Hello, World!

Welcome. This is "old man shouts at cloud" territory. Consider yourself warned...

Gentlemen, a short view back to the past

I am old enough to remember a time when the internet was fun. A time when it consisted of more than four main websites that everyone went to.

As a young-ish child, in the year of our lord, circa 1999, getting on the internet for the first time was wild.

Granted that it took us hours to get going because no-one had a clue how to setup the Windows 98 PC, and then how to connect said pc to the modem, and then complete the circuit to the telephone line.

Eventually, with sheer will and determination, that little box screamed down the telephone line. Life would never be the same again.

Google was not yet the massive beast that it is today. Instead, in our family, we had yahoo set up as our search engine of choice. This was my portal into the vast and uncharted seas.

What I do remember though, that is before Myspace and Bebo really took a boot into the line of dominoes that lead us to where we are today, the internet was full of personality.

Yes, it was weird a lot of the time. Disturbingly gory in places if you knew where to look, and mostly pr0n. I guess it still is? But what it was also, was littered with little personal sites.

These little sites were usually just personal home pages that might say a bit about who they are, what they do, things they like, and maybe, if you were lucky, a photo of their pet.

Almost 100% of the time they had a visitor counter and a guest book. This was before bots were a thing ruining our lives. Popups that spawned in different windows were a thing back then through. They were rough.

Angelfire, geocities, I salute you - O7.

Or maybe this is all nostalgia brain...

Being online at the turn of the millennium

You could be yourself, or, more commonly, go by an avatar that you took from place to place. Yes, some use that avatar to hide behind and do harm, but as someone who is generally shy IRL and tend to listen rather than talk in group situations, there was always something freeing about it.

This, then, is why you are here. Under my moniker I have decided to bring back a little of the old way. Yes, I do not have a visitor counter. I do not have a guest book. I do not have blinking gifs of pages under construction. I do not have a colour scheme so horrid that it seared into your retinas. But I do have hope.

Web 3.0 - corporate edition

I think we have hit the limits of bullshit that we are prepared to put up with. More movie and TV streaming services than there are stars in the sky. Not actually owning anything should you buy a digital movie, book, album. Having the algorithm shovel feed us confirmation bias until we believe that the whole world thinks like we do.

The next thing is likely AI prompts replacing the classic Google search box. I would be lying if I said that I am not guilty of doing that. Next time you actually run a regular search, look at how it's a minefield of internet enshitification:

  • sponsored ads
  • results from random ad filled sites
  • cookie popups that force you to accept or pay
  • notification prompts
  • newsletter signup boxes.
  • hijacking the back button to show you more articles you might be interested in.

If you are lucky, then just maybe, somewhere between one third and half way down the page you would find the thing you were actually looking for.

Some hope

There are people who are trying to claw back some of what we used to have. Federated social networks like mastodon, bluesky, lemmy, piefed and so on give me hope.

There is a boom in physical media again, people wanting to actually own what they pay for. I'm not here for the cassette revival, nor the CD, but I do yearn for ZIP discs again. I also hope this continues onto film and TV too, but again, forgo the tape based media - lets not go back to VHS.

I also have seen small web communities pop up and do the classic thing of linking to each others' sites. Not to game search but in the spirit of collaboration to promote each other.

We will never go back to the old days, we have moved on. What will be, will be new. It will be both good and bad. Always has been.

I just hope that it at least has some personality.

Fin.

NB: This is still a Work in Progress to that end