I've been exploring the fediverse and subbing and posting all over the damn place. Realizing lemmy can federate with kbin blew my mind. Not to mention the possibility of turning my old laptop into a personal server to host my own instance. Is this what it felt like to discover how the internet worked in the 90s?
Whever anyone asks what the internet used to be like I send them to a little old site called www.homestarrunner.com It's still up after all these years. Truly beautiful.
To try and give context, Homestar Runner was made in Adobe Flash and in its time rectangles were notoriously uncool in web design. Flash sites weren't limited to the rigid structure of a typical webpage, so you would often be mousing over and finding objects to interact with in whatever whimsical shape the designer wanted. Homestar makes lots of use of hovering the mouse, so if you're on mobile you might be missing half of the experience.
On this loading page, the small blue flag is the important part, which takes you to the main page that people remember
This is how we would surf the web back in the 90s! I still remember flying over the earth shredding some world-wide gnar! We would all screech the AOL connecting sound as we swooped majestically through the forums.
I'll never forget the sound of the siren's call as it wafted sweetly over the waves, gently washing over me like a warm blanket of security. That dulcet tone that cried, "You've Got Mail!"
the feeling of community i have among lemmy, kbin and mastodon is something i've never really encountered before. i'm procrastinating at work right now but i've never felt bored.
To a small extent, yes. I kindof felt that when I discovered mastodon 5 years back, but it's still not quite the same. Back then, the internet was a new adventure. Every website was kindof shitty, but they all had their own unique personalities based on who made them. The internet's potential was unknown. The fediverse just feels like more of the same bland social media, but everything is messier and hard to find.
I say that, but Lemmy just makes me realize how much I took reddit for granted. Forums are nice, but it was great to have a place where at least 1/5th of the english speaking population congregated to discuss the issues of our time. I don't think we will get that on the fediverse.
I want to believe in the fediverse, but it REALLY needs to be ironed out and made easier to use.
It’s more akin to the early 2000s to me. Not in the sense of how the tech works but more in the feeling of nothing being “owned” by any one person or entity and things just being…free.
It's more before and after having a GUI web, which wasn't so much a matter of Andreessen inventing it (which happened in like 1994/1995) as it was ISP's switching over from shell accounts for their users so most people could use it (which was more 1997 - 1999 or so.)
Before that most of the social internet was usenet and IRC. Usenet in particular reminded me a lot of what reddit was for a while (especially reddit old) and what I could see the fediverse turning into.
I think new communities are extremely heavy weighted in the trending section. I've not looked at the algorithm for it, but the 2 communities I made were on there immediately after creating them.
Maaaan. The internet used to be a wacky place with all kind of over the top interface concepts. Now it’s all clean text and minimalist design. Far more functional but not nearly as fun or creative.
Laziness too, ain't nobody got time to painstakingly hand-place and align each glittery Blingee graphic on a page while also making sure it's responsive and user-friendly on all viewports. Just throw in the default TailwindCSS styles and forget about it.
It was a wild time. Sadly, I didn't have a mouse that plugged into the keyboard, so it was a lot harder to learn to surf the web initially, but I think my surfing skills became better in the end because of it.
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