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Resurrect the Old Web

stevedylandev.bearblog.dev

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Re: Resurrect the Old Web

#241

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

azangru wrote: post #223

> 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. It was cozy. No ads, no feeds, no endless videos. Instead it was just people, the whole reason you started in the first place. Now it's just noise and scary addicting and effective algorithms that keep you plugged in for hours on end If people want a mechanism of connecting wi…

Because most people don't know how to do that. Mainstream social media has huge reach and monetisation opportunities, so that's where most people go.

What's needed isn't a nostalgic return to the 90s, blogging and all, but a completely non-corporate internet, probably using a separate set of protocols with novel reader/browser tech - self-hosted and/or distributed and/or torrented, simple enough for anyone to set up a server at home, no ads, no tracking, no corporate hosting or influence of any kind. And no "open source but impossibly complicated for normal people to use."

It doesn't have to be fast, it just has to be available with minimal friction for set-up and content management.

Let ten million private sites bloom and see what happens.

Re: Resurrect the Old Web

#242

Post by glroyal »

BREAKING NEWS: the "Old Web" was far, far more than just blogs and feeds. It was full of bulletin boards and chat systems and listservs and other such "social" software artifacts inherited from BBSes and commercial timesharing systems popular for decades before the World Wide Web was even invented.

Blogging died IMO because its authors felt (and still feel) entitled to compensation for practicing a hobby, and started forcing advertising down their reader's throats as a means to extort them for money.

Re: Resurrect the Old Web

#243

Post by marginalia_nu »

wiether wrote: post #3

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...

A load bearing element of the old web was these hosting sites where you just uploaded your HTML. It became as big as it did because of how easy and accessible it was.

It's really questionable whether any old web revival project could work without someone picking up the torch of the likes of geocities. Thankfully there are such projects, which may or may not shut down at some point, but then someone else can pick up the torch. I doubt anyone put stuff online in the nineties expecting them to be around thirty years later.

Re: Resurrect the Old Web

#244

Post by apprentice7 »

bigiain wrote: post #183
hoherd wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was also visiting pages like pages.small-isp.net/~username and digging through the HTML to see if somebody had

This is the oldest snapshot I can find in archive.org, from 2001. But the page says copyright 1996 at the bottom, and that's more like when I actually published this page: https://web.archive.org/web/20010519112823/http://members.oz... Sadly, or perhaps not, the Shockwave animation has failed to survive the internet geological record. This bit made me grin: N.B. this is an animation, but if you don't have netscape 2…

That link automatically downloads a CDR file.

Re: Resurrect the Old Web

#245

Post by tracker1 »

amatecha wrote: post #193
CapsAdmin wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ads back then were pretty unobjectionable because they were like, a GIF or JPG on a page. It wasn't even until like 1998-1999 or something where they really started being JavaScript-driven from ad delivery shit like DoubleClick and so on. Suddenly I'm reminded of one of the early perpetrators of pop-up ads, X10 Technology[0] which was egregious enough to result in an early internet music artist, Kompressor, releasing…

I still refuse to even consider an X10 product to this day because of those ads.

Re: Resurrect the Old Web

#246

Post by tracker1 »

2THFairy wrote: post #52
reactordev wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

I had ads on one of my sites in the later 90's that drew a fair amount of traffic... it technically was enough to pay for the hosting, but in the end it wasn't making enough money for it to be real income. I removed it just because I wanted to give a better experience.

Re: Resurrect the Old Web

#247

Post by Venn1 »

azemetre wrote: post #228
Venn1 wrote: post #176

I've never been huge into social media or even blogging when that was en vogue, but I did set up a forum on my site a little over a year ago after realising how much of a black hole for technical discussion Discord has become. I use it as an easy way to document any screwball problems I run across when working with hardware and software, and occasionally people pop in and ask questions, so I'm glad I set it up. Somet…

What forum software did you use? I’m thinking about adding a forum to my site for the same reasons you gave. How long did it take before the first user signed up and posted?

I'm using wpForo since it integrates well with my CMS. The first users showed up in the first week, mostly because I directed YouTube questions that required posting error logs and the like to the forums. It has been a good tool for helping people out.

Re: Resurrect the Old Web

#249

Post by alwillis »

toast0 wrote: post #159
alwillis wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 s…

> Apple was still selling the iPhone 3GS at the time, a device with 256Mb of RAM and a 600Mhz 32-bit processor. That's a ton of ram. I recall spending a lot of time on flash websites in the early 2000s in college on the school issued laptop with maybe 64 mb of ram (and I think maybe pentium iii 650mhz so more cpu oomph)

Remember that iOS, unlike desktop operating systems, didn't have virtual memory and could only run one app at a time.

Re: Resurrect the Old Web

#250

Post by alwillis »

GTP wrote: post #205
alwillis wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 s…

Given Steve Jobs' character, there may be another reason behind it: that year, before the decision to stop supporting Flash, Adobe broke their agreement with Apple by releasing Photoshop for PCs before the version for Mac for the first time. This could sound as a conspiracy teory, and I don't know how much evidence we have that this might have been the reason (or one of the reasons) behind the decision. But, given Jo…

> Given Steve Jobs' character, there may be another reason behind it: that year, before the decision to stop supporting Flash

Flash was never supported on iOS; Steve's letter was to confirm Apple wasn't ever going to support Flash on iOS; it remained available on MacOS.

I don't think the Photoshop thing had any affect on supporting Flash on iOS.

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