If you've ever found yourself missing the "good old days" of the #web, what is it that you miss? (Interpret "it" broadly: specific websites? types of activities? feelings? etc.) And approximately when were those good old days?
No wrong answers — I'm working on an article and wanted to get some outside thoughts.
@molly0xfff belated reply; (signed on in 1994, had a website ever since) - I'm feeling less and less of that feeling lately. Personal websites seem to be on the rebound and I think that is what I like most about the open web. ActivityPub, decentralization, open protocols... I'm glad these are part of the daily conversation again. But when I did miss the good old days, this is what I missed.
@molly0xfff Vast choice of millions of quirky small tiny websites, including, but not limited to, blogs, "check out my hobby", movie websites. All that personal expression that was not funneled into the same three websites' allowed formats.
(1) User-authored experience (2) Everyone being on the same team
Tim Berners-Lee imagined the web browser and web server running together in a single package. The same person who was observing other people's pages was also capable to do anything Facebook or Google could do, for good or for ill. And weirdly enough, little bits of the politeness that came along with that freedom -- robots.txt for example -- still survive, somehow, to the modern day, heartbreaking in their innocence next to the mutated horror that is the modern internet's grim realpolitik, yet still around.
Myspace and Geocities have nostalgia factor today because they carried over a little piece of an era now long forgotten, the ability to make your page weird and misshapen. There was no person examine the experience your page conveyed, who could decide it was horrifying and they didn't want their brand associated with it. Make music play that everyone hates every time they visit your page? Figure out a way to craft a link so everyone on earth becomes your friend? Knock yourself out, kid. It was the last little gasp of free control that many people on the modern internet have never experienced, before it was fully silenced in favor of CSS that was fully crafted by a professional, and all your stuff HTML-sanitized before it could be displayed.
Posting to alt.hackers used to be forbidden to everyone; in order to post that you had to know how to get around the permissions.
You used to put your email address into anonymous ftp as the password, not because anyone would verify what you typed, but just to help the server operator keep tabs on who was using their site for their own curiosity.
Everyone was on the same team.
The very first person who sent an internet spam message got called up and yelled at by someone in the Air Force, who told him to knock it the fuck off because the network wasn't for that.
In the early 1990s after I had left Cambridge, I could type "finger cellodad@mit.edu" in a UNIX window and the local server would tell me he's in the terminal room in the basement of Building 4, and has been logged into his favourite terminal for so many hours and minutes.
Innocent times.
(Then we'd open a zephyr window and chat).
(That was before the "cello" and the "dad" was part of our lives, but you know what I mean).
@molly0xfff I miss the era of personal web sites started out of genuine admiration for something, rather than out of a desire to farm a few advertising pennies
The constant "how can I monetize this" problem isn't just limited to the web itself. It has damaged hobbies & modern life in general.
It is very different making a thing for me, for the fun of it, than something that must be marketable. It's also fine to do things and not be good at it.