember some of the name, the internet archive is your best bet.
unfortunately I do not remember the name
Key words, etc. You would be surprised.
I wonder if there is a Lemmy version of internet detectives somewhere.
SEO-bait is the result of search engines and the prioritization of long form text over relevant hits. The internet has existed before search engines, and will exist long after they’re replaced with something else.
If you really want a 90s throwback, have a look at neocities.org
I’ve been on Lemmy for a only a couple of days and I’m already saving posts left and right.
Yeah, I’m kinda tempted to start a “InternetIsBeautiful” clone where we can post random links to cool things.
EDIT: Made one: https://sh.itjust.works/c/internetisawesome
Please do!
kbin definitely needs a “save thread/comment” feature. sounds handy.
I have to admit, this whole fediverse adventure is making me feel like I should really make myself a neocities homepage!
Is that Myspace Tom in your avatar?
Maybe I am Myspace Tom
Guess you’ll have to click on my profile to find out
Your profile says exactly what I’d expect Myspace Tom to say, so thanks for being a friend to all!
I feel hurt.
Oh my god…
Oof. Right in the nostalgia. Looks better than Geocities though
The best part about federated services, like Lemmy, Kbin, Mastodon etc, is that they are free and open source software. The amount of development that is going to do into these project from people all over the world will add features and tools that will surpass reddit’s.
We have the basic software down today but it will become so much more.
This is such a good point. Reddit nor any of the other giants can surpass the ability of open source. If this works out it will prove a very fundamental shift in tech.
I agree, it’s very early days, but I look at this the same way I see the Raspberry Pi organization developing their single board computer (SBC) back in 2011-2012. Look where that is today in terms of development/support.
It very much felt something like this, yeah. Discovering new things and actually being hopeful about what you could do with all the news toys.
It was also filled with this home-made, self-hosted feeling that lemmy has to an extent. I think the most defining feature for me of the internet at that time is that if you had a website, people talked to you. They sent you email. They used your crappy online interaction thingamajig. They wanted to connect with all the benevolent innocence in the world.
I think the feeling that will never be replicated is that we didn’t quite know what could be possible or where the limits for the internet lied. MMOs were a sci-fi dream and being served small, 240p videos in less than an hour blew our mind. It was more about the incredible potential for users the network and technology held than anything it could precisely do in that moment.
Then broadband hit and the rest is history.
my summation would be “then in September 1993 AOL dumped a ton of new people into USENET and everything started going to shit, and never really stopped.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL#1991–2006:_Internet_age,_Time_Warner_merger
This is exactly what it felt like. It is amazing to see how well federation works - look at all the usernames from different instances! I enjoy the Cambrian explosion of new communities. It feels like conquering and taming a wild frontier.
Cambrian explosion. Love that take!
Not quite kid.
If you want the real experience, you need to become a worker bee. When you find a link that leads out, don’t just stop at whatever it links to. Hit their home page, look around. Read some stuff. And don’t come back until you have something to bring back to a community somewhere else here.
That’s the real 90s experience. Consuming entire swathes of a website at a time and then going and telling people about it and talking about it.
Do you think we need a community? Well open it. You can’t mod? So what, who cares, you can always give it up later. Open up the community anyways and start posting cool shit for other people to see and encourage them to bring cool stuff to show you too!
If you start doing that, then you’ve got a taste for the 90s experience. Also, listen to ska while you’re doing it.
you know what you’re talking about , or at least that’s the impression that I get - aw crap of course you linked to the Bosstones, never mind, here I was thinking I was being clever.
Lmao
What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun
I looked in on one of the subreddits I used to frequent. The moderator had posted a good explanation of what was going on, why they considered it unacceptable, and what they were going to do about it. That generated a long thread of people saying, “No one cares. You don’t matter. Get over yourself. Go away.” Those people have no idea about the amount of effort that volunteers make to manage things so they can live in happy ignorance.
I wish them well, but I don’t want to hang out with them anymore. There are better options.
And now you have that choice! This is also why I support there being duplicate communities if the topic is large enough. It’s more choice, we just need to figure out how to make the UX good.
Yes. When you got to Yahoo and just started to click through the directory pages it was an experience filled with wonder. It was, as someone else already mentioned, much slower.
Just recently created a Mastodon account, and this is my first Lemmy post, so it’s very new to me too, and there is definitely a feeling of discovering something new.
I do have a similar feeling with the Fediverse as I did as a teenager back in the web 1.0 days, although it might just be that there is a lot of text content that feels sincere (which honestly there is on Reddit too), much less spam and advertising, and generally just has not been commercialised at all yet.
@MrFlamey Using your Mastodon account, you could even follow a lemmy community; and fav, boost and comment on their posts (like I did just with your comment). Just copy the URL to anything on the fediverse, paste it into the search box of your Mastodon client: you’re good to go!
Longer explanation: https://toot.kif.rocks/@anathem/110565430770229960
Thanks. Seems to let me follow them, but I can’t see the posts in mastodon, only by following the link through to the lemmy community. I guess I should try commenting from Mastodon or something. It’s fine though, I will get used to it eventually :)
@MrFlamey Give it some time. If you follow a lemmy community, all posts of that community will _from now on_ reach your Mastodon instance and be displayed there. There is no retroactive synchronization.
(The exception to this is when someone from your Mastodon instance already followed that community in the past: Then somebody else already did make those posts available to your instance and you can immediately see some posting history of that community.)
Yeah kind of. It’s not as fun as waiting for your family to leave and searching “big boobs” for the first time, but it does remind me of finding a new forum lol
Hehehe . Anyone remember Dosshell? How about when Windows 3.1 for workgroups came out?
