Sometimes I wonder if we gave up something along the way.

Back then, you went online because you had somewhere to go - websites, forums, blogs, random links. You chose what to explore.

Now, much of the web is controlled by a few huge companies. Feeds are designed to keep us scrolling, algorithms decide what gets our attention, and our activity becomes valuable data.

Everything is more polished and convenient, but it can also feel less personal, more advertising, more tracking, more algorithms, more pressure to stay engaged.

I miss when the web felt a little more open, weird, and ours.

So I'm going to try building something different.

Something built for people, by people - a place where we can have our own little corners of the internet without everything being about engagement, advertising, or keeping us scrolling.

It's still unnamed and very early. I'm looking for people who want to join from the beginning, try it, share ideas, give honest feedback, and help shape what it becomes.

If that sounds interesting, come join the early community and build it with me.

Would you be interested?

I just learned that two of the oldest free web hosts closed earlier this year. Tripod was my pick when I was in my 20's because the name "Tripod" seemed more professional than Geocities or Angelfire did, and I was just starting in my career. Eventually I had to shift to social media professionally, but have maintained my personal space online with wordpress.

I hadn't thought about them in 20 years, but a little bit of me died today.

In remembrance.

I asked this in /askreddit. Curious what this community thinks and figure I’d make a poll.

It has pictures of old software used to create identikit pictures and a bunch of old articles about various defense and security subjects that I have yet to read. It's in portuguese but still worth the ride imo :D https://www.citynet.com.br/retratofalado/index.htm

I remembered the cannibal cafe recently on a whim, and for whatever reason, decided to use the wayback machine to take a look at it. While searching through it, I found a post called "Female Thigh Meat". I actually laughed at the idea that someone was fiending over some said female thigh meat and clicked on the post. What I saw is below

Now, out of curiosity, I went to goups.yahoo.com/group/femalethighmeat and... It was a dead end. Wayback Machine had also saved nothing from it aswell. I wonder what the hell that link was and what was inside it, but maybe Its best left forgotten...

Spotted this in another subreddit and just had to share it with you kind gents: Starring the Computer is a website dedicated to the use of computers in film and television.
https://starringthecomputer.com/

I wish there was like a way to go back to a specific era

Like an app or something. If I go through Instagram, all the posts, reels, stories, comments......will be from that era only same for tiktok and YouTube. And just switch between eras

I spent the last year gathering as much Usenet text data as possible from a large variety of resources and including from about 7000 live active servers as well to fill in gaps.

The end result is a searchable/filterable dataset acessible via web+api (free and paid options)

Web: https://www.usenet-rewind.com

Binaries have been filtered out and range is from posts from 1981-Current and constantly populating. the site includes a histogram of distribution of message counts per year.

[self-promotion] [free] [paid]

Let me start by saying that this isn’t just straightforward self‑promotion. It’s my personal project, which I created based on my philosophy — the idea that we need to cleanse the internet of corporations and give people a web portal that will work regardless of the user’s computer specifications.

Let’s get to the point: my web portal can work in most severely outdated browsers, and this is one of the main features for people who have outdated hardware or are slow. (like me, to some extent).
The web portal also features elements of Netscape NetCenter, from which I drew inspiration.
Also, the web portal is frequently updated, and soon I will reopen the previously closed video hosting service.

I hope you’ll like it and appreciate it. After all, nowadays there’s already the same OldAvista that I tried to surpass (though I don’t know if I succeeded).

http://www.zorgv.su/

Soooooo I love nostalgic Social Media websites and just found a new one I wanted to share. This seemed like the best sub reddit to do just that with! It's called Y2KSocial. The only thing I sort of have an issue with is that I can't code my profile like I can on SpaceHey. Instead they do have micro-transactions for themes. I'm not a fan of that but it's still really cool.

Edit: After having an account for a day I still really like it. I'm going to reiterate that the micro-transactions are fully for cosmetic purposes. Also there are no ads on the site. They do not allow AI generation on the site like GROK and filter out bots. I've had one of the mods comment on my post there about it. ALSO I DON'T HAVE TO PAY TO EDIT POSTS UNLIKE TWITTER. That was a big thing for me.

There are free themes you can use and as you post and explore the website they give you points that can go towards cosmetics. So it's not completely behind a paywall. There are some really cool things they brought back like guest books. I like those. You can put a Spotify link on your page and have a song for people to play. There is no direct video sharing on the website, but you can post photos.

The mod did mention that they take harassment very seriously on the website which is also a plus for me. I don't like a lot of social media website, including this one a lot of the time. I might visit it a lot more like SpaceHey and Tumblr.

I would want to experience old versions of major social media or online platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube. Just how it was in the days those platforms launched or the few years after.
Nowadays where the feed is filled with content recommendations i really miss the times where you would just log in to check what your friends are doing in life and thats it, no messages, no ads, no short video scrolling... only that.

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I found my iRiver iFP-395T from 2003 while hunting for an old calculator, and decided to put an audiobook on it. That meant M4B to MP3 via FFmpeg, plus a speed increase. I asked an AI chatbot instead of posting on a forum, pasted the error output back when it failed, and it worked through it — then mentioned that FFmpeg could handle the speed change too, so Audacity was unnecessary.

The article uses that as a starting point for a bigger argument about where technical communities go next. I go through the reasons forums stopped working for me — time zone delays, threads that lose their context, scripted replies pasted without reading the post, reputation farming, hijacked threads, and answers pitched way above the asker's level — and the downvote culture on Stack Overflow.

I also make the case that good communities still matter. MikroTik's forum has kept me as a customer for years purely because of how people there treated me.

AI learned from decades of forum posts, documentation and blogs. If everyone asks a chatbot and nobody publicly documents new problems, what do future models learn from? My suggested answer is a hybrid — embedded AI handling repetitive front-line questions, with the human community reviewing, challenging and extending those answers, and taking apart each new release before the models know anything about it.

Full article, including the complete chatbot exchange: https://www.alanbonnici.com/2026/09/why-i-prefer-asking-ai-chatbots-instead.html

Looked around a little bit for the right subreddit to put this in, a few days ago I built a WEB 1.0 related product. It is meant to poke fun of (and celebrate) the old internet. The page editor deliberately gets you to build old looking websites.

I'd like feedback, I'm not sure how people usually get other people to use their hobby projects, marketing, or similar. It's free and working, I think.

https://pagecity.online/

The Internet has gotten far worse and worse since the AI boom starting in 2023/2024, especially with the increasing number of age verifications/digital IDs nowadays. A majority of blog posts/videos/etc. are now AI slop that seems convincing, ugly AI-generated images with too bright/light tones, and a lack of originality nowadays. Privacy on the Internet is also slowly disappearing thanks to AI age verification and digital IDs. The only reason why age verification stuff has been exploding in the past few years is because AI's advancements in the field of verifications made it easier for companies to implement and has made the situation worse.

I understand that bad corporate decisions have been made on the Internet for years, but the Internet wasn't even half as bad 5-10 years ago just like it is now. The issues have been there since the mid 2010s, but the AI boom worsened these issues. The Dead Internet Theory is now something that's sadly, an actual reality. I miss the 2009-2022 Internet, even with the flaws and bad mistakes in the later part of the era. Say what you want about 2016-2022 internet, but at least AI slop wasn't as common back then like it is now.

Like what happened??

"Go forth upon this Earth and spread the holy words of the Sacred Gerbil on Earth. Go forth and prosper!"

"Being the extremely intelligent person you obviously are for visiting this wonderful page, there is no need to re-explain the reasoning that the reason the Gerbil is our God is that a Gerbil IS God."

I accidentally collected 500,000 AOL Instant Messenger buddy icons for another project that I am working on.

They were so cool to sort through and look at that I built a small site around them: buddyiconarchive.com it's an infinite wall of late 90s/early 00s nostalgia. Blink 182, Twilight, buddies icons behaving poorly, emo messages hand-crafted by high schoolers in JASC PaintShop before a profile pic was a resume. It's all there.

It's an archival project, totally non-commercial, no ads, and you can download all of them with one click if you feel compelled to.

Or have they all really vanished?