I haven't checked it out personally, but this is my impression of all of the webs that aren't the world wide web. Like the meshtastics, the new freenet, some web 3.0

It being harder to join has the effect of their being a smaller more engaged user base. Less likely that there will be pressure from corporate interests, more likely that every user has a vested interest in both production and consumption.

edit: And of course, you'll see the same in dedicated niche forms and spaces like HAM radio. I imagine the folks TXing EME have a particular flavor that is well maintained.

"Things used to be so good" is mostly rose-tinted glasses. Allow me to switch to asshole mode for a minute:

What exactly WAS the "old web" anyway?

100 half-baked sites hosted on Geocities, Yahoo, about pointless stuff, covered with gif-vomit that looked like epilepsy simulators?

Honest, serious question: What actually was of objective substance on the old internet that's nowhere to be found now?

You can find random pointless stuff now too, just that except Geocities/Yahoo it's Intsagram/TikTok/Twitter etc.

If you mean self-hosted websites, they're still here, and nothing's stopped you from creating your own.

If you loved all the Flash toons on Newgrounds etc there's unironically a lot more shorts and animations on YouTube now, if you but search for them (I suggest Weebl, David Firth, Sechi, to start with, and let the algorithm soak up the weirdness)

Just as the "internet" supplanted newspapers, magazines (gosh those classic gaming mags), and broadcast television for many people,

and how the newspapers replaced the town criers before them,

why shouldn't the "internet" be supplanted by a more accessible medium?

There's so much crap on the "old" and "middle age" internet: ads, scams, anal mods, trolls, low-effort content, that could be bypassed by just asking AI about something and make better use of your limited mortal lifetime.

That’s the Cretaceous web. I miss it fondly.

Web Design Museum: Search Engines https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/exhibitions/search-engines-i...

Yeah, I'd say "old web" is early '90s up through about mid-2000s or so. Geocities, Tripod, Angelfire, lots of standalone web forums, the early blogosphere, no social media, etc.

‘09-‘14 is hilariously not the “old web.” With that said, those of us who participated in what I consider the “old web” are likely “old” now, so… shrug?

Two of my favorite sites [0][1] still online—Lurkers Guide to Babylon 5 and ex-astris-scientia—were started in ‘92 and ‘98 respectively.

Elegant content for a more civilized age.

[0] http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/

[1] https://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/

I've just gotten used to this at this point. My first time on the web was somewhere around 1995 I think, although my first time on the Internet was earlier (it was a proxy through some ancient BBS and I'm pretty sure it was using gopher). Even though I was just a kid back then, clearly that makes me old now.

I’m old and it’s definitely not the old web. I consider the old web to be when PNGs were sliced with Fireworks and laid out in tables.

2009-2014 is Web 2.0, back when people still thought social media was a good idea.

For me the old web is when people still had homepages. When those went away, the old web died.

Right? When I think of the old web I think of my Xena and X-Files fan sites on Geocities circa 1997

It was still a significantly different era than today. Let’s call it Middle Web. Maybe Late Middle Web.

+1 for this

I'd consider the facebook and mega era to be relatively new, the "old web" for me would be the one without centralization around a few giants, the era of random phpbb forums, private websites with "this site is under construction" banners and internet directories to find stuff.

I remember the naive implication/expectation that a URL would be permanent. That once a file is identified by its URL, you could bookmark it and it would always be there. And absolute worst case, if someone really, really, really had to change a file's URL, they would politely return 301 Moved Permanently, and feel very bad about it.

Now people don't give a shit about URLs. Webmasters casually move files around all the time because they feel like it, and if links get broken, who cares, that's the referring site's problem! Their beautiful file hierarchy is more important than the web staying connected!

No, that's just embarrassing stuff. That stays on the web forever.

I mean, it does usually, just not always in its original location.

It seemed reasonable, because keeping things up on the internet was becoming cheaper. We failed to see that capitalism would even demand payment for such trivial things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brigadoon

  The plot features two American men who stumble upon Brigadoon, a mysterious Scottish village that appears for only one day every 100 years; one man soon falls in love with a young woman from Brigadoon. The show's song "Almost Like Being in Love" subsequently became a standard.

Seriously. 2009 is several years after everyone was already saying “web 2.0”! That is nowhere near the “old web”.

The old web doesn't necessarily mean the oldest web. 12-17 years ago was very much an older fairly different era of the web that's worth analyzing even if it's on the younger side of the old web. I can definitively sympathize with your reaction though, it doesn't feel like that era was that long ago yet.

I vaguely recall those, but they were more for normies trying to get online. For me the old web is what I saw when I logged into my university gopher server and saw the advertisement for something called the World Wide Web which I could browse via lynx. Soon enough I got a PPP connection and then Mosaic/Netscape 1.0. However everything after javascript shipped (let alone CSS) is new new new. I'd almost go as far as saying if it doesn't have a tilde in the URL it's not old web... almost...

It's the great irony of digital media. Copying data is accurate to the bit and is preserved "as-is", but in practice, it requires someone to maintain servers, to care about it. To separate out what is worth preserving.

We hot-linked to all those image hosts because we couldn't imagine them disappearing.

Archive.org had incredible foresight and if it didn't already exist, I'd call such a project a pipe dream.

The technology is still in its infancy unfortunately, so there's no way the web could have been based on it, but I think content-addressing is the long-term play. If I click a link, there are some cases where I want the server to respond with a fresh response just for me (e.g. a website showing the weather). But often I just want whatever content was linked to (e.g. a webpage explaining a math content). In the latter case, it would be nice if the link had a hash of the content in it, and 3rd parties could host copies to keep the link working even if the original operator stopped existing.

> Webpages dying is probably one of the biggest design flaws of the original web.

Let me introduce you to the alternatives: print media, film, stone engravings. That stuff tends to get burned and shattered and it takes FOREVER to make copies.

I'm being cheeky but I don't know what design change you could possible make to the web to make webpages not die.

It's pretty difficult to avoid without very significant tradeoffs, though. The closest is content-addressable peer-to-peer networks, but these still rely on someone keeping the information around, and they struggle to scale anywhere near as much.

> Webpages dying is probably one of the biggest design flaws of the original web.

I'd say it's one of the biggest design flaws of the current web, what with more and more content hidden behind paywalls, increasingly restricted WAFs, and rendered client-side via convoluted JavaScript.

Archiving and mirroring of old-style websites, delivered as static HTML, is simple and straightforward. 20 years from now, most web content from ~1996 to ~2015 will still be accessible, but much of today's web content probably won't.

> The blog mentions "0.mk's revenue did not cover hosting" but then goes on to implement expensive AI integration.

The article doesn't seem to describe the cost of the AI solution. It does imply that it is lower than the cost of maintaining and supporting their service manually.

How did you managed to obtain that domain? Usually single digit or letter domains are “reserved”.

> or enjoy the fruits of modern design.

Like web pages that load slower with high speed fiber than the old web did on 56k and ISDN connections?