[HN Gopher] Resurrect the Old Web
___________________________________________________________________
Resurrect the Old Web
Author : speckx
Score : 151 points
Date : 2025-09-25 12:48 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (stevedylandev.bearblog.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (stevedylandev.bearblog.dev)
| wiether wrote:
| I don't get HN's appeal for the bearblog platform?
|
| If anything else, if one wants to resurrect the "Old Web", one
| shouldn't do it on someone else's platform.
|
| Parts of the "Old Web" disappeared when the platforms hosting it
| stopped.
|
| The brutal shutting down of Typepad should be another reminder of
| this reality: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/08/one-time-
| wordpress-c...
| HermanMartinus wrote:
| Creator of Bear here. Suggesting that because one project
| fails, others will too is a bit of a fallacy. Fact is that
| whether you self-host or not, you're still using someone else's
| platform (unless you're a _real_ self-hoster with a box in your
| closet, in which case, good on you and godspeed).
|
| I think as long as platforms have an easy way for people to
| backup and migrate, that's fair.
|
| Additionally, part of the appeal of Bear is that I've made it
| my personal mission to get the platform to outlive me. Take
| that as you will. I can't prove that Bear will live on in
| perpetuity, but I can try my best.
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| I don't use Bear but bless you for building it the way you
| are. Not everyone has development skills to do it themselves
| so it's up to us coders and programmers to build these tools.
| wiether wrote:
| Thank you for taking your time to reply to my comment.
|
| I want to clarify one thing first: I don't have anything
| special against your platform, it's just that it seems I see
| at least one article a week about it on HN lastly and I'm
| wondering why.
|
| I'm sure you are well intentionned and you'll do your best to
| keep the plaftorm as true to the mission you have chosen to
| take and described in your manifesto, no doubt about it.
|
| But having been through a certain number of hype cycles
| around tech, I tend to become suspicious when I see too much
| people pushing something. That's why I understand people
| complaining about Kagi's omnipresence here, even though I'm
| totaly on the hype train here.
|
| Furthermore, the article looks like a promotion for the
| platform. It probably isn't, and you don't control what
| people publish, so it's not your fault. Yet, it reads like
| "bearblog is the solution to "Resurrect the Old Web".
|
| Which, to me, can't be, since it's a platform like the
| hundreds that previously came and went, no matter their
| creator's promise.
|
| So, sure, bearblog exists, it offers people a way to publish
| content in an _old fashioned_ way, and, according to its
| manifesto, it will stay like this as long as it exists. Which
| is nice. And can be part of a solution, but it's not the
| solution. I don't think there is, actually.
| mallowdram wrote:
| Tech is stuck behind the symbolic threshold. We're at the
| point we use the symbolic, which is arbitrary, for
| literally everything as a substitute, mimic, representation
| that's in reality. Eventually the symbolic eats itself
| alive in arbitrariness and society capitalizing on that
| arbitrariness. This is basic stuff CS doesn't make itself
| aware of.
|
| We're at the end of communication in this symbolic era. You
| can see it in politics, climate policy, fiscal policy,
| trade policy, media, everything is at an end-point or a
| breaking point.
|
| So lacking an awareness of the end-game for the symbolic,
| we retreat to an easier, earlier state, which is nostalgic.
| But its nostalgia for a system already on the way out.
| rambambram wrote:
| Interesting. Got a blog where I can read more about this?
| mallowdram wrote:
| Glad you asked
|
| We don't blog about it in our team since this is about a
| post-symbolic era, which has some proprietary elements.
|
| But we keep two with papers active exploring the ideas
| with updated citations.
|
| I stumbled across this whole dimension of arbitrariness
| in the aftermath of a successful game which the users
| took as non-narrative. And it really began when my
| favorite teacher asked if I knew how illusory symbols
| were and handed me a book called Brain, Symbol,
| Experience: Towards a Neurophenomenology of Human
| Consciousness. From there the threads led in all
| directions.
|
| Words as arbitrary control.
|
| https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cXtU97SCjxaHCrf8UVeQG
| Yaj...
|
| Storytelling as arbitrary control.
|
| https://docs.google.com/document/d/1d-ODky2MzGuTCoFCKWPw6
| Jx2...
| Terr_ wrote:
| > I think as long as platforms have an easy way for people to
| backup and migrate, that's fair.
|
| Once one sees how much of the current tech-economy relies on
| lock-in and switching-costs, it's hard to unsee.
| dcreater wrote:
| But isnt it structurally superior to not need platforms like
| bearblog, substack, medium etc.?
|
| Deploying an astro blog template to netlify is literally
| 1-click. An instantenously superior option if you dont want
| to host/pay/code yourself.
| Y-bar wrote:
| The Old Web also happened on someone else's platform, back in
| the day hosting your site on Geocities, Angelfire, Tripod and
| their likes where huge. The old web was to me about people
| publishing whatever for whatever reason, especially amateurs
| and persons. That web has to me been pushed aside for the
| benefit of the gain-market-and-profit-from-everything crowd.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Why did the old web die?
|
| I'm a HN Heretic. HN says dark patterns, money, power,
| corporate interests.
|
| I think it was very simple: Proprietary platforms solve real-
| world problems the more "open" web doesn't and did not
| effectively solve: discoverability, spam filtering, content
| filtering, community. Regular people don't want the open web,
| and _never have._ They only tolerated it when it was given to
| them without alternatives.
| nativeit wrote:
| Proprietary platform solve all the problems you cite for
| exactly as long as it remains profitable to do so, and not
| a nanosecond longer. Once you've been captured, say goodbye
| to every one of those things.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| That's not new; it's been happening all the way back
| since AOL. AOL was basically an abstraction layer over
| the whole internet that we tolerated (remember when every
| show had both a URL and an AOL keyword?), but it broke
| like anything can.
|
| For that matter, your maxim also applies to the open
| internet, and watch what's happening. It's not
| profitable, so sites are packing up.
|
| In a nutshell, content costs money. People make content
| anticipating money. Doesn't matter if it's on Discord, on
| YouTube, or a private blog. No money, no investment.
| cosmicgadget wrote:
| Also it is easier to publish to a walled platform than the
| open web.
| giantrobot wrote:
| > The Old Web also happened on someone else's platform, back
| in the day hosting your site on Geocities, Angelfire, Tripod
| and their likes where huge.
|
| Let's not forget ISPs and schools offering hosting.
| Universities even used to let students and faculty have
| routable IPs and DNS entries on the school's domain.
| nativeit wrote:
| I graduated from Geocities/Angelfire in a year or less,
| learned HTML, and designed my first website on a traditional
| shared hosting plan with hypermart.net. From there, obv. I
| could easily go anywhere, as there wasn't anything
| particularly special or proprietary keeping me there. I wrote
| HTML in notepad, and FTP'd those files to my host. There's
| nothing to stop people from doing this today.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > someone else's platform
|
| > Parts of the "Old Web" disappeared when the platforms hosting
| it stopped.
|
| The key is to put everything under our own domains. This turns
| the platforms hosting it into mere implementation details. If
| the host goes down, just move the data elsewhere.
|
| I use GitHub Pages for my static site but I could trivially
| move everything to Cloudflare Pages if needed. I could also pay
| for a VPS or make my own server somehow. Moving away from gmail
| to my own domain was also one of the best things I've ever
| done. I'm a happy Proton Mail customer now but that's just an
| implementation detail, I could switch by simply reconfiguring
| DNS to point to new mail servers.
|
| DNS is the ultimate layer of indirection. We must own the
| domain. If we don't have a domain, then we're just digital
| serfs in someone else's digital fiefdom.
|
| And that includes sites such as this one. Make it yourname.com,
| not ycombinator.com/threads?id=yourname.
| onion2k wrote:
| _No ads_
|
| I don't know what "Old Web" the author is remembering but when I
| was first paid to make a website in 1997, it had banner ads on
| it.
| davey48016 wrote:
| Banner ads, pop up ads, pop under ads...If browsers added a
| feature, then websites used it to show you ads.
| M95D wrote:
| I prefer those ads to today's ads. At least they didn't track
| anyone.
| rkomorn wrote:
| Pretty sure they did. Ad networks have been around a long
| time and they've never been "nice".
| alisonatwork wrote:
| Every time I get on my tracking and internet privacy
| soapbox, and I lament how little people care about it these
| days, I need to cast my mind back to when I was a teenager
| and everyone wanted a counter on their homepage. Not all
| hosts provided a counter script in their cgi-bin so various
| third-party websites offered counter image links that you
| could add into your page. Of course when you clicked
| through you could see all the different countries of your
| site's visitors and it was the coolest thing ever. I was
| thrilled when I hit 1000 visitors at some point! But
| looking back, even if a few of those third-party counter
| providers were just benevolent sysadmins offering a public
| service, I have no doubt some of them turned into the data
| mining giants of today.
|
| To be fair, Geocities did get done by the FTC for secretly
| selling users' PII to third-party advertisers almost 30
| years ago, so it wasn't just our own faults. But I think
| rather than the FTC actually putting a stop to the
| behavior, the outcome was just that websites had be more
| honest in their EULA that users would be giving up their
| privacy rights, so here we are.
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| My first website was on Homestead (.com or .net?) was HEAVILY
| banner ad supported
| doublerabbit wrote:
| It kind of had to be. How else could they host people for
| free?
| 2THFairy wrote:
| So, obviously, ads were the norm back in the day. The author
| had to be wearing several rose tinted glasses when writing
| that.
|
| But the author isn't entirely wrong. There were/are a lot of
| websites that simply did not run ads. Hosted not for money, but
| "for love of the game".
|
| This is something that was lost with the shift to exclusively
| platform-based hosting. A facebook page or subreddit simply is
| never going to be ad-free in the way that a lot of former or
| legacy forums were and are.
| reactordev wrote:
| They all wish they had the viewership for ads. They
| definitely were a thing all the way back to the first
| browsers. Banners, side banners, buttons, applets, most web
| advertising size standards are derivative of these initial
| placements.
|
| What you're talking about was geocities or aol's members
| sites that anyone could build a site with. Anyone running CGI
| wishes for that sweet ad revenue to pay for the Sun
| servers...
| krapp wrote:
| Geocities, Angelfire, Tripod and the like all had banner
| ads. I think you could pay not to have them but for free
| accounts they were mandatory.
| alisonatwork wrote:
| That wasn't the case in the beginning, on Geocities at
| least. It was a pretty big deal when they started
| introducing popups and mandatory banner ads.
| crtasm wrote:
| Yes, I had some pages on geocities around 1996/97 and to
| the best of my memory they had no ads. I must have
| stopped using the site entirely by the point they got
| added.
|
| edit: Wikipedia claims that happened in May 1997.
| 2THFairy wrote:
| > They definitely were a thing all the way back to the
| first browsers.
|
| I am not disputing that ads were a thing. I am not
| disputing that ads were _common_.
|
| I said that there were a lot of sites that chose not to run
| them.
|
| > They all wish they had the viewership for ads.
|
| This is just not true. Like, c'mon man, the very site
| you're on right now takes this approach.
| CapsAdmin wrote:
| I may be wearing the same glasses here, but it felt like ads
| were more like "real ads" back then.
|
| Like when walking down a street, you may see some posters
| advertising something, but they are clearly ads, because they
| are noisy rectangles bunched up with other noisy rectangles.
|
| On the older internet, ads felt more like that, and seemed to
| stay in the corner away from the content. However, on the
| modern internet, ads and content feels entangled.
|
| It's a bit like visiting a touristic area. It can feel like
| everything is trying to grab your attention to sell something
| and merchants become untrustworthy.
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| I don't know, I rarely see ads these days. I surf the
| internet with adblock exclusive and just try to skip over
| things like sponsored links or youtubers advertising in
| their video.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| It's like the nostalgia about the "Summer of Love" and the
| 1960's... it really only lasted a single summer and only in one
| or two little areas.
|
| Same thing with the "old web." It was about the very early 90s
| before Netscape Navigator (the Mosaic days) and when everyone
| was just throwing up a single HTML page with a bunch of
| links... that's the "old web".
|
| The modern WWW kicked off with the ability to make credit card
| transactions online (1994). That... and porn (1995).
|
| For "old web" sites that still exist, check out wiby
|
| https://wiby.org/
| Fluorescence wrote:
| > it really only lasted a single summer
|
| "The Summer of Love" literally refers to one summer in 1967
| not the whole of 60's counter-culture. Even Woodstock was in
| '69.
|
| In terms of the various cultural strands then of course they
| lasted longer with many roots in 50's beatnick culture
| (bohemianism, poetry, LSD, Buddhism) to today where bands
| that played Monterey '67 and Woodstock are still touring and
| a "definitely not a hippy" in San Francisco might live in a
| polycule, micro-dose psychedelics while using a meditation
| app before writing a blog about effective altruism.
| corytheboyd wrote:
| CONGRATULATIONS, YOU WON!
| CIPHERSTONE wrote:
| "No ads" is possible. It's a choice really. Too many bloggers
| also want to make money and think ads are the way to do it.
| That's certainly their right, but it doesn't have to be that
| way.
|
| Want no ads, start browsing gopher sites. No ads there. Or find
| people making blogs just because they want to. They exist.
| Github + Jekyll is a great option for free static blogging if
| your willing to spend a little time getting it setup and
| learning something new.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| The 94/95 web had no banners. Because most of it was hosted on
| university servers or some random guy/company just wanted to
| bear the cost.
|
| I remember the big decision on if adverts should even be
| allowed... Well here we are. Users get free things. Advertisers
| pick up most of the bill. The second that model doesnt work
| sites pack it up. The 'before time' could be there but
| servers/bandwidth/people are not free. You can minimize those
| but in the end someone needs to pay the electric bill.
| philipkglass wrote:
| I have been running my own web site for 20+ years without
| ads. The server and bandwidth costs are minute. I use a basic
| VPS. I started it when I was still a poor grad student. This
| is cheaper now than shared hosting was back in the early
| 2000s and it's easier too. But it's not cheaper than "free"
| and it's significantly more administrative work than just
| using a social network. The "people" costs (including my own
| time fiddling with software configurations) is the biggest
| barrier.
| dmortin wrote:
| What bothers me is that even some tech forums use Facebook groups
| and stuff, hiding the information in non-searchable silos.
|
| Why can't at least tech people use only traditional forums which
| are easily searchable, readable without login, etc?
| SirFatty wrote:
| "tech forums use Facebook groups "
|
| And Discord, which is terrible for that.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| _Back in its early days it was fresh and exciting, a fun way to
| connect with your friends that might be far away, or make new
| friends online._
|
| This doesn't sound like blogs + rss, this sounds like phpBB + AOL
| instant messenger. Social media is at its best when real people
| are interacting with real people, not when real people are
| interacting with a blog post/tweet/etc., (and definitely not an
| algorithm)...
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| My favorite forum used vBulletin and I was using Miranda IM
| because I could find amazing themes for it on deviantART.
|
| Man, what a time.
| AndrewStephens wrote:
| All that is happening on Discord these days. It is a shame that
| this is not happening over open protocols but I doubt most
| people care.
| SirFatty wrote:
| That's more like IRC...
| lstodd wrote:
| More like ICQ
| afinewinterday wrote:
| I think OP missed a big point: it's also the fact that algorithms
| are sifting through every word and picture you post and
| constructing insanely accurate targeting to sell to advertisers
| and governments, and to the bad side of those two.
|
| What we also need is privacy. I only want my friends to see my
| blog or rss feed. Not the entire planet and every greedy spyware.
| afinewinterday wrote:
| Funny when I look at my account on another machine when not
| logged in my score is -1, but that is hidden when I'm logged in
| to HN and everything looks normal and score is 1.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Not the entire planet and every greedy spyware._
|
| I don't mind the entire planet of human beings seeing my blog,
| but I don't want what I write to be monetized by grifters and
| trillion-dollar companies.
|
| For that reason, my personal blog is behind security so only
| invited people can see it.
|
| It works very well, but no, I'm not going to explain how it
| works because there are plenty of people on HN who have no
| morals, work for crappy companies, or are part of the trillion-
| dollar machines that are destroying human creativity so some
| C-level can buy a third private island.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Old Web was killed by spam bots, Metasploit, Shodan and DDoS
| attacks getting easy enough to buy for random joes.
|
| I ran phpBB boards, my own blogs, an instance of a German php-
| based MMORPG I long forgot the name of. But it simply wasn't fun
| any more to keep up with the bad actors, to wake up and find
| someone found yet another bug in the MMORPG software or phpBB and
| in the best case just spammed profanities, in the worst case raze
| the entire server blank.
|
| It's just not feasible any more to be an innocent kid on the
| Internet with a $5 VPS. And that's _not_ taking the ever
| increasing share of legal obligations (CSAM and DMCA takedowns,
| EU 's anti terrorism law, GDPR, you name it) and their associated
| financial and criminal risk into account - I know people who did
| get anything from legal nastygrams for thousands of euros for
| some idiot uploading MP3s onto a phpBB to getting their door
| busted down by police at 6 in the morning because someone used
| their TOR exit node to distribute CSAM.
|
| The only thing that's somewhat safe is a static built website
| hosted on AWS S3. No way to deface or take down that unless you
| manage to get your credentials exfiltrated by some malware.
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| Okay, so we need Old Web with extra steps (security).
|
| I'll admit that when I lament the web we used to have, I'm
| never thinking about viruses, malware, pop ups/unders, &c.
| Seems like all that stuff was just a small price to pay for
| connecting with likeminded people.
|
| I have a slice of that with Mastodon but maybe being 20 years
| older and jaded is making me wistful, yearning for something
| that is never coming back.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| We more-so need Old Web with actual consequences for bad
| actors. You know, the days when you could email an ISP's
| abuse mailbox with evidence of someone running portscans and
| they'd get at least told to clean up shop _or else_ , and the
| _or else_ went as far as getting their contract cancelled
| entirely.
|
| These days it seems like abuse@ is routed straight to
| /dev/null, and that's not even addressing enemy nation states
| that willingly shield and host bad actors.
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| This is a great point
| alex1138 wrote:
| I am bearish on this idea
| lioeters wrote:
| Chat, launch new startup named Bull Blog.
| AfterHIA wrote:
| The feeling of, "being able to breathe again" that this creates
| is a boon to my failing health. I'm seeing movements in this
| direction alongside, "HTML-only" as a better
| realization/utilization of the internet. We might not ever get
| the Vannevar Bush-Ted Nelson lost super internet some speculate
| about but I'm glad we can at least get to, "something workable."
| Cheers speckx!
| jan_Sate wrote:
| Not closely relevant but I've revamped my personal website
| earlier this year to bring the old web vibe into it. I've got a
| 88x31 GIF section and I wonder where I could look for other old
| web sites to cross link with my site.
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| I have 88x31 banners on my homepage, https://webb.page, what's
| yours?
| 101008 wrote:
| I did something similar a few months, launched it on HN, no
| traction. It's really difficult. No one wants to host their blog
| / posts on a platform that will dissapear when the owner gets
| bored or can't maintain it anymore.
|
| Added this to other comments: old web had ads (iframes, banners,
| popups!), and also was completely self-hosted, which gave you
| more freedom than any other cloud platform. If you want to
| resurect old web, just give a free hosting with FTP.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| I think the "old web" is also heavily nostalgia-infested, it
| wasn't nearly as good as most people here remember.
|
| Blatantly false information? Internet Explorer required for
| everything? Adobe Flash and Java all over the place? Websites
| that frequently actually could hack your computer? Geocities
| and AOL being the meeting places, reincarnated as Discord?
| Terribly slow, low-resolution imagery that our brains filled in
| the details for? The worst font and font color choices known to
| man? Shock content being absolutely rampant? Constant pop-ups?
| Every company wanting a toolbar?
|
| That's what I remember. It's the same phenomenon where people
| think their Nintendo 64 or PlayStation 2 was a masterpiece
| never paralleled, revisit it in 2025, and realize: "wow...
| this... sucks actually." It's the same phenomenon where people
| think cars were better in the 80s, but they sit in an 80s car,
| and realize we've come a long, long way.
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| Several things can be true at the same time. 80s cars were
| uncomfortable but damn they look good.
|
| On a CRT display, a game's aesthetic could thrive but fall
| flat on modern displays.
|
| Learning patience for slow internet speeds versus immediacy
| to see stuff you actually don't wanna see anyway.
|
| It's all perspective, really.
| maxrecursion wrote:
| There are amazing retro games that are still awesome to play
| to this day. To say they all suck, and it's just nostalgia is
| not true at all.
|
| Sure, a lot of them suck, especially on Nintendo 64, because
| of the 3d transition, but from the NES onward there are
| timeless classics.
|
| My kid beat super Metroid several times, he decided to play
| it on his own on his switch, and he loved it. He plays the
| old pokemon games too. In other words, that's a terrible
| analogy.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| You're choosing the top 10 games on the Nintendo 64 and NES
| to make your analogy; out of the thousands and thousands of
| games produced for those systems. Give your kid game #50
| (Waialae Country Club: True Golf Classics on N64) and see
| if she would prefer it over literally any modern game that
| ranks on Steam. My analogy holds.
| klez wrote:
| Why would you compare "any modern game that ranks on
| Steam" with random games from the era?
|
| You said
|
| > It's the same phenomenon where people think their
| Nintendo 64 or PlayStation 2 was a masterpiece never
| paralleled, revisit it in 2025, and realize: "wow...
| this... sucks actually."
|
| I actually tried re-playing PS games I remember enjoying,
| and I still enjoy them.
|
| I see what you mean about the fact that people look at
| old stuff with rose-tinted glasses, but really some
| things _did_ age well (including parts of the early web).
| krapp wrote:
| Even on the old web, most people hosted their sites on a
| service like Geocities or on their ISP's servers, school, etc.
| Very few people actually self-hosted.
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| Actually not a bad idea, just not making this offer available
| to the world. Or maybe have a super low storage limit like
| 100MB. Or 10.
| evilduck wrote:
| > If you want to resurect old web, just give a free hosting
| with FTP.
|
| Also know as: How to get a visit from the FBI or a state agency
| equivalent once someone discovers you're a viable conduit of
| unsavory content.
|
| The old web is dead, it will never come back because it relied
| on ignorance, naivety, charity, and good faith. Those are
| mostly all gone. You can still stand up one of these hosts and
| pages for yourself but you must still be incredibly vigilant
| because automated attacks on your host will be happening non-
| stop. Jumping into hosting for others is no longer a hobby and
| it never will be again.
| Apreche wrote:
| The old web isn't a platform, an aesthetic, or a technology. The
| old web is people creating and sharing because they are
| intrinsically motivated. Everything we hate about the current web
| comes from extrinsic motivations. Good luck removing them.
| tolerance wrote:
| This is the most succinct critique of the "old web phenomenon"
| I've come across and I reckon can be applied to other issues as
| well. There doesn't seem to be a dearth of extrinsic motivators
| these days, oddly mediated through screens.
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| Beautifully and succinctly stated, damn. This is like, reading
| a bunch of philosophy and trying to wrap your head around it
| and some bored professor casually ELI5's the topic.
| kshahkshah wrote:
| I think we need a new protocol, a hard break
| crgk wrote:
| Then you may be interested in Gemini (or Gopher, or...)
| https://geminiquickst.art/
| vallassy wrote:
| Obligatory XKCD:https://xkcd.com/927/
|
| I fail to see what a new protocol would bring to the equation.
| I see it more as a human behaviour issue, network effect, worse
| is better etc etc.
|
| My grandma uses Facebook because someone taught her how, she
| doesn't have the capability to explore technology on her own.
| That honestly goes for most people, they treat their computer
| as necessary for getting along in modern society and nothing
| more.
|
| Facebook is the internet.
| tuyosvawnt wrote:
| "you can return to the past, but no one will be there"
| corytheboyd wrote:
| > In my opinion the answer is honestly pretty simple: blogs and
| RSS feeds.
|
| This point is made very often, and I do believe it was true for
| many people, but I honestly didn't care about individual blogs at
| all when I was a young net user.
|
| I didn't care about the 1,000 words a single person wrote about
| their trip abroad. There was no way to interact with it? All the
| action for me was on forums and chat rooms. Like the author
| mentions, it's exactly the type of excitement that naturally led
| to early social media, which I was also a huge fan of for the
| close friends I already had.
|
| The defeatist in me feels like I will just never have that same
| feeling again online. In part because I am no longer a child, in
| part because there are just too many people online now, in part
| because too many of those people's brains are twitter-rotted.
|
| It's fine, I have my close circles to keep my human social spirit
| alive.
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| > I honestly didn't care about individual blogs at all when I
| was a young net user.
|
| Wow. This was me too. I was excited to hop on the Rockman.EXE
| Online forums and tell people about my homepage I was
| constantly redesigning/rebuilding.
|
| > The defeatist in me feels like I will just never have that
| same feeling again online.
|
| I feel you, but I'm still chasing that. Close circles are where
| it's at though, maybe we gotta be happy with that. SIGH
| st_goliath wrote:
| > I didn't care about the 1,000 words a single person wrote
| about their trip abroad. There was no way to interact with it?
|
| I wonder, have you ever read a novel? Hundreds of _pages_ a
| single person wrote about a story that happened (usually)
| entirely in their head, printed on paper, no way to interact
| with it. It 's a _great_ experience if the author has some
| skill at this.
| corytheboyd wrote:
| Yes, I have read novels. I don't think blog posts and novels
| compare at all.
| 1dom wrote:
| I can't downvote, but this comment feels a little rude or
| standoffish towards someone who read what you wrote,
| thought about it, and gave a response.
|
| You said you didn't care for 1000 words that someone wrote
| about their trip abroad, and that's clearly an example to
| illustrate something, but it's not clear what, because it's
| contrived and falls apart easily: nobody else really read
| those blogs either, people read blogs from people and
| topics they're interested in.
|
| So what about 1000 word blog from an a single individual
| that does interest you? Or more than 1000 words from a
| single individual on a different topic, like a novel?
| jwr wrote:
| I am all for resurrecting the Old Web, but please, let's not
| repeat the same mistakes again.
|
| Be independent. Running your own website is not that difficult.
| And seriously, spending the minuscule amount of money on hosting
| should not be a problem. It's a hobby, hobbies cost money. If you
| own your website, you can move it anywhere quickly. Nobody will
| start showing ads. Nobody will pester your users with annoying
| "SUBSCRIBE" modal popups. Nobody will sell the platform along
| with you and your content to a new owner.
|
| I do not know enough about this particular platform -- maybe it's
| different from others, maybe not. But I have seen enough
| platforms undergo progressive enshittification to be wary of any
| place that wants to host my stuff under their domain/URL.
| ryanolsonx wrote:
| It's funny, when I was younger, it was all about MSN messenger,
| MySpace (esp the music player on there), and forums. That's the
| old web I remember from before. No personal blogs, really. (Again
| I'm not old enough to remember before that)
| talkingtab wrote:
| I do not think "old" helps a discussion and probably impedes it.
| A better conversation is perhaps about what features we call
| "old" are good and desirable. Then how we can build a new,
| sustainable system with those features.
|
| Unfortunately sustainable is somewhat equivalent to money.
| Whatever work you do, and even if you love it, in general it
| needs to have a functional business model. Businesses that can
| financially support the people who provide them, tend to
| continue.
|
| Personally, I believe this is the fundamental problem with many
| of the things that we now fondly think of as "old". Google
| groups? What was the business model? Did it make money? How could
| you make money from doing something like that?
|
| The fundamental business model IRL used to be "fee for service".
| Not lock in. Not subscription. It works, because if people want
| the service they can pay for it. Okay, so hint: what are the
| issues of implementing fee-for-service on the internet?
|
| hint number 2: someone mentioned banner ads in a comment. Is that
| fee for service? If not, for extra credit, what would be the side
| effects of a banner ad type business model? Are there useful
| services that could be provided with an alternative business
| model. Etc.
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| > what are the issues of implementing fee-for-service on the
| internet?
|
| If you aren't selling porn or whatever credit card companies
| can't stomach, there's no problem. I recently stumbled upon a
| way to accept payments without the credit card companies
| (crypto): https://www.x402.org
|
| > what would be the side effects of a banner ad type business
| model?
|
| I remember Carbon Ads and BuySellAds being tasteful banner ad
| companies. I think one or both folded in recent years. In
| today's era, respectful banner ads probably have a niche
| market, especially with the prevalence of ad blockers. You'd be
| better off implementing x402 instead (paying for access to a
| resource).
|
| But then your end-user needs to already have a crypto wallet,
| understand what USDC is, and so on...another niche market.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| > Recently a local news station in Maine reported a story of some
| middle schoolers calling their friends with landline telephones.
|
| This reflects on another problem: the sorry state of journalism
| and willingness to turn press releases into news. That story ran
| in a wide variety of media outlets, and a Google News search of
| "children landline phones" turns up a bunch of these.
|
| It turns out that these articles were really ads for "Tin Can," a
| VoIP phone for kids. Not really a landline at all, it's seriously
| nerfed, and I'd assume that if it's SIP, it's locked to their
| service, or else it's their own proprietary protocol. Not really
| a surprise, given that real landlines are almost extinct, and
| expensive where available.
| lunias wrote:
| The "old web" to me was GeoCities and Angelfire, it was
| customizing your NeoPets shop, it was hosting a web server on
| your home network on port 8080. It was mailing a check to an
| address you found on a website in hopes that you'd receive a
| bootleg anime VHS in the mail a few weeks later. It was webrings,
| banners, and websites reviewing and promoting other sites through
| a "links" section. It was right-clicking to copy an image and
| getting a Javascript alert telling you the image was "copyright".
| It was learning that you could copy it anyway if you spammed
| enter. It was hotlinking those same images in protest. It was
| waiting 5 hours to download a 37 second 320x240 RealPlayer video.
| It was having a password "protected" area where the password is
| base64 encoded in the source. It was trying the same search query
| in multiple search engines because they would return different
| results. It was typing random URLs in to see if you could find
| something interesting yourself. It was playing midi files on loop
| in the background. It was Macromedia Flash, explicit popups, pure
| yellow text on black backgrounds, and reformatting your computer
| to get rid of viruses.
|
| The "old web" was McDonalds in the early 90's. This looks more
| like McDonalds today, maybe tomorrow it will be a Starbucks.
|
| I run my own blog on AWS for ~a dollar a month.
| pif wrote:
| > 8080
|
| You mean 80. Ports after 1024 were for wimps.
| lunias wrote:
| Nah, port 8080 because your ISP is blocking port 80 to try
| and prevent you from running a home webserver.
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| This was a beautiful read.
|
| Can I read your blog? Mine is https://blog.webb.page.
| lunias wrote:
| Very nice! Mine is https://ethanaa.com, but I basically only
| updated it for the first couple months after I built it lol.
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| Added to my NetNewsWire!
| Bjorkbat wrote:
| It really is crazy how much was lost when Apple killed Flash.
| Absolutely miss Newgrounds. It's still around of course, I'm
| reflecting more on the vibes when it was in its heyday.
| Unbelievable the games people were making with Flash back then
| and how it spawned the careers of a ton of indie darlings.
| Also, not Flash at all, but does anyone remember Exit Mundi?
| Absolute gold.
|
| Honestly, I kind of look back on blogging unfavorably. Before
| that people made websites to showcase their interests and
| hobbies, and because of that even the most basic looking
| websites could have a lot of "color" to them. Then blogging
| became a thing and people's websites became bland and
| minimalist. Arguably blogging culture is as responsible for the
| death of creativity on the internet as much as the constraints
| of mobile-friendly web design and Apple's aforementioned
| killing of Flash.
| lunias wrote:
| Newgrounds was incredible! At the time, games (of any
| quality) for free was a biiiiig deal. It was even more
| amazing that you didn't need to wait hours to download and
| install them.
|
| I agree w/ your take on blogging... kind of a bland "one-
| stop-shop" for everything a person thinks of rather than an
| experience tailored to a specific interest. I used to make
| Dragonball Z fan sites mostly... even within a single domain
| I would have multiple websites all linking to each other,
| each with a different design, and subtly different content,
| but now I have a bland blog that I don't update regularly
| lol. Maybe building a retro site is what I really need to do.
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| > now I have a bland blog that I don't update regularly
| lol.
|
| I'm guilty of this but at least it's a different kind of
| boring (plain text files).
|
| > Maybe building a retro site is what I really need to do.
|
| YES.
| Bjorkbat wrote:
| > I used to make Dragonball Z fan sites...
|
| Based
|
| I'm working on a revamp of my personal site. I do a lot of
| creative coding, most of them are throwaway experiments, so
| I thought I'd showcase more of them there. Besides that
| though, I have some "rare pepes" that I've been meaning to
| put somewhere. What I like about these is that they're
| highly polished, animated gifs that imitate the sort of
| "holographic" effect you'd find in rare collector's cards,
| but at the same time you can't track down who originally
| made them, they aren't part of some professional's online
| portfolio. In that sense they feel like a special piece of
| internet folk art, made by some complete rando.
|
| Nowadays we have Pinterest and the like, but I really like
| the idea of creating my own little online space for images
| I like.
| rchaud wrote:
| Agreed on both points. When blogging became the dominant
| reason for having a website, we were already on the way to
| the "content" hell. Any semi popular website had pressure to
| post more frequently, diluting quality. And pretty soon after
| that, blogs went from 500 words to 140 characters, but 10x
| the frequency.
|
| Static websites that were updated only once in a while were
| far better at showing a cross section of someone's life In
| that respect, StumbleUpon and browser bookmarks were superior
| to RSS.
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| StumbleUpon is the reason I regularly use the phrase, "I
| stumbled upon" to this day.
|
| What a glorious product.
| m000 wrote:
| In retrospect, I would say that the "blog rush" was kind of
| a precursor to the rise of influencers. There was even a
| crowd of "blogging gurus" that would ask a pretty peny for
| advice on how to advance your blog.
|
| The blogging pressure got so out of hand, that even some EU
| bureucrat thought it would be a great idea for each FP6
| funded project to have a blog besides its static website.
| At least with the influencing trend they don't ask
| researchers to do glamour shots with their food.
| tolciho wrote:
| Flash was the first broken site I ever encountered, some
| restaurant had an all-flash webpage. Never did end up going
| to that restaurant. Why bother? If they render content
| inaccessible behind some needless jank like Flash or
| JavaScript, why bother? Another fun thing to do was to keep a
| tally of how many "OMG stop the presses!!" security
| vulnerabilities Flash had racked up over time, which was
| lots. Many hundreds. Made even a lolfest like Windows look
| bad. Flash, it was not killed with fire soon enough. Chrome
| and other such bloatware arguably also need some sort of
| fire, or at least a diet or trepaning or something, but
| that's a different rant, though one very much related to the
| Old Web or the smolweb.
| alwillis wrote:
| > It really is crazy how much was lost when Apple killed
| Flash.
|
| Steve Jobs published "Thoughts on Flash" [1] in 2010; Flash
| was discontinued by Adobe in 2017. If Apple supposedly
| "killed" Flash, they sure took their time doing so.
|
| The iPhone had about 14% marketshare at the time, so it's not
| like Apple was in a commanding position to dictate terms to
| the industry.
|
| But if you read his letter, what he said made total sense:
| Flash was designed for the desktop, not phones--it certainly
| wasn't power or memory efficient. Apple was still selling the
| iPhone 3GS at the time, a device with 256Mb of RAM and a
| 600Mhz 32-bit processor.
|
| And of course Flash was proprietary and 100% controlled by
| Adobe.
|
| Jobs made the case for the (still in development) HTML5--
| HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
|
| What people don't seem to remember: most of the industry
| thought the iPhone would fail as a platform because it didn't
| support Flash, which was wildly popular.
|
| [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20170615060422/https://www.a
| pple...
| SXX wrote:
| Getting rid of Flash was never ever about using HTML5 for
| Apple. It was always to obviously to make battery life
| better and ofc adding more experiences to their walled
| garden store.
|
| Safari is lagging on HTML5 features for decade far behind
| Firefox. And any features useful for "PWA" is just
| sabotaged. E.g like Screen Wake Lock API finally
| implemented in iOS 16 but to this day broken on Home
| screen. And like not quite obvious to use in Safari too.
|
| Because working web standards support would make cross
| platform mobile apps possible outside of App Store.
| alwillis wrote:
| > Safari is lagging on HTML5 features for decade far
| behind Firefox.
|
| Really?
|
| Safari was first to ship :has() in March 2022; Firefox
| couldn't ship until December 2023.
|
| I listed a bunch of web platform features Safari shipped
| before Chrome and Firefox [1][2].
|
| Even now, Firefox hasn't shipped Anchor Positioning,
| Scroll-driven animation, text-wrap: pretty, Web GPU,
| Cross-document view transitions, etc. but Safari and
| Chrome have.
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44074789
|
| [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44067706
| johnfn wrote:
| > Steve Jobs published "Thoughts on Flash" [1] in 2010;
| Flash was discontinued by Adobe in 2017. If Apple
| supposedly "killed" Flash, they sure took their time doing
| so.
|
| I'm really surprised anyone could say that. To my view,
| "Thoughts on Flash killed Flash" is about as true as "the
| sky is blue". It's fairly clear to me that without a strong
| stance, a less principled mobile OS (like Android) would
| have supported it, and probably Flash would still be around
| today. Apple's stance gave Google the path to do the same
| thing, and this domino effect led to Flash being
| discontinued 7 years later. You say 7 years as if it's a
| long time from cause to effect, but how long would you
| estimate it would take a single action to fully kill
| something as pervasive as Flash, which was installed on
| virtually every machine (Im sure it was 99%+)? You
| correctly cite that iOS penetration was low at the time,
| but mobile Safari grew over the next few years to become
| the dominant web browser, and that was sufficient.
| alwillis wrote:
| > You correctly cite that iOS penetration was low at the
| time, but mobile Safari grew over the next few years to
| become the dominant web browser, and that was sufficient.
|
| First, there's no way Flash would still be alive today;
| Apple might have sped up its demise but it had so many
| disadvantages, it was just a matter of time and it was
| controlled by one company.
|
| Remember that the web standards movement was kicking into
| high gear around the same time; we had already dodged a
| bullet when Microsoft attempted to take over the web with
| Active X, Silverlight, JScript.
|
| The whole point of the Web Standards movement was to get
| away from proprietary technologies.
|
| > You correctly cite that iOS penetration was low at the
| time, but mobile Safari grew over the next few years to
| become the dominant web browser, and that was sufficient.
|
| Safari has _never_ been the dominant browser; not sure
| why you think that. Other than the United States, iPhone
| marketshare is under 50% everywhere else.
|
| Even in 2025, Safari's _global_ marketshare is about 15%
| [1] and that 's after selling 3 billion devices [2].
|
| [1]: https://backlinko.com/browser-market-share
|
| [2]: https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/31/apple-has-now-
| sold-three-b...
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Ruffle needs more love. The time and effort that's gone in to
| a browser extension to emulate flash, should be receiving
| that sponsorship from Cloudflare.
|
| https://ruffle.rs/
| rzzzt wrote:
| I'm waiting for microphone support so I can make the frog
| on Ze Frank's website sing.
| Gormo wrote:
| It's not just a browser extension -- it's also available as
| a JS library that can be added added to any site to restore
| seamless Flash support.
| snickerbockers wrote:
| It's more to do with HTML5 than lack-of flash, although it
| could be argued that flash's long-prophesied downfall was one
| of the reasons for HTML5's rapid adoption.
|
| HTML5 is when the web stopped being the web. It has no
| legitimacy in calling itself "hypertext", it's an app-
| delivery mechanism with a built-in compatibility layer. In
| this regard Flash is just as bad and probably even worse, but
| since it wasn't in anyway standardized or even open-source
| there was a fair amount of pushback from all fronts. HTML5
| had no such pushback.
| hoherd wrote:
| It was also visiting pages like pages.small-isp.net/~username
| and digging through the HTML to see if somebody had <!-- hidden
| comments adding private commentary but only for folks who were
| knowledgeable and curious enough to look -->
| rootsudo wrote:
| Wow this hit too close to home but describes my internet
| experience of the 00s exactly. Except for anime vhs tapes it
| was fansubs on irc or mailing burned cds/dvds.
| lunias wrote:
| That's awesome. By the time I got on IRC it was for XDCC ;P.
| I did once pool cash with some friends to buy rips of
| Dragonball GT on ebay... 64 episodes on 2 CD-Rs.
| hossbeast wrote:
| I once bought a SNES game that couldn't be found at local
| stores (final fantasy 2) by 1/ finding a guy on a message board
| with the cartridge, 2/ mailing that person a check, and 3/
| waiting (probably weeks?) to receive the cartridge in the mail.
| The old Internet. I still have that game btw.
| AznHisoka wrote:
| >> It was mailing a check to an address you found on a website
| in hopes that you'd receive a bootleg anime VHS in the mail a
| few weeks later.
|
| Check? More like actual dollar bills stuffed inside a piece of
| paper inside an envelope, so nobody could see what it was
| matula wrote:
| Remember FriendFeed? It was unironically a pretty cool thing.
| Subscribe to RSS feeds, displayed in a Twitter-like timeline, and
| could comment and share and follow people and see their feeds...
| and all of that had their own RSS feeds.
|
| The current FeedLand gets close, and is nice for reading, but
| there's not a huge "social" aspect to it.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| I, too, felt the old web was much more creative and limitless.
| But to be blunt, these attempts to resurrect it feel like the
| opposite: another collection of 90s-style HTML and artwork about
| generic "old web" stuff (or about the old web itself, which makes
| no sense - you don't hear people today reminiscing about 2025).
|
| I think a big problem is desensitization. When I was young,
| MSPaint art looked good, bitcrushed music sounded fine, and
| simple flash games were fun. Then the art, music, and games kept
| becoming more complex and higher quality, so the novelty and
| perceived opportunity was sustained. Now it has tapered off, so
| the novelty has run out and the next improvement is hard to
| imagine.
|
| However, the world is so complicated and technology is still
| improving such that I suspect (and hope) we'll find more
| breakthroughs within the next decade. Personally, I'm still
| optimistic about VR: right now good VR is too expensive and
| development is too hard, but those are incrementally-solvable
| problems, and few people have experienced good VR (especially
| with motion) but I can imagine it.
| nativeit wrote:
| Not for nothing, the last time I checked the most popular indie
| games on steam are all intentionally made to look vaguely 8-bit
| (really prob more like 64-bit, but lofi retro).
| armchairhacker wrote:
| Sometimes for nostalgia, but I think that's usually because
| it's easier to make decent graphics if they're 2D and low
| resolution. You don't see many games with the low-quality
| Flash style, pixelation happens to be less "ugly".
| crnkofe wrote:
| I like to go on a nostalgia trip every now and then as well.
| Loved the old forums that got taken out by social networks. Also
| loved the various private communities in IRC and Usenet and the
| blog-o-spheres I was part of and read about. But the sad reality
| is that its more about the community than the technology. And the
| communities of old mostly disbanded and moved on and restoring
| old tech won't bring them back.
|
| Nowadays the main issue for me is that there are too many people
| in the room. Pick any social network and forum and you're an
| immediate misfit there. Make one edgy statements and trolls,
| flamers, live streamers will tear you apart. Not to mention AI
| tech advancements are making a not-great situation slightly
| worse. The internet is no longer a happy place. Its a good
| question if it ever were.
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| > The internet is no longer a happy place. Its a good question
| if it ever were.
|
| I still remember being excited to "go online." So yeah, it was
| (for me).
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| Forums had been better but I wonder how much is about peeple
| just beeing different. Nowadays people have less time and
| struggle more, so they favor s.th. more effortless in their
| free time and also are more egoistic (on average of course
| only).
| endymion-light wrote:
| Trying to ressurect the old internet by staying limited to a
| platform like bear blog may be a big limitation. To me, part of
| what made the old internet so interesting is the expression of
| ideas in so many things beyond just regular blogs.
|
| Like someone else mentioned, things like GeoCities, but also
| stories like Ted The Caver, neopets, etc. Blogs are great but to
| be honest, I get most of my stuff from mailing lists and hacker
| news and feel quite fine with that.
|
| What i'd love to see more of is people building interesting
| experiences for the love of the game, that's what feels like
| builds passion and interest. But there's no returning back to the
| old internet in the same way, because what's interesting and
| what's fun to read has changed.
| root_axis wrote:
| A post like this makes the rounds every few months on HN. What
| posts like this neglect to consider is that the overwhelming
| majority of people who use social media apps didn't use the
| internet during the "old" era. The reality is, this is nerd
| nostalgia that nobody cares about or wants besides a sub-
| population of nerds. The masses don't care about blogs, rss, or
| small networks. The internet grew because the social media and
| internet companies invested billions in bringing the masses
| online via these shiny addictive platforms - the "old web" is
| never going to appeal to them - it is a relic of the past.
| krapp wrote:
| >What posts like this neglect to consider is that the
| overwhelming majority of people who use social media apps
| didn't use the internet during the "old" era.
|
| They don't neglect to consider that at all - what people are
| nostalgic for is the web before it became mainstream and got
| ruined by muggles and corporations, when was just an exclusive
| club for nerds. Implicit to the concept of resurrecting the
| "Old Web" is recreating spaces that will never appeal to the
| masses. That's a feature, not a bug.
| superkuh wrote:
| The old web never went away, it never died. It was you who left.
| You who runs a corporate browser that can't even load HTTP pages
| anymore. You who only post on massive corporate run social media
| (like I am with HN). You who host your website on github or
| behind cloudflare or don't even bother and just have a mastodon
| or facebook page (both exclusively javascript applications).
|
| The old web is still there, almost invisible under the piles of
| corporate javascript applications. There's probably more old web
| now than there was when the old web was new. It's just that in
| terms of relative ratios it's buried under so much crap and
| search engines are so bad no few can surf it. Heck, there's even
| still usenet and people posting there like myself. It's not dead
| and it's not spammed anymore, and it's a true federated protocol.
|
| But it is easy to be the change. Self host your website from your
| home computer. Don't use Chrome or Chrome derivatives. Don't put
| computational paywalls in front of your services like cloudflare
| or even Anubis. The truth is that for most websites in most
| situations, all that is not needed. And most importantly, surf
| the web. That'll require setting up the modern version of
| webrings: feeds. And sharing feeds with your friends and peers.
| krapp wrote:
| What "corporate browsers" can't even load HTTP pages anymore?
| lockranore2 wrote:
| I think this might be a reference to the barriers browsers
| place to hit sites not listed behind a TLS cert.
| smnplk wrote:
| But noone wants to look at another website anymore. People dont
| browse the web like in the old days or in the 2000s or in the
| 2010s. People are just used to being siloed now. Many dont even
| know what the old web was and how it felt. There are just a few
| silos now, FB , reddit, X and this is all they know, many dont
| even know much more than FB.
|
| Internet has become dogshit wrapped in catshit.
| mediumsmart wrote:
| _it 's only html (but I like it)_
| z0r wrote:
| Let's do it!
|
| https://c.tenor.com/6T0_YBIw9MkAAAAC/tenor.gif
| butz wrote:
| I think youtube should not be mixed into old web. Either embed
| your video in website and provide download, or host it on
| peertube. I know about video file hosting issues and costs, so
| maybe use appropriatly sized videos? Low quality, low resolution,
| compress as much as possible, and it will probably won't take
| more than any average website. :)
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| There's no way for a video platform to work without some sort
| of payment. Video costs money. Thankfully, Cloudflare R2 is
| enough for the average blogger. You just gotta figure out how
| to use it.
|
| I'm building a short-form video platform with R2 as the storage
| backend. I figured out transcoding but I definitely need a
| better server for it. The old web isn't coming back because
| "free" is rife for abuse.
|
| I've embedded a video on my homepage from my platform
| (dogfooding). Not sure I'll share the platform here when I soft
| launch next week or so, HN doesn't like incomplete products.
|
| All this to say, video with decent quality is possible for the
| average website.
| rolph wrote:
| video is a file like anything else.
|
| so .txt costs money; .zip costs money index.html costs money.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Something that was pointed out to me the other day: Firefox can
| show you "important dates" in the address bar, but they've yanked
| RSS support. You now need a plugin to get the RSS feed link for a
| site.
|
| I miss the old web, but I'm not sure it's coming back. You can
| still go on Usenet as well, not sure why anyone is spending time
| keeping the servers running, because I can not find an active
| newsgroups anymore. It was nice for a time, but the future has
| lost it's appeal to me.
|
| Maybe the author, and some the comments are right. I should go
| build an silly personal website, just in HTML, have all the pages
| be different styles, have silly buttons, weird Perl scripts all
| over the place and link to like minded people.
| ibfreeekout wrote:
| Honestly, go for it! I started my own blog up and write
| everything myself, all the way down to the basic HTML and CSS.
| I don't use any frameworks or anything, whatever is there is
| just mine. Benefit is I'm not locked in to any one platform and
| migration is a piece of cake. Obviously won't work for everyone
| but I don't need much to put some words out there, but at least
| I can say it's all mine.
| lubujackson wrote:
| Speaking of the "landline" thing for kids that is mentioned at
| the start of the post, this product is making the rounds amongst
| my kid's class (3rd grade). Not sure if it will catch on, but
| seems far too pricey for my taste, though I like the concept:
| https://tincan.kids/
|
| I think it is good to separate the nostalgia from the actual
| valuable nugget you want to revive. Nostalgia is great for
| marketing but parsing the missing nugget is the important part.
|
| I have hundreds of CDs I never got rid of and last Christmas I
| got my son a cheap CD player. Yes, he could have infinite music
| through Spotify, but what I wanted to give him was that sense of
| control over music. The physical element has value, which has
| been appreciated for a while - a lot of that comes from the
| purposeful interaction required to select, set up and play the
| music. To listen to entire albums instead of individual songs. An
| avenue to explore music you only sort of are interested in but
| give more time because of switching costs.
|
| But more specifically, I remembered the feeling of being a kid
| and having my own cassette player, walking around with it and
| bringing music with me. It was one of the first things I owned
| that could modify my space and change my mood and affect those
| around me in a positive way. That is a powerful concept when you
| are little!
|
| I think the missing element of the "old web" is having that sense
| of control and influence. Not huge control or huge influence, but
| self-directed and with some friction. Sometimes, the friction is
| the most important part!
| DudeOpotomus wrote:
| The old web hid search results from behind paywalls and logins.
|
| New web literally makes Google worthless for 80% of my searches.
|
| q: What will the web / social media be like when the only people
| using it are idiots and the poor?
| wyclif wrote:
| NetNewsWire will choke out on you if you have a large number of
| feeds, because of the way it is designed.
| brycewray wrote:
| https://netnewswire.com/help/iCloud.html
| cosmicgadget wrote:
| > In some ways it's bringing back old web rings and simple
| networking through hyperlinks.
|
| And there are plenty of likeminded individuals, many who have
| posted here. It may not seem like it because linking with hrefs
| and webrings is much more fragmented than services that beat you
| over the head with engagement metrics.
|
| I think the distributed linking model coexists well with
| centralized resources like:
| (https://indieseek.xyz/links/internet/blogging/) and
| (https://outerweb.org/explore/category/indieweb) (mine)
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| The old web was people that could afford PCs, a select group, and
| who knew how/chose to connect to the internet, smaller sub group,
| plus college students. Then it was people who could afford very
| expensive toys (iPhone) on expensive phone plans that required
| credit qualifications. The types of people who are inquisitive,
| or who have expensive hobbies, or even time/energy for hobbies.
| There was a time early on when services that normally require
| some kind of credit check just...didn't... if you used the iPhone
| app.
|
| Today's internet is wage slaves on prepaid phone plans using apps
| on cheap cell phones that want a cheap/free distraction from
| their lives.
| ktosobcy wrote:
| This:
|
| > Instead it was just people, the whole reason you started in the
| first place.
| lockranore2 wrote:
| I was around for the leap from BBS systems to Fidonet; the bad
| old days when there were no such thing as graphics. I can
| absolutely sympathize with what's being said here, and for me,
| there are two primary reasons why I pine for the elder days. The
| systems then required some effort to gain access to which kept
| some of the signal to noise loss down (if you know the difference
| between CB radio and Ham radio, you know what I'm saying), and
| while commercialism's always been a part of these systems, more
| value was placed on content than advertising.
| drnick1 wrote:
| The first step to "resurrect the old Web" would be to remove the
| fonts.googleapis.com dependency from your blog. It enables Google
| to track people across the Internet.
| Kovah wrote:
| Bunny Fonts is a fully compatible, GDPR-compliant, drop-in
| replacement for Google Fonts. https://fonts.bunny.net/
| drnick1 wrote:
| This may be better than Google, but I don't understand why a
| blog needs a font CDN at all. Just use standard fonts or host
| them yourself if you really can't do without your
| SuperCoolFont.
| akho wrote:
| They also have a youtube in there.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| I don't have a lot of nostalgia for an "old web". I like the new
| web. But there are some aspects of the old web that I'd like to
| see more of. To that end, I've been trying to find ways to make
| the new web adopt those principles. One of them is ownership: If
| your friend from school runs the website, you know your data
| isn't being siphoned up by Big Tech. Lowering the barrier to
| entry to make a "cool" website (such a small social media
| platform) is the goal. Back in the day, this meant setting up
| phpBB. These days, it probably means setting up a Mastodon node.
| skn3 wrote:
| https://neocities.org
| tolerance wrote:
| It's hard for me not to read these "old/small web elegies" as
| coming from people trapped in a kind of perpetual adolescence
| leading them to contrive impediments to authoring a static
| website while grieving over a want for community.
|
| I'm curious about the personal lives of the authors of these
| kinds of posts and whether there's any shades of the film
| American Beauty in them.
| dinkleberg wrote:
| It is kind of wild to admit, but the bottom of this article made
| me think about the fact that RSS readers can be local apps for
| the first time ever... I've always used hosted services and run
| my own Miniflux server. But a quick search revealed a nice native
| linux reader: https://gfeeds.gabmus.org/.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Blog platforms seem to come and go pursuing this goal. It's funny
| to think that when Ghost came on to the scene (12 years ago!
| There goes the time!), it too was all about just blogging
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5625546
|
| I have an old Wordpress blog I used to run and that I backed up
| but never restored when Hetzner needed to migrate the VM. It's
| been almost a decade that that backup was taken. I wonder if I
| will be able to resurrect it. It's somewhere on all these hard
| drives...
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