I miss forums... Reddit got the hold on that genre now. Nothing, not even this Lemmy can rival it. People mention Tumblr and Quora as Reddit alternatives but hell no they're not the same. Tumblr especially makes me cringe, seems so furry infected everywhere.
It used to take hours to find anything and it was so satisfying when I finally found it.
Typically, I started the search and usually I would end up on a forum or a newgroup. Read for a bit, go back to the search engine with a refined term which leads me to another forum/newgroup/website.
No way do I have patience for that today.
One of the more memorable moments was being on TOS Trekmuse when MacGyver, the owner of it (who worked for a studio), got some of the actual Trek cast to play their TV characters.
But beyond that, it was just pure fun playing those old Text based roleplay games. Sometimes the RP was serious, sometimes we were laughing hysterically in OOC chat, but it was always fun and it kept my typing, grammar, vocabulary and creative writing skills sharp. I miss it.
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.
Usenet forums, and this application I had that tracked my request along the path it took - it was a map of the big pipes of the internet, the highways; I would search or send an email or whatever then could open this program to see the literal path it took to the destination computer. If I was on the college proxy server it would use different 'roads' than if I was on the account I had through the phone company. It was fascinating.
I don't miss everything being difficult to accomplish.
Social media was so good back then. Livejournal was a total joy and I have my friends from there to this day. It was basically free therapy even if it was way cringe to read years later.
My memories of the early Internet were a little earlier. I hope this is ok hearing from a geezer. My first memories of the Internet were from the late 1980s as a young university student. I somehow managed to score a Unix account on the mainframe.
Email, and sending & receiving to Listserves. I kept hoping my girlfriend at a different university could get connected, but it never came to be.
Comedy by email through The Internet Oracle. I was one of the "priests" (editors) of the service for a while. Basically you would send an anonymous email (!!!) to the service that would be sent out to people, and your get a random question out of it, to answer in a humorous manner.
I remember the incredible mind-blowing feeling when I first discovered Internet Relay Chat in about 1988. It was an all text interface, pre-windowed environment.
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.
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.
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.
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.