1696
old internet
(lemmy.blahaj.zone)
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this post was submitted on 29 May 2025
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Microblog Memes
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A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
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Absolutely miss that old internet.
It had flaws aplenty, but anyone could pick up a “…for dummies” book and cadge together a website. Plenty of free website generators and hosts, too. All those personal pages, family pages, “Hello World!” pages, personal hobbies and small businesses…. Then of course the newsgroups, freeware apps and tools from generous people filling in the gaps in available software…yeah. It was completely unpolished, wild, and unpredictable…but it was awesome, available, and far more egalitarian.
I do miss it, the zeitgeist anyway. Sure. Modern speeds and frontends are nice, but everyday people are priced out and corralled, monetized and stalked. We’ve become the coppertops of The Matrix; exploited, mined, and willingly, in some cases, enslaved.
It is easier than it's ever been to host your own website. You could have what most personal websites were like in the 00s without ever once coming out of the free tier in Azure. Domains are still gonna cost you, but actual hosting is pennies.
Yes, I don’t disagree that it’s not hard, especially with all the free templates available. Today, however, the odds of anyone ever randomly finding your personal self-hosted website are essentially zero. You don’t have any SEO, no adspace to earn higher search engine priority, nothing. Someone would have to specifically search for you/your site to find you. That’s unlike the early web where your site might randomly show up in a search for whatever hobby/business/interest that you might have included in site text or “about” in the HTML.