Web 1.0 nostalgia

[lurker]

Does anyone miss the "old" internet? I mean before about 2005 or so, definitely before the dot com bubble burst?

The web was less centralized and "urbanized" into a handful of giant sites. It used to be that there was a website for every weird niche under the sun, maybe even for weirdos who make up languages :).

Remember Geocities? You got a whopping 15 megabytes of space, IIRC, to make your own site. You got a subfolder under the Geocities domain to put whatever HTML you could come up with, and they slapped a few (in retrospect) unobtrusive ads at the bottom to pay the bills. I put one of me and my friends' earliest worldbuilding projects on there, although I didn't know that the silly stuff we made up had a name and that other people did it for fun just like we did.

These days you have the "smol web" movement that tries to bring back that feeling of the wild west of the web.

I'm guessing a lot of people on this board also miss those days, too. Message boards are an endangered species these days. Now everyone goes on Reddit or Facebook.

If you want a piece of that nostalgia, try going to wiby.org and clicking "surprise me" for a random site. Wiby only indexes pages that don't use Javascript.

There are also still some Gopher sites up, and a new protocol called Gemini that is trying offer a similar minimalist experience as Gopher while offering security etc.

So yeah just a few random thoughts about the Web that was.

[Arayaz]

Is it weird to feel nostalgia for a time before one's birth?

Because I was born in 2010, and yet... so charming, these websites were.

[lurker]

I don't know if I'd call it "nostalgia" per se, but I can sympathize with the desire to have born witness to an era one was not a part of. I was born just as computers were making their way into the home. Our first family computer (an odd thing to say given everyone has a computer in their pocket these days) was a Commodore 64. I have very faint memories of it as well as the other things going on in the late 80s.

I often explain my affinity for older command line interfaces as me having grown up in the 90s, watching movies made in the 80s, and thus seeing computers that were just text terminals, so I got it in my head that "real" computers only used text because that's what I saw in the movies: green CRTs, blinking cursors, clicky keyboards. I have a similar preference for more robotic sounding speech synthesizers compared to the uncanny valley not-quite-human voices we have today.

This explains a lot of stuff in my worldbuilding. The yinrih use CLIs because the interplanetary network is too slow to support graphics. When they use keyers to speak English the voice is described as "tinny and bloodless" because they aren't familiar with the human vocal tract and just try their best to replicate human speech, with the result sounding like a vintage 80s speech synth.

[Salmoneus]

I'm nostalgic for several different Web 1.0s!

There's the web I gradually learnt about as a child in the early 1990s - a weird, small selection of mostly pointless websites like Blue Dog Can Count and Blue Pig Won't Oink*, big business websites that looked like they were designed by a child, and terrifying (and often incomprehensible due to failure to download all the messages and everything being read backwards) Usenet flamewars. And downloadable updates for Encarta! Around the end of this period my family bought something called something like "The Yellow Pages of the Internet" (but not made by The Yellow Pages, so it must have had a name that skirted copyright law, but it was big and yellow and looked and work like TYP), which listed all the interesting websites by topic so that you could easily visit them all.

Then there's the web I fell in love with in the late 1990s and early 00s - a geeky place of webrings, half made by teenagers and half by very dedicated geeks. A place of splash pages, frames, over-busy backgrounds and terrible font colour choices that made everything illegible, little animated dragons, geocities, livejournal, visitor pages (and counts!), vast amounts of free and trustworthy software for download that even idiots could operate, etc.

Then there's the place that was probably objectively best, in the late 00s and early 10s, where people had figured out how to make things work, but it was still mostly Just Us here. The normal people were turning up on myspace and facebook and later twitter, but didn't get in people's way, and their numbers helped power an increased number and variety of high-quality special interest websites, and above all forums (which had gotten started in the previous era, of course (and, as BBs, even before that!), but not in the same numbers or with as many people). This internet felt like a fully developed town, with all the amenities you could want, but none of the chaos and alienation of the big global city it is now.




*Blue Dog Can Count was a site where you typed in a simple arithmetic question and a blue dog barked the correct number of times to give you the answer. Blue Pig Won't Oink was a site where you types in a simply arithmetic question and a blue pig did absolutely sod all in response.

[Reyzadren]

I don't have such nostalgia per se, but I do think that I carry some of its spirit within me, whereby I try to bring all the advantages and (lack of) features from the old internet into the current era. For example, my personal website is hosted on Neocities (the domain is inspired by Geocities).

In fact, back when I was a kid then, I've always told myself - if I ever had my own website, it would be a place to put my conlang stuffz with the power of HTML. Thus far, Neocities enabled me to do all that: personal website (conlang section).

[_Just_A_Sketch]

Like many others in this thread, I don't exactly have nostalgia for the early web. By the time I was born social media was already becoming quite popular. When I first began using the internet frequently, it was through social media. I only know of the early web from what I've heard online. Eventually I ended up joining a forum for a book series I really enjoyed. Since then forums have been my favorite form of communication online. I also am fascinated by the internet and internet culture. More recently I've become interested in the web revival movement, as a means of gaining more control over my online experience. Nostalgia for web 1.0 is very common in said movement, so part of it has rubbed of on me.
In short, while I do not have true nostalgia, I do find the early web really wonderful, and would love to have experienced it.

[lurker]

*Blue Dog Can Count was a site where you typed in a simple arithmetic question and a blue dog barked the correct number of times to give you the answer. Blue Pig Won't Oink was a site where you types in a simply arithmetic question and a blue pig did absolutely sod all in response.

Now that is the kind of weird nonsense I miss about the early Web.

Here is another one I keep going back to (look at that date!)

[Egerius]

Is it weird to feel nostalgia for a time before one's birth?

Because I was born in 2010, and yet... so charming, these websites were.

I feel nostalgia for the mid/late 1980s, I was born in 1993.
That's probably why I have a Commodore Amiga 500 in my bedroom.

[Visions1]

Is it weird to feel nostalgia for a time before one's birth?

This probably not related to the topic at hand, but sometimes I feel that when hanging around older people or things. Or when I think about things that used to be normal in the olden days, but are relatively absent today.

Show me old things from early 20th century Russia, and my heart feels overcome with this blowing wind, this will to fight for something true I believe in. (No I'm not a tankie. Far be it. I just like the era's lithography and studying those social movements.)

[Salmoneus]

Late 19th and early 20th century Russia was an amazing time period, culturally. Diverse political engagement, and a fantastically rich artistic culture - graphic art, literature, music, architecture. There's various modernists, alongside both conservatives and populists, all in dialogue with one another. The creative tension of trying to imitate the west while also inventing a 'russianness' to retreat to in defiance of the west.

[In classical music: rachmaninov, rimsky-korsakov, stravinsky, scriabin, prokofiev, glazunov, medtner, balakirev, all alive in 1900 among many less famous names; Tchaikovsky had died just 7 years earlier]

[Salmoneus]

Does anyone miss the "old" internet? I mean before about 2005 or so, definitely before the dot com bubble burst?

FWIW, though, the dot com bubble burst in 2001.

[Visions1]

I love Tchaikovsky. I used to listen to Souvenir de Florence, just close my eyes and imagine a story for it.

Ah, and what I'd give to see a real birzhe (boursa). I've actually tried doing one of those - it's very beneficial, if both people have the same goal and ability. To truly confide in a friend and come up with plans.

[lurker]

Does anyone miss the "old" internet? I mean before about 2005 or so, definitely before the dot com bubble burst?

FWIW, though, the dot com bubble burst in 2001.

You are correct. My wording was ambiguous.

I was there... I was there 23 years ago when the strength of tech failed.

I mentioned 2005 because that's when YouTube came out, and Facebook the year before, which to me are two of the focal points of the modern web. I was on Facebook back when it was restricted to university students. It was a very different place back then. I quit FB back in 2013 when the big concern was the loss of privacy rather than social media destroying your mental health.

I deleted my Reddit account last year and have blocked the domain from my network, both because I was addicted and to protest their API changes that broke accessibility. I'm trying to 'de-urbanize' my online activity as much as is feasible, finding smaller alternatives for things like email and social media. That's how I found this forum. Someone mentioned it on a Stack Exchange thread asking about worldbuilding forums, and this one was mentioned as having a conlanging focus.