The few years before social media and the iPhone.

I used to love doing web design. Was perfect career for me, a mix of creativity and coding. Websites then were art, creative, took risks. Then cms became standard, sites all looking the same. Sites are more user-friendly now, but I miss the wild, weird internet of its early days.

Before the questionable fake content and the pollution of websites by intrusive ads.

I really got into the Internet in the mid-00’s and I would say the early days of YouTube, Digg, and most things still being pre-social media with forums being widespread was my favorite era. However, my second favorite era is going on right now. I always wished open source services would be more popular and even back then there were issues with corporate controlled services screwing over their users (see the Digg Migration). I’m so glad to see the Fediverse finally taking off, with self hosting options and no centralized entity who can shut the whole thing down at the flick of a switch. Leaving Twitter and Reddit behind has been very refreshing.

Anywhere from the 90s to the mid to late 2000s because that’s when you saw the most personal websites being made and what I would consider the golden era of Newgrounds. Now, I wasn’t able to experience the personal websites of the 90s, but through various means I’ve seen some really cool personal websites from back then.

The days before everything became enshittiffied, before 6 or 7 giant corps took over, the days before social media became a cesspit of slanging matches & false lifestyles, the days when search engines worked & displayed what you searched for not what they think you want to see, the days before shitty algorithms clogged your feeds up endlessly with shit that you searched for once during a conversation you had with someone at work, the days where news sites showed news headlines not bullshit clickbait lies, the days before evil corps tracked every move you make, the days before you were forced to have a shitty app for everything.

The days when going online was fun & interesting. I hope Lemmy continues to bring back some of that fun!

It was obviously when Homestar Runner was at his peak (the character himself, the webseries named after him, and the website it’s hosted in all at the same time). This guy literally changed the accents of some people.

Livejournal in the late 90s-early 2000s. God I made such great lifelong friends there. Nowhere else has had that level of intimacy.

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Well, have a nap, then FIRE ZE MISSILES!

I have a lot of nostalgia for the late 90s/early 00s when the internet was still exciting. Videos! Games! Flash! Chats! Piracy! Winamp!

The Fediverse, today.

But no not really. If you are on Tiktok or shit like that suddenly there are actually people living close to you. Connecting to people you can actually meet is important.

For me, it was the 90s, before the entire landscape got consumed by giant corporations. I know it wasn’t all roses back then, but it felt like you could find anything online, and it opened up a whole new world.

Remember when almost every new web site had a guestbook and would sometimes let you sign up for an email address using their domain? I had a [username]@britneyspears.com email address for a while.

First decade of google. After that all censorship and wokeness broke loose.