Using the internet like it's 1999

I don't know if I'm crazy but I think social media is pretty okay at the like, core building and enhancing social networks thing.

Instagram is probably my most used one these days and I love seeing my friend's stories and I don't think I've parsed more than a handful of ads in the last 2 or 3 years that I've been an active user, probably a few tens of hours wasted with dumb reels, not a bad cost at all imo. I have probably 400 irl people and 200 internet accounts I follow. It doesn't have the charm and honesty of navigating a webring or whatever, but the friction is so low so I get to see a lot of stuff my friends, acquaintances and especially just people i'm peripherally in community with share that I probably wouldn't otherwise.

I miss the old internet for sure, but I'm not convinced the current situation is as horrible as people say.

so true, re: patience

I was just thinking back the other day about BBS days and how frustrating a busy signal could be, or connection time limits, etc.

> On your router, you can and should setup blocklists for various malicious and nefarious domains, advertisements, adult content, etc. This is not “1999-esque” in practice, but is a requirement for the modern web.

I worked on a Geocities archive restoration. There was a boat load of porn (including illegal porn), malicious domains, spamvertising, malware, predators, political extremists, etc on the 1999 web, and you can find all of it within the raw Geocities archive that was made before it shut down. The idea that the old web was some kind of pure place of innocence is a weird and factually inaccurate take. If anything, the late 90s web was more dark than it is now, perhaps in part because nobody had any idea of how to police anything on it and things like PhotoDNA didn't exist yet.

If anything, my work on 90s site archival has taught me that the web has always been a place with a lot of dark places, and the narrative that the old web was some sort of pure innocent place that became evil is not matched by evidence.

It's just as plausible to me that the general "misbehavior" of humans on the internet hasn't changed all that much, but that we have, frankly, adopted a more puritanical and intolerant approach towards it. Nobody was talking about getting rid of Section 230, carding people for 18+ before they could use IRC (or install an operating system, what the actual fuck is wrong with you California), and Congress wasn't dragging evil Geocities CEO David Bohnett into grilling sessions where they were accusing him of hooking kids on digital cigarettes. Perhaps it would be wise to have a little nostalgia for some of that too.

Yeah, it's quite sad where we landed. Circa 2004-2006 while the internet was mostly open and accessible I mentally grouped "the internet" into two buckets. There was the real web plus usenet plus email and then there was "facebook" with its weird garden wall and exclusive invites or some such shit. I didn't think of facebook as being "on the web" even though they used the http protocol. It was highly unusual then to have any web content behind a registration wall.

So hardly anyone considered facebook to be a part of "the web". It was its own weird duck. Twenty years later and most people only frequent this "weird" part of the internet - this limited ensemble of paid and unpaid walled gardens.

Hey Kyle! Neocities is great