Websites run by ordinary people, about things they’re interested in. Explanations in text instead of monetized YouTube videos dragged out so they can cram more adverts in. Decentralization, with lots of little hosts and sites instead of large walled gardens of corporately owned “content”. The absence of the concept of “content”. Places where people would chat just because they enjoyed talking to each other. Email that wasn’t mined for details of your personal life by megacorporations. Fascism still being universally reviled.
Yeah, I miss finding some very barebones website called like “Gary’s Favorite Garlic Breads”, just run by Gary, who isn’t trying to turn a profit or be an influencer. He just loves garlic bread and wanted to share.
I miss Gary :c
All those old websites with basic html were golden. Not always in quality, but in heart.
Yea
The lack of ways for cooperations to gather information about internet users.
Pretty much. I feel like everything is out to track you and to try and sell you garbage products. And if your in the US you have no rights to tell these companies to remove your data. Unless your in California.
deleted by creator
Hope for the future, that the days of widespread ignorance would soon come to an end.
Fast forward 20 years, and misinformation is rampant and most people believe it without question. 🤦♂️
We used to receive more real e-mails than SPAM e-mails.
Same with phone calls
And snail mails.
We could create a personal website without having to pay and without giving up personal details. Everything was anonymous.
Search engines actually found what you were looking for. No censorship or bad suggestions or trying to sell stuff.
Always finding something new and interesting, not being limited to a few commercial websites.
People were much friendlier and open to share.
I’d like to see less use of JavaScript tracking and more “simple websites”!
I agree. I use Pelican to build my website and I don’t use any javascript. It’s simple, it’s fast (it doesn’t really have much content that would be interesting to anybody, but it’s mine and I like it!)
One of the things I like about Lemmy is that the devs had the forethought of developing in Rust rather than PHP or another prototyping language that doesn’t scale as well.
I really miss IRC and usenet. And I know both still exist but I miss the communities there 😊
deleted by creator
I do sometimes go back, but most of the places I used to visit are empty other than bots sharing crap. It used to be such a great place, had really supportive groups but also many many weird ones.
I never really used Usenet but IRC I definitely miss. Its main problem was that keeping yourself connected and seeing messages when you are away involved having bots that replay them to you or some screen running on a remote server that lets you connect to it.
All these various communications apps we use today are largely just worse, but prettier versions of what IRC could do.
I agree. IRC was definitely great. Staying connected was definitely a problem, but the conversations made up for that. I had so many good friendships there, and I loved the ease of creating a new channel and gather there with friends. The ops system was definitely really good. You could do everything with the channel.
I do frequent old servers I used to hang out on sometimes, if they still exist, that is, but like usenet, most channels are for downloading or nsfw stuff. Really sad, it was such a cool place to be!
That it wasn’t flooded with the everyday person’s idiocy.
I used to think the internet was awesome because it would allow everyone to communicate with each other without limits. Now I think it’s awful, for the same reason.
Bring back the <blink> HTML tag! You can’t have a good blog without it!
Serious now. I miss the blogosphere. It was just a bunch of casual writers messing with their HTML (this was before CSS), writing whatever the fuck they wanted, and linking other blogs that they read. One of my favs was literally some guy making shit up about his own life, you could see the bullshit from a distance but it was enjoyable bullshit. Another was poking fun at other blogs.
I also miss being able to fully load a simple page with a 56k connection. My connection nowadays is orders of magnitude faster, then why the hell things are so slower?
Because of all the JavaScript. I swear like 90% of the Web nowadays is just JavaScript. Look into the NoScript add-on. It allows you selectively block (or allow) JS scripts on any given webpage/site/etc.
It actually makes it SO much faster to load webpages. Plus the privacy & security benefits are pretty nice too. 👍 :)
I’ve used NoScript for some time, but it breaks a lot of sites - because those 99% of bloat are all intertwined with the 1% of actual content. So even if I’m aware of the privacy, security, and speed benefits, I ended ditching it. (Actually I just deactivated it, but it’s still there.)
I, and most people in fact, only use a handful of sites these days. And most of the sites you only really need to block the most common tracking scripts and the site totally works fine and loads noticeably faster.
And you only have to do it once, not every time. It might take a bit of time the first go around but then every time after that it’s out-of-sight-out-of-mind most of the time in my experience.
-
Web directories like dmoz
-
Small web (personal websites are bringing this back with nojs and minimal css)
deleted by creator
-
Demon Torrentz. Also, the absence of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Google-owned YouTube, and Threads. Did I miss anything?
I miss not having the expectation of every social media being so heavily moderated and sterile.
The old internet was like walking down a busy city street. You might walk by someone doing something absolutely batshit crazy, but you just think “Weird. Moving on.” and go about your day because getting emotionally invested would be dumb. The new internet feels like a workplace where people want to run to HR to report anyone who acts out so that they’ll get what’s coming to them.
It’s not all bad, but I miss the sort of “wild west” feeling where nothing on the internet mattered because it wasn’t real life.
The new internet feels like a workplace where people want to run to HR to report anyone who acts out so that they’ll get what’s coming to them.
This. Probably the most thing I hate about today’s internet, bunch of over-protected snowflakes who get offended by anything.
And what’s worse is how that’s spilled into everyday life. Movies like Blazing Saddles and Revenge of the Nerds would get obliterated if they were released today. Everyone’s immediate reaction to something they find unseasonable is to go absolutely nuts and cancel it instead of “huh, whatever.”
I still think we need to take most of the safety signs down and let darwinism take its course.
It’s not all bad, but I miss the sort of “wild west” feeling where nothing on the internet mattered because it wasn’t real life.
Well… We have lemmy and kbin now, without algorithms promoting stupid shit like in social media.
It’s a weird feeling not being targeted with content and ads. I forgot what it was like.
I kinda miss the days of the internet being a bit of a gamble, where you might see cute puppies or someone shoving a Mason jar in their ass (back on the easier internet). Those days are gone, unfortunately.
- Usenet. Eternal-September.org still provides free access.
- Scorefiles / killfiles were brilliant
Yeah, Lemmy is more or less just a new way to do what Usenet has been doing for decades.
The basic privacy. You could post on a forum and it was just you and the people on the board talking. Today you post anywhere and it’s the whole world looking at the conversation.
Privacy was worse back then but search engines got better since.
