My reaction to this post
omg its the same kid! its him hes a skateboarding netrunner now
Honestly I just jumped to Lemmy after dndmemes sent me this way and it feels like I’m delving into early internet forums back in the day, fresh and new and full of excitement for the future
I know exactly what you mean. Fresh optimism. For fun, not for money or algorithms.
Fresh optimism for the communities and the new apps all being furiously worked on right now. I’ve got Memmy, Mlem, and Voyager all installed currently and watching the rapid development of each is a hell of a lot more interesting than the one Reddit app that’s been dogshit since they bought it and stuffed it full of ads and is only getting worse.
I have like 5 android apps installed waiting until I’m reunited with my beloved [email protected]
I should just probably try them all but do you have a preferred one so far? Currently using Memmy but honestly I finally dove back into something like this after a proper year without Reddit, to see how this community is doing and to see what the vibe is like.
Remember when forums would let you put unsanitized HTML in your signature and people exploited it to flood them with pop ups and redirects? Lemmy’s bringing that back, too!
Came for the decentralization, stayed for the nonconsensual lemon party redirects.
Lemmy DID support HTML and iframes sometime ago. The devs scrapped it for security reasons and I hear they are planning to bring it back in future after making sure it is secure enough to use.
I was on a forum looking for something once and someone had a flash game as their sig. It was like Portal The Flash Version but the gun was on a rail. And the dimensions of the flash viewport were like a typical sig, so it was pretty interesting just to play a game in such a strange aspect ratio. Not really relevant to anything but I haven’t thought of that in a really long time.
This is a Good Joke
put an old man face on that kid and you’ve nailed it
I think fediverse users are on average much older than other social medias. I often see polls on mastodon and the most prominent groups are very often the 35-45 year olds. I feel like im in the minority of my age (19) caring about free software and it makes me sad that nowadays tech has to be so dumbed down because even the young can’t use computers just like my grand parents. It’s crazy how my classes most people only knew how to open instagram, but they had no clue how to save a word document
You might be right. I’m new here but so far I’m amused and surprised by the amount of ‘classic’ memes going around.
I think for many of us in the mid 30s early 40s it boils down to having experienced a version of the Internet where content was king, not personality. Anyone could get their website out there but it was what you put in it that mattered, not who put it there (unless you were an actual celebrity). You could bump into all sorts of new information just by clicking from link to link. Then we saw and experienced first hand the rise of the search algorithms, the echo chambers, click bait and the cult to fluff that social media became pretty much since the beginning.
The Internet we have now is certainly shinnier but only the way plastic is. When I look at the information being churned out and that gets passed around more often I can only think about it in terms of pollution. The equivalent of styrofoam pellets being manufactured for single immediate use that cover the information sphere and that just end up making people’s life worse in the long term. Twitter, Meta and the like (none holds a candle to TikTok though) are no different from the factories that have been spilling poison down the drain for decades. The latter pollute our physical space, the first pollute our emotional an mental environments.
I honestly don’t think I’m being a grumpy old fart (though I am). This is the reason I preferred reddit a while ago and why I now came here. It sort of feels like those days when ‘browsing’ was about stepping out of your own world experience and into completely different ones.
End of rant. Thanks if you made it here. :)
unless you were an actual celebrity
That didn’t matter, because without video there was no easy way to prove it.
Exactly.
May the gods of the internet bless and watch over you
Honestly, I think we have better content nowadays, but said content is harder and harder to find. At the same time, said content probably gets more and more viewership as well.
I feel like if I was born in the 90s, I would’ve killed to have content like Kurtzgesagt or LinusTechTips or Wendover or NileRed or Adam Ragusea etc etc. Although you had your Bill Nyes and Mythbusters and whatnot, there couldn’t have been a way to make high-quality content without the resources and reach that a platform like YouTube offers today.
Yes Geocities web rings with rotating skulls was the content king!
Or maybe people rapping in AOL chat rooms
Sure, yeah trash is trash. If that’s how far you wanted to go you’d have plenty of it. But the web didn’t necessarily trend towards it. Plenty of other spaces where to go. Later, in the mid-late 2000s marketing saw how eagerly people swallowed trash and so the race to the bottom took speed. Most of the web today is aimed at the lowest common denominator. The rotating skullz are but the grand-daddies of the Tiks and the Toks IMO.
You’re not alone. Most people I know don’t even sort their files into directories anymore, they just search for it (particularly in cloud storages like Google Drive).
In fact, when I took the introductory computer engineering course at my HS, the teacher made everyone sort their Google Drive files as an assignment.
I just found out that people use search on thier computers to find files and have no idea where anything is located. It hurts just thinking about it.
And paradoxically they refuse to use search engines to find anything on the Internet.
Even worse that Windows search is slow as hell, can’t imagine the time wasted
totalcommander.exe for the win!
How do they find anything on the internet without using a search engine? (I used to love Stumble Upon!)
I completely lost control of my folder structure after keeping all my old backups (before i had a network storage) on HDDs and later copying them over as Backup-Pc-X, Backup-Pc-Y, etc. I should clean up since years. But hey, so far the search worked :D
That I can understand. I have a folder on desktop I dump everything into that’s loose to sweep under the rug. Desktop23. Desktop22, etc. And these folders go back years on my external drive. They will not be organized ever.
But I have the feeling you understand where things are supposed to go. The people I’m talking about have zero idea what’s in thier computer.
I have been ill this year and as I am pretty limited in what I can do, I am finally sorting stuff properly. It is just that I usually don’t delete anything. Every time I change a device I dump stuff based on file type on folders either on cloud, device or external HDD thinking I will come back to it. Instead, I never come back. And because of my work, a bunch of stuff is pretty depressive so sorting a decade of files and images I would want to forget feels impossible. But I am making a dent.
I think there are a lot of computer illiterate people I most generations but there seems to be an overlap of late gen x/early millennial thst kind of had to learn how computers and the internet worked if they wanted to use them as tech wasn’t as easy to use. Plus anyone older than that who used computers where more often considered nerds.
These days more and more people don’t even have a computer and just do everything through their phones.
but there seems to be an overlap of late gen x/early millennial thst kind of had to learn how computers and the internet worked if they wanted to use them…
That’s exactly what happened. It’s like how my grandfather knows absolutely everything about cars, he had to work on his if he wanted to use it.
Removed by mod
Trust me bruv, there more hacker youngsters here then you realise.
oh the turntables, back in the 90’s the stereotype was the 10 year old showing the 60 year old how to use the “computator”, nowadays maybe it’s the 60 year old showing the 10 year old there are open source alternatives for image editing apps, office apps, and most things with a tappable tablet interface.
The 60 year old explaining the beauty of FOSS to a someone that only cares about tiktok and thinks Google is the internet
Don’t forget your dual-wheel, 4D+ mouse!
I wonder if this works under Microsoft ® Windows ®
I would play minecraft with that
Ngl this probably would make it easier to scroll websites without fixed widths, as well as diagrams.
I use shift and the scroll wheel. That’s on Ubuntu though. Not sure about other OSes.
Yeah me too but my mouse kinda sucks and jumps to hyperspeed on a small movement.
Two eyes … Two scroll wheels
Makes sense to me
This image brought to you by the time-period when anything with young people had to have skateboarding, surfing, or roller blading.
It was the law.
Well in this case it’s quite clever since he’s literally surfing the web
Everything is more extreme when you spell it with an x xaseball
I was told it was weird to use the phrase “surfing the web” the other day. I am not even that old.
It beats doomscrolling. Surfs up, dude! 🤟
We need to bring it back. The internet was way note fun during the surfing era.
I’m going online for a bit
??? I’m Gen Z and I use it sometimes, weird according to who?
After Gen Z, do we start over with Gen A?
Kind of. People are calling the next generation after Z Gen Alpha.
But that’s subject to change. They used to call Millennials Gen Y or Mini Boomers.
I thought Gen Y was the generation before millennials? Like millennial parents?
Gen Y eventually got named millennials is how I always heard, but I’m a ditzy millennial so probably wrong
Did you guys know that lemmy is a series of tubes
For th uninitiated:
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=_cZC67wXUTs&t=0
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Good bot
It’s tubular!
Hold on to your butts - we’re gonna surf the web
If my calculations are correct, when this baby hits 88 Kb/s, you’re gonna see some serious shit!
We just completed another cycle, we are back in the 90s
Back in the 90s I was on a kind of famous internet discussion site I’m trouser_mouse (trouser) trouser_mouse, don’t act like you don’t know
And I’m trying to hold onto my past It’s been so long, I don’t think I’m gonna last I guess, I’m just trying to make you understand That I’m more trousers than mouse Or I’m more mouse than trousers
Running in the 90s again
Does it really feel like the old web though? I’m a zoomie (22) and I kinda developed a rose tinted nostalgia for the old web (Windows 98 era) where I didn’t even live in (tbf apparently a lot of zoomers have some nostalgia obsession with some sort of era).
Veteran lads, can Lemmy capture the old web feeling?
Right now, because it’s still growing and developing, Lemmy has this sudo-wild west felling to it. Like anything can happen.
This was how things were in the early days of the internet. With no way to know how things are going to turn out, people are just hanging out. Smaller groups interacting with each other, and just having fun.
It feels like a reboot, or a modern revision of the how things were.
Pseudo make sandwich 😉
Ha! I read, and re-read my post at least 3 times and could not figure out why it felt wrong.
Too much bash and not enough books
As an old YTMND user, this is probably as close as it will ever get to what I experienced back then. I’d say have fun with this while you can, lol.
But they will never know what is like to be under the fear of a cold war and a nuclear attack…oh, wait, shit!
Mr. Putin, bring down this wall!!
Not even close.
It does a bit. Modern internet has walled gardens and constant rage bait. Havent seen it yet here.
The original vibe was one of lack of consolidated info, extremely niche groups, and a lot of self discovery. This is so far beyond anything of that nature I find the comparison straight up weird. The lack of rage harkens back to maybe late 2000s but definitely not the early 90s to win98 vibe.
I think people say it’s got a bit of an old school feeling to it more because it feels a little bit lawless, and new, and experimental - a wild-west with a user base still finding its feet and expanding and figuring out what this place is and what communities will form.
I’ve been kicking around the internet since the 90s so it’s quite a nice feeling, although not quite the same!
Yeah for one we didn’t have up-points on all our posts and comments, and even in more active BBSes, forums, or chat rooms, you rarely had as many people in one “place” at a time. Really your only method of interaction or “reacting” or registering approval/disapproval was through writing something of your own.
And nothing ever went viral, because no one but a bunch of nerds cared about what happened on the internet.
The Internet felt like a brand spanking new wild West back in the 90s like there was so much to discover and explore. You don’t understand the novelty of having all the information at your fingertips immediately. What was that actor’s name in that movie that one time? What was the name of that song with those lyrics? Missed last week’s episode, used to just hope you can catch it on summer reruns, but with internet you could look up whatever you missed.
Lenny right now feels like a wal mart brand replacement for something you had a long time that just broke and you’re still trying to find a long term replacement. It’s got some of the features, a fraction of the content, a bunch of new words to learn, and a lot more bugs, so who knows. It’s just a message board at the end of the day so I’m not sure if it brings anything new to the table like 90’s internet did.
Partially. The main feeling of old is the greater sense of community, even if everyone is a named anonymous. People don’t have to fight for attention around here. If you want to see a better visual representation of mid 90’s internet, check neocities.org
Yeah I’ve already heard about that. I absolutely love those website designs. Each site beautifully represent the creator’s personality, which makes it fun exploring these sites.
Yes and no. It should be a niche forum covering competitive speed fisting but it’s a really bland version of internet 2.0
No, not even close. The web was pretty shit and — get this — nothing you ever did on it counted.
[cries in screeching modem sounds]
Plus there’s not enough dancing baby gifs or under construction signs.
Or screeching primary colors, textured backgrounds, or badly rendered fonts. Or
<blink>and<marquee>.Or
You are visitor number 37 Since two years ago
[Skip Prev] [Prev] [Next] [Skip Next] [Random] [Next 5] [List Sites]
There are several eras of the web.
I think Lemmy feels very much of the “Web 2.0” era, which came about in the mid-to-late naughties. When MySpace and Facebook and blogging were all the rage.
So not the same “old web” era as Windows 98. If that makes sense!
yeah, we’d need more Geosities banner ads and <flash/> html tags to go back to the Macweb1.0/Mosaic era. …Sometimes I still visit zombo.com to feel young again.
The UI is much nicer than way back in the day. It’s a hell of a lot faster, and there are way more people. But the feeling of posting something without having your data collected is bringing me back though.
Yeah that’s totally understandable. I just really love all the old web feeling recapturing neocities sites like these: https://exo.pet/, https://dokode.moe/, https://shishka.neocities.org/shishka/new
Velcro shoes were the best
Old people got em too!
They still make them, or at least they did when I got shoes last a couple years ago.
COOL K1D 1S TH1S YOU
Hard to believe our hover-keyboards used to have wires!
This picture makes me nostalgic for an era I barely remember being alive for.
sorry if i made anyone feel oldAm 65. Old. But don’t feel it. No need to apologize.
The fact that this is true is honestly my favorite part of Lemmy. I love the old school feeling of it being a novelty and a free for all and a work in progress all at once.
