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The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

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Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#191

Post by FpUser »

kstrauser wrote: post #5

I sure hope that's right. It was the best feeling in the world to stand up an Apache server on my Amiga, and later my little FreeBSD server, and see my friends viewing the website I was hosting on my dialup connection. It wasn't pretty, it wasn't elegant, and it certainly wasn't fast, but it was mine . I made that. From installing the server to writing the HTML, I owned that service from end to end and had completely…

>"It wasn't pretty, it wasn't elegant, and it certainly wasn't fast, but it was mine. I made that."

I know the feeling. Even though I use Hetzner and OVH I also host stuff in my home office. Ordered business 1gbps fiber line with static IP for $120 CDN per month for that.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#192

Post by alfl »

jabbany wrote: post #32

I feel like this article doesn't address the reason why people moved away from the "old" Internet --- most people only care about their _content_ not the particular technology that backs it. In the old times, you could only host content if you were really good with the technology. The people who had websites were people who knew how to set up and run a web server, and to compose the HTML content that was being served…

For now. My company kubelt.com is fixing this.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#193

Post by alphachloride »

kevstev wrote: post #160
taurusnoises wrote: post #115

I so wish these articles would give a 101 on how to make an old-school, decentralized website. So many of us want that, but just have no idea where to begin anymore (and I made websites in the late 90s....) Love these articles, tho. The more the better.

Is it really that obscure these days? 1. Have a computer in your house open exposed to the internet on port 80- port forward on your router. 2. Run an http server on that box. Apache is a reasonable choice but there are probably easier pieces of software out there to set up. 2a. Create an index.html or equivalent default page name and put some html in it even if it's just hello world- it can even be in plain text. 3.…

To be fair, this is not a 101. Exposing port 80, figuring out a static external IP, or setting up DDNS, and https all need more hand-holding I think.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#194

Post by bri3d »

jchw wrote: post #188
aeturnum wrote: post #171

I have never understood people who mourn the death of the "old" internet because I do not feel I have lost it. Particular communities come and go, as they always have, but I have found that the I can find the same sorts of gathering places for the same kinds of people I always have - in about the same numbers too. The thing that has changed is that a huge swath of new people have come online and, though some of what…

I do agree that the "old" internet is not totally dead, but in my case communities I used to be in and even a couple I had direct involvement in were gutted because people left in favor of participating in communities via websites like Twitter. IRC channels I was in dwindled in numbers, draining instead to massive Discord servers. The thing is, the "old" Internet was always somewhat anemic compared to the "new" Inter…

Hmm. I have pretty much the same kinds of interactions on private Discord servers which I had on IRC 20 years ago.

It's harder to find particularly skilled or like minded people in some niche areas or fields, but with simply more people online, this seems inevitable - more haystack to sift through. Of course there are worrying corporatization or centralization arguments vs. IRC, but ultimately the end result doesn't feel that different to me in terms of community.

I'm not really involved in any fan communities or anything a Wikia would involve, so I can't comment on that facet.

I suppose for what I do (reverse engineering hobby stuff, mostly), what would have been a "team" or "group" blog site, possibly with some useful collaboration plugins or the like, is now a GitHub repo, but that's more of a convenience than a drawback compared to the "old" Internet to me.

Overall, it does seem like things are more centralized and therefore a bit less unique, but at the same time, I have to spend less time securing bespoke web servers, buying crappy VPS hosting, and dealing with routine maintenance and setup to collaborate with like-minded people on projects.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#195

Post by arvinsim »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #35
kstrauser wrote: post #5

I sure hope that's right. It was the best feeling in the world to stand up an Apache server on my Amiga, and later my little FreeBSD server, and see my friends viewing the website I was hosting on my dialup connection. It wasn't pretty, it wasn't elegant, and it certainly wasn't fast, but it was mine . I made that. From installing the server to writing the HTML, I owned that service from end to end and had completely…

Yeah. That sense of ownership has been lost. Now corporations own everything. Nobody wants a domain, they want a @name on some social media platform. Nobody wants their own website, they want to post on social media. ISPs have cgNAT now, nobody is directly connected to the internet. Everything is just so boring .

I am pretty sure a lot of people want their own website and domain.

It's just that a lot more inconvenient to have and manage one for most people.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#196

Post by aeturnum »

jchw wrote: post #188
aeturnum wrote: post #171

I have never understood people who mourn the death of the "old" internet because I do not feel I have lost it. Particular communities come and go, as they always have, but I have found that the I can find the same sorts of gathering places for the same kinds of people I always have - in about the same numbers too. The thing that has changed is that a huge swath of new people have come online and, though some of what…

I do agree that the "old" internet is not totally dead, but in my case communities I used to be in and even a couple I had direct involvement in were gutted because people left in favor of participating in communities via websites like Twitter. IRC channels I was in dwindled in numbers, draining instead to massive Discord servers. The thing is, the "old" Internet was always somewhat anemic compared to the "new" Inter…

Yah - there was a "collective social moment" that was how people came together around exciting new (at the times) forms. That's a kind of irreplaceable moment that is always happening for some community somewhere, but it never lasts forever and it always moves around with the times.

I know what you mean and I am also nostalgic about it - but my life has also changed and I suspect that my nostalgia for times gone by involves nostolgia for that moment in my life. Even if there was the same energy around the places I hung out in the late-90s and early-2000s, I would not be there as much or with the same aims.

> you link to Fandom/Wikia as a community hub.

Oh man, I was not intending to link to them as a community hub. It was the first source I found that indexed some current Hotline trackers and clients. But I think the Fandom treatment of communities is informative of how the times have changed.

I think, 20 years ago, this information would have been stored on a server maintained with the sweat and love of a single individual. Sometimes real collectives existed, but I found them to be rare. Often, if that person got distracted, or found new interests, we could lose a useful source (and for people in the community enough - a friend). Now there are commercial entities that will "preserve" that information while cutting the community out entirely. Like you I am not sure that is "better" - but it did allow me to find a list of Hotline clients in ~10 minutes of searching, and I suspect the "real" Hotline community is still on hotline as it was before.

So...I do think it depends on where you see the old internet. People do different things as passion projects now. I have found that I can go back and find many of the things I see other people mourn as lost, and I am sorry to hear that you have not had the same experience.

Writing my first post made me go find this - it's a web player that collects thousands of keygen MIDIs: https://keygenmusic.tk/# (using the hard work of the good people at http://www.keygenmusic.net/?lang=en - donate if you like the music!)

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#197

Post by jjulius »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #76
zwieback wrote: post #52

I don't think the old internet ever went away, instead the commercial internet exploded, in some ways good in some ways bad. If you want to create and showcase your own stuff you have a ton more options than you used to, it could be nostalgic HTML pages with blinking colors or some slick thing on a prefab site builder, up to you.

In general I've begun to think of the whole small internet movement as a countrerculture phenomenon. It's got a lot of touching stones with the bohemians, the beats, the hippies, etc. What they've all got in common is a search for independence, authenticity and community. I do think the retro-aesthetic is more of a statement than anything else. It's like the long hair of a hippie. Like there's no reason a hippie coul…

Eh, I'm with you on your general sentiment, and I definitely think websites can still embody the "old web" spirit while using HTML/CSS to stand out in a way that's different from "old web" aesthetics.

The problem with the Bootstrap example is that Bootstrap is exactly the kind of overly-bloated, JS-heavy (depending on use) Web 2.0 tool that the "old web" spirit is firmly against. A hippie can live like a hippie and still have a crew cut, but using Bootstrap on an "old web" website would be like a hippie heading to a board meeting wearing a polo and khakis bought brand new at Banana Republic as they yell, "Fuck the man!" from their sports car.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#198

Post by zrm »

XorNot wrote: post #187
wolpoli wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The barrier of entry was actually lower than that. We didn't need to stand up an Apache server. We could just sign up for a Geocities/Xoom/Tripod account and upload HTML or use the built in site editor to create content. Somewhere along the way, people stopped building well organized sites and started producing chronologically organized writings and content. These chronologically organized articles and content have d…

The counter point is that the rise of quality search engines has reduced the value of "well organized". Consider that one of the premier features of the Jetbrains IDE is "search everywhere" which will search command help text for you as well and then return the command as a possible result - much easier to describe what you're trying to do and be led to the exact command, then try to understand the mind of the person…

> The counter point is that the rise of quality search engines has reduced the value of "well organized".

I wonder how much of this is still true.

Google results from a few years ago were much better than they are now. That's a combination of SEO ruining the results by Google assuming anything not hosted on a megaplatform is suspect and not showing it plus SEO ruining results by still being there in them despite that, but it happened.

If someone made a curated list of interesting small sites by category, it would be a lot more useful now than it was before that happened.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#199

Post by giantrobot »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #156
wolpoli wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The barrier of entry was actually lower than that. We didn't need to stand up an Apache server. We could just sign up for a Geocities/Xoom/Tripod account and upload HTML or use the built in site editor to create content. Somewhere along the way, people stopped building well organized sites and started producing chronologically organized writings and content. These chronologically organized articles and content have d…

> The barrier of entry was actually lower than that. We didn't need to stand up an Apache server. We could just sign up for a Geocities/Xoom/Tripod account and upload HTML or use the built in site editor to create content. Reading this thread feels like everyone is anchored to whatever methods were popular at the time they entered the internet as being the peak. The BBS people think it was all downhill after BBS decl…

> Curated and organized websites tend to fall out relevancy and decay very rapidly. Might as well just let people post as they see fit and then we can find it by searching.

Your points about nostalgia I sort of agree with but this part I take issue with. Many sites use blog software which does the whole chronological ordering. Unless the site's particular blog theme exposes archives, a sitemap, or the author meticulously tags (and the theme shows tags) it can be stupid hard to navigate around blog-like sites.

Blog-like sites also tend to have a partial chronological list of posts at the root of the site. If you're writing some personal journal or topical things that makes sense. For someone writing about some particular topic(s) this is a navigation anti-pattern. It doesn't matter if the latest post on Topic A was posted on Monday. As a reader interested in Topic A you want all of the posts on it. Most blog-like sites make this challenging to find or don't expose it.

I don't really like "just search" as a replacement for categorical organization because most search sucks anymore. That might have been ok for Old Google, before the DoubleClicking, but now it's just another navigation anti-pattern.

Interestingly, had Web 2.0 concepts been implemented a bit better by CMSes, navigation of sites could be ably handled by user agents. A site with an OPML/Sitemap XML pointed to with an "alternative" meta tag could let a user agent (or service) build nice navigation for sites automatically no matter how the blog-like CMS organized the HTML.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#200

Post by kevstev »

alphachloride wrote: post #193
kevstev wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really that obscure these days? 1. Have a computer in your house open exposed to the internet on port 80- port forward on your router. 2. Run an http server on that box. Apache is a reasonable choice but there are probably easier pieces of software out there to set up. 2a. Create an index.html or equivalent default page name and put some html in it even if it's just hello world- it can even be in plain text. 3.…

To be fair, this is not a 101. Exposing port 80, figuring out a static external IP, or setting up DDNS, and https all need more hand-holding I think.

If I was talking to my mom sure. But were talking on HN here, clicking around your routers web UI shouldn't be too difficult for anyone here to figure out. And honestly if you can't figure that out you shouldn't be exposing your stuff to the internet anyway, you will become a part of a botnet in short order.

Setting up Apache properly is a much bigger PITA for anything other than a static html use IMHO.

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