I could only get AOL in my town back in 1995 or so. Back then you had to pay… by the hour? The minute? Something like that. And AOL wasn’t a 24 hour service, it would shut down each night and kick everyone off.
Bullshit. The technology WAS better.
Text communication took like, 28 Mb of RAM and was blazing fast, and a single chat application like Pidgin could interoperate with ALL of them.
❤️
How accessable was the old internet for visually impaired people?
While I appreciate the heavy handed strawman argument, it was entirely possible to make the old internet more accessible to those with disabilities WITHOUT making the technology worse in every single other way.
Mixed and depending on the year. Hardware was available, (braile and speech syth) but it was expensive as hell. There was a bit of a crisis when we went from dos to windows. None of the early GUI supported any of the hardware. In 95 you could use JAWS screen reader. Navigator 4 and IE5 were shit for a while until they started supporting it. Graphic images were still a problem, even after ALT tags became available, trying to get content makers to use them was a fight.
To say nothing of Flash. Sighted navigation was nontrivial.
oh god yes, flash and shockwave were awful. When my company used flash they also put text-only versions of the site up behind the scenes, but we were in the minority
ASL?
30s/Yes Please/Hopefully your bedroom
26/Heli/Iranian airspace
Wanna meet? Send coordinates
19/f/definitely not Tehran
What is this talk, like you cannot be offline anymore? You can still put the phone down. You can turn off the message sounds, and check them in the evening, or tomorrow. Is someone forcing you on gunpoint, to constantly browse instagram, youtube, lemmy or something? But but- no. Life requires making choices, and being online constantly is a thing, you have accepted to do, if you are unhappy with it, stop doing it. If you have an addiction, you can fight against that, you do not need to just accept it.
It’s not that you can’t, but the social norms that filled that time have been replaced by short-form media.
If you want to put down your phone, there’s nothing wrong with that. But you’re just going to be sitting there with your thumb up your butt because everyone around you is going to have their nose in their phone.
That is part of the choice, too, yeah. But it is the question: are you happier constantly online and available, or would being more offline make you feel better? I think everyone should at least try for a while. If you (you in a general sense here) cannot spend a day, without checking your inbox (I guess I have to add, unrelated to work), or scrolling instagram, or the news, or youtube… you have a serious addiction. Is it worth it, to constantly take part in the addiction, just because others have it too?
Personally I am mostly available only via phone calls, if I am not sitting on computer. If it is urgent, they have to call me, otherwise it can wait until I remember to check the messages. That might take a while, but people get used to it.
Im unfortunately not your target audience, Intro verted in person to a fault, i’m relatively happy with the state of affairs. But you are absolutely right with many if not most people
If you have an employer who doesn’t respect down time then yeah, you have the metaphorical gun of poverty pointed at your head. Boss called you at 10:30 PM to fix the slides on the Henderson presentation but you didn’t answer because you were sleeping, your phone was in sleep mode and didn’t ring. George did answer and started working on it all night. George will be in the room when the presentation happens, you won’t be.
I hate that this is true, I wish I could disconnect from the office like my parents did but if I’m not available whenever my Boss wants me, it’s the unemployment line. It sucks, I hate it. It should be different, it should be illegal but this is reality and the reality is my Boss holds most of the power in our professional relationship.
If you are on call, that does not require you to do anything else on the phone, though. You could even have just a dummy phone, so they can still call and text you - most people do not have to work 24/7 on their smart phone (or computer for that matter). Not being constantly online does not have to mean you have to return to pre-modern times.
everybody knows its the nostalgia for GEOCITIES AESTHETIC
-Under Construction-
Tbh the indieweb and fediverse have me feeling this way these days. I look forward to getting home and checking my forums and messages, just like I used to after school.
Do you have any recommendations for good forums?
Search your hobbies, there are tons that are still around and busy. Some that i like to visit are grassrootsmotorsports.com and hobby-machinest.com, but you can just search for “%hobby% forum” and you’ll probably find something decent.
Doomworld is great if you like doom.
Other than that, indie web stuff can be cool, like 32bit cafe, and I think melonland? Status cafe forum is also worth a check once in a while.
Tbh it depends what I’m into at the time. Usually some hobby forum and a discourse for a bunch of friends + friends of friends who met on the phpbbs like 25 years ago lol.
back when using your real name on social media was idiotic
Still is
My mom then: don’t put any personal information on the internet!
My mom now: I just need to put my social security, credit card info, and full street address and I can see which Seinfeld character I’m most like!
Also the Internet wasn’t crapped up with every moron imaginable that could pick up a phone. There was a minimum barrier to entry; you needed a computer and to have at least average intelligence to figure out how to use it.
This is the right answer. Also the internet hadn’t been overtaken by big companies and bots. And law makers was just starting to understand what it was, so it wasn’t censored left and right. It really was a magical time.
We’re still living in the Eternal September. It used to be that there was a certain etiquette to being online. Don’t ask a question someone else already asked, don’t pretend to be an authority on something you’re not, and so on. Then September 1993 happened. Suddenly there was a much bigger new cohort of internet users who needed to assimilate to the culture. It was an endless cohort of people who didn’t know how to behave. October came around more new user, November, December were the same. The change didn’t happen quickly. It took decades but it started then.
lol I’ve been perpetually online from the beginningish.
People used to have social lives and meet and make friends and go out before apps or broadband. In the dialup days the internet was an addition to an already completed life. Facebook and iPhone was where things started to go to shit. Suddenly everyone was permanently online instead of just the cool people. And their brains all went to mush and they forgot how to relate to other people and have a life.
some things about AIM are better. on discord, you express yourself with a monthly fee and now the member list is full of distracting animations. on AIM (and myspace), you had to learn some HTML to format the song lyrics in your bio just right.
AIM also had built in file sharing.
Wow I completely forgot about this and now I’m awash in a sea of nostalgia. We used to just send each other mp3s over AIM and it was so chill. “Hey check out this song I’m listening to” “OK cool thanks” like it was no big deal. Ahhh
It was even better than sending a file, though. You could just point the settings to the folder you wanted to share and anyone on your buddies list could browse the shared folder and download what they wanted if you were online.
AOL hired the Winamp guys and they immediately pioneered the Gnutella firesharing system. It was available for less than a day before AOL corporate went “Oh shit” and tried clawing it back. Too late.
You pay a monthly fee? Mine’s free. You do Nitro or something?
That’s not it at all. The internet used to be a multitude of small sites. A true bazaar made by individuals, visited by individuals in their web browsers.
Now it is all the 5 biggest platforms trapping users in their apps and doing their best to wall everything off.
Bring on NomadNet!!!
or Gemini Protocol,
They’re both great retro, but sadly they’re largely missing interesting content ;(
See, when you open the front (web) page for the Gemini protocol, it looks like an actual human wrote that. When you do the same for NomadNet, it looks like (and with your computer fans sounds like) an investor cash grab. That’s probably why I don’t recall about the latter despite researching adjacent tech a lot before.
https://unsigned.io/rnode_bootstrap_console/s_nn.html
nomadnet is a application that’s a subnet of reticulum
reticulum provides the mesh and ssl transport, nomadnet is a hosting platform built on it. no cash involved.
i think the easiest path to trying out nomad is liam cottle’s (meshtastic guy) meshchat https://github.com/liamcottle/reticulum-meshchat he added support for nomad net
Cool.
Actually, I have heard of it, here to be precise. I guess the front page threw me off so bad that my brain filtered it out like it never happened.
No, it’s because it wasn’t full of bots and shitty content created solely for the purpose of generating clicks. People created content to have fan and share their passion, not because they wanted to be a professional influencer.
Really, because I’m more nostalgic for having hope for the future.
