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For me, right now. I’m having a blast figuring out how to self host all the enshittified services that I’m closing off access to.
Catch 22 really, I’m enjoying it because I’m learning so much, so fast but probably shouldn’t have to and it’s not feasible for most I realize.
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.
I was not expecting anyone to say the TikTok era is the best of the internet. Each to their own I guess, you’re wrong though
What? Everyone is on Tiktok, which is not the case with the Fediverse. The platform and lots of content suck, but it can also be valuable (short videos from things happening without press censorship and delay). The fediverse is still tiny in comparison and doesnt cover these things, like looking for restaurant reviews next door
Before the web when it was all ad free and just nerds was pretty cool. The email list / Forum era was pretty good.
The best era was 1993. I’d spend maybe 1 hour a day and read every new thing there was to read on the web.
Things went quickly wrong after you couldn’t read every webpage update before new updates. The www was no longer human comprehensible.
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.
I want my ICQ and my IRCs and my “you’ve got mail” and my horrible screeching that means I will be online soon back.
I’m not even kidding. Give me back my 90s internet.
I keep wanting to go back to usenet, but I hate that it’s not included by my ISP anymore
http://www.eternal-september.org/
free access to text froups
WHOA! Thank you so much!
Go play HYPNOSPACE OUTLAW right now, if you haven’t. Trust me.
The best era is the first 5 years you experience it. That’s when all the magic happens. Recapturing that level of awe wonder and pure joy is hard after you become a veteran.
closely followed by the period right before it you didn’t experience, but everyone around you is nostalgiajacking to…
The infancy of YouTube and Twitch. Everyone made content for fun, pretty much no one was nude or in a hot tub, monetization didn’t censor everything.
It was nice 🙂👍
Early YouTube and twitch, early reddit, pre-instagram. That was a good time.
Gah, I miss those days. I had a personal video on YouTube from the early days. Something or another flagged it — probably the audio I used for the cheap “credits” I put in — and the video went away.
More recently, grandmas birthday video. It got taken down a year later, likely because I had short, edited clips of Peanuts included. 🙄
Oh, and you mean Justin.tv.
Best era of the Internet was before the DMCA. At the time it passed I knew it would kill a lot of my favorite things about the Internet and I sadly wasn’t wrong
What’s DMCA?
Digital millennium copyright act. It effectively moved the burden of proof for copyright infringement from the copyright owner to the accused, short-circuiting the existing IP laws, among other things.
It is where much of the drama around copyright online stems from. It’s used as a way to quickly stifle anything someone posts that’s something you don’t like.
It made circumventing DRM itself illegal, even if you’re not breaking copyright by doing so (even if it’s for your own research or backups).
The few years when Google was fully usable.
Google is so useless these days. It’s very common that my searches get actually zero results now. Like, what the fuck happened? Google used to identify its quality by how many hundreds of pages of (admittedly mostly useless) results it could return for each search. Now, when I do get results, it’s about a 3 to 4 ratio of useless ads to actual content.
I have the Google rewards app that occasionally asks me questions about where I’ve been / what I’ve bought for which it will pay me a few nickels each. The other day it asked me questions about my use of ChatGPT and the relative trust I had for the answers given by the language model to my trust of the results from a Google search. The last question was an essay question asking me why I thought ChatGPT was better for the specific application I was using it for. Google paid me a whole goddamn dollar for telling it, in many colorful words, that I understood the tool I needed for my question wasn’t an ad generator so obviously I didn’t use Google.
Search engines no longer exist. There are only content recommendation engines now.
When AltaVista was actually good was another highlight. Babel Fish was great for its time.
Personally, for me, it was up until about 2008ish. YouTube and blogging existed but it was all still mostly amateurs having fun. There weren’t really paywalls and the iPhone was still so new that you didn’t assume someone else had a smartphone. My circle of friends mostly had blackberries so we could chat/email with friends and get information (like news headlines or sports scores or even directions) but going fully online was still a deliberate thing you did on a computer. Bosses, being older, still assumed you were unreachable after work hours.
Basically, it was the era right before the internet became a requirement to function in society but it still had lots of fun content.
The 2000s for sure - from early online games and MMORPGs to a lot of forums, when Slashdot and Reddit were good, the start of Wikipedia, etc.
There was more optimism around everyone communicating with eachother internationally, and fostering communities. Nowadays it feels everything is dominated by a few big monopolies, and there’s a lot more censorship.
The early 2000’s. When I clicked the chat button on ICQ that connected me with a stranger anywhere in the world, that blew my mind as a kid.
I have a lot of nostalgia for the late 90s/early 00s when the internet was still exciting. Videos! Games! Flash! Chats! Piracy! Winamp!
It really whips the llama’s ass.
Viruses…viruses everywhere. And god damn we loved every second of it
Oh damn that virus that said ‘free cupholder’ and it opened your cd thing.
It was wild. An MP3 could be music, porn or it eats up your whole hard drive.
I remember spending 3 whole days downloading LotR: Two Towers (a huge feat as I had to finesse the entire household to not pick up the phone for those three days), only to end up with an audio-only file and a shit ton of viruses. Glorious memories
When e-mail addresses required “!” separators.
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.
