220
How do you guys remember the early days of the internet? What do you miss about it?
(tim.kicker.dev)
this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
220 points (97.4% liked)
Asklemmy
42603 readers
2655 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Ah, the early days of the internet where every click on a link felt like you discovered something new and exciting. I remember making my own 'homepage' (with stats counter, most of the visits were my own), the dial-up modem's noises, browsing open ftp servers to find interesting warez and generally not worrying about viruses.
You were excited to get email because it was almost always from a human being who put meaning and intent into their message. It was like getting a handwritten letter compared to all the random terms of service update emails from a service you haven't used in four years and emails from a service you didn't sign up for because someone else thinks your email address is their email address and the outright spam in the filter.
@Mechanismatic @rayman30
Yes, agree and remember. I lived in very many different places in the late '90s. Often, the only method of communication was email. No landlines sometimes and certainly no cell phones.
I can't remember the last time I got a personal email. I get some rather lovely ones from my colleagues, but a personal email is a letter, and nearly as extinct.
Lmao me too, a stats counter with like 13 visits
15 of those were me
And then my co-student refreshed the page a 1000 times for laughs and the counter went up, because I didn't install a cookie with an IP check.
Now everything is stuck in corporate silos and largely out of reach.
I miss the somewhat more decentralized and anonymous nature of the early Internet and the Web. People were more likely to have their own Web site with their own shitty personal flare. Services were more infrastructure than ways to monetize the masses. Everyone was busy learning and trying out new things instead of just mindless content consumption or broadcasting their basic-assed opinion.
Things seemed more substantial. But also anonymity granted people the ability to not be judged by their failures. So trying things was less personally risky and easier to fade away in time.
Maybe I just got old. I would love to get back there, though.