It's still there, at IRC/Usenet/some niche forums. Replace phreaking with maybe some mesh networks and ways to connect computers without calling an ISP.
There are still niche blogs and even phlogs.
And you can still use Pidgin and libpurple plugins to connect to a huge array of protocols. Ditto with core Biltbee or Bitlbee+libpurple allowing you to use any IRC client (even the ones without TLS for DOS and Win9X) to connect to modern networks such as Discord, Mastodon, Telegram and whatnot.
On games, well... JS and Itch.io ate Flash and indie/shareware games. But even today people creates hackroms (esp. Pokémon) and games for RPG Maker 2k/2k3 which they can be run under EasyRPG anywhere.
On loggin' in today:
- No Windows. Slackware in a NUC with a debblobbed kernel from Linux-Libre, propietary packages with Flatpak for corporate crap.
OFC that's the work/HD movie player/libre 'high end' games, for the rest I use an n270 netbook with hyperbola.
- I update when I want, but slapt-get and flatpak do everything. On the netbook, I can spend ages without updating anything.
- No ads on any $GNULINUX or $BSD distro/branch.
- Dillo on the netbook, Librewolf on the NUC, Crapium because of $CORPORATE, isolated under bubblewrap and a separate user account. Is not my computing technically, so it's 'GNU kosher'.
- Dillo and a hosts file cuts down both ads and cookies/trackers:
https://github.com/stevenblack/hosts. On the NUC, using a browser
with UBo today it's digitally suicidal.
- For news, I avoid all mainstream political bullshit except for:
https://sciencealert.com for good pop Science news
The Conversation's Spanish feed for Nature/Environment and Science news.
I have both set as RSS feeds and everything loads under sfeed_curses to read anything without ads, popups or distractions at crazy speeds. If I need images, I press 'o' and it opens up the news under Dillo costing me near nothing.
Finally, there's:
gopher://magical.fish <- huge portal, the news site it's great
gopher://sdf.org <- blogs in gopher
gopher://bitreich.org/1/lawn <- check the Gopher lawn
gopher://i-logout.cz/1/bongusta <- updated blogs
I was both in 1975 and my first experience with the Internet was in 1991 when I was 16. I thought it was amazing. There were Usenet forums for thousands of topics and places where nerds could talk about stuff from bands to TV shows to programming languages. There was no graphical World Wide Web (unless you worked at CERN) We had to use Archie to find an FTP site and download a file based on the name.
Does that Internet exist anymore? Well Usenet is still around but since 2000 it is mostly spam or for sharing files now.
Then the author says:
> 2012: When Everything Started Changing
I think everything changed when Eternal September happened. When I first got on Usenet the older students told me to lurk for a month and always read the FAQ before asking a question. Then I started seeing all these annoying posts from people ending in @aol.com and that was when the Internet and Usenet really started to change.
Usenet is coming back through the cracks. Google finally graveyarded support and all the spammers went with them. It's pretty low traffic except for some select groups, though. comp.lang.c and talk.origins will never die. :)
This is me too. First access to the internet was through a dial-up to a "bulletin board" (via a girlfriend's fathers account). From there you could launch a shell and get (I will get things wrong here) lynx, gopher, usenet, telnet (muds), etc.
Then I went to university and we got access to the internet directly there, but in the country I grew up in, it was pretty much only university students on IRC etc at the the time. Within a couple of years the commercial providers sprung up and "everything went downhill" (the sentiment being expressed here).
> Turn on your computer - most likely Windows 10 or 11.
> You open your default browser - most likely Chrome.
> …your browser (most likely Google) will show you an AI summary…
> Once you solve all that, there's a cookie banner waiting for you that gives you two options:
> Oh wait, you're interrupted again. This site requires age verification to view its contents.
Those are your problems. Why not use Linux (or even macOS), Firefox, Kagi, Consent-O-Matic, and avoid websites with stupid captchas and age verification? (Not always possible for government and banking sites, but you use to need to be in person)
My internet was gopher, Usenet, and the very beginnings of webpages at some universities. Much smaller. I don't miss it being only that. At the time it sucked when aol was attached to the academic internet and all of my usenet groups became unusable but now, yeah, things are much better with how vast and chaotic things are.
With enough pressure, corporate reliance may become unpopular and push people to become more sovereign.
The first time I realized there was no permission slip to setting up an onion service I remember thinking this is how it was supposed to be and shocked at the simplicity and ease.
I really don't think there is a big enough billboard about this. Id love to see the community build on top of these principles and make it even easier for the eventualality that people are going to want these abilities back. The ability to create spaces that are yours. Establish a mailbox that's yours. A social platform that's yours. Collaboration tools that are yours. A messaging platform that is yours, all running on hardware you own.
Building on the backbone of tor as the founding principles for the future.
I like the the term stable diffusion to describe this...(not the ai) we need stable diffusion of the simple idea that one can create their own spaces in cyberspace again.
It might be that we just have to accept that the internet and us simply grew apart. But right now, we still seem to be lacking the imagination to engineer new spaces beyond it.
And the stamina, probably.
Convenience bred laziness.
It might change though. Change through disruption.
Disruption that will not be without collateral. As always.
I for one am curious how hostile of a place the internet will become before the successor arises. How will it even look like? Will it be using IPv12?
___
Man, I wish reticulum wasn't broken by design.
It has so many cool future ideas, but pinning all that on a hard dependency to crypto that _will_ be broken is just so dumb.
That and lack of hardening against really any sort of malicious actor.
Someone please build reticulum with those things fixed.
It could be so cool. Decentralized, medium-agnostic, meshing. The spirit of the old web, transported partially via LoRa radio, partially via fiber and partially via pigeon (optional) without you as the user noticing + without the Lord Jesus Christ denying your connection before marriage.
Reticulum uses AES-256 encryption, which is considered quantum safe due to the sheer number of extra combinations adding 128 bits to AES 128 creates, including by NIST[1].
It uses AES because AES is extremely well tested and vulnerabilities have not been found.
The new quantum safe algorithms are still mostly in beta and a few have already been broken. They also have extremely large key lengths which breaks the fundamental idea of Reticulum being able to run over any almost any connection, including LoRa. See what the creator of Reticulum said on the topic [2].
It's not that he's wrong in that assessment, but that doesn't really change anything about the fundamental problem of the cost of being wrong being a completely collapsed infrastructure.
We do not know if the quantum safe stuff is actually quantum safe, but we also don't need to. We just need to have a mechanism to use something else in the future if that should turn out to be a problem.
That mechanism is (from my understanding) lacking.
On the flipside, I was able to purchase three albums in FLAC format, DRM free, from an obscure band that I thought wouldn't have a legitimate path to purchase.
I also use Linux exclusively at home, with a paranoid-level of lists added to my pihole, so I don't see anywhere near as much friction as the average user.
<sarcasm>
Today I sat down on my PC determined to finally go and file that bug report with debian - when I open their site in order to download the new .iso I am moving my mouse to the bottom of the screen and waiting to click that I accept the cookies in order to continue but I cannot see the banner. It is really frustrating.
</sarcasm>
The internet is still kind of the same. Yes - some IRC networks changed but people think that facebook/discord/reddit/tiktok are the center of internet. No - just go to the real web - it still exists out there. IRC is still here, and they do not ask about your age/id in order to enter and chat. BTW HN is one of these places where you are free too. Probably when Paul starts demanding my ID in order to post my dull sarcasm here I will move, but for now it is a pretty nice place to be.
To an oldster like me, this is already post classic internet, where the "golden" era was that of Usenet, and the web was just one interesting new use of the internet.
Which begs the obvious question - to those whose internet values are formed in the current era, will this feel like a lost "golden era" 30 years from now?
Purely for the fun of thinking about it, and not just to be awkward:
We owned a heavy, wooden CRT TV set from the 1970s or 1980s that hid all buttons behind a fake, black "speaker" that you could press to pop open. A decade or two after we had tossed this TV into our barn for disposal, my brother and I took turns hitting the glass screen as hard as we could with a baseball bat.
It never left a mark, regardless of how hard we hit it. Why don't we produce that quality anymore?
I would hazard that given the inflation adjusted price of a mid-range TV appears to have dropped about 99 percent since 1975, if we were willing to pay 100 times as much for a TV as we actually do here in the year 2026, we could have one made out of bulletproof glass too :)
I was there when we turned on the Internet in 1981. At the time I would have defined the Internet as the set of all endpoints reachable using IPv4. By that definition, none of us today are even on the Internet. You can't send a SYN packet and have it arrive at my house, and I can't send a SYN packet to your house. That means we are entirely dependent on the big guys like Facebook if we want to communicate with each other. Yes, there are some protocols like bittorrent that get around this, but that's the default situation today.
I mean... if you look at the "Logging on today" section, they're using Chrome on Windows 10/11 and spend half the 17 steps dealing with those two things.
The first thing about the Internet is that you should know by now how to use it, at least as well as it knows how to use you. If not, you will be subjected to the Internet, not using it but being used. The web has evolved to a point where you need to remove a few layers before you find the actual web.
Don't use predatory social media. Don't use Chrome. Don't use Windows. Those three things will get you 90% of the way back. The rest is using the Fediverse, the small web, moving away from Google and subscription shit like Netflix and the rest of the business who trade with your time.
Learn to identify the things that are actively trying to profit off of you and don't use them, even if they're made to be extraordinarily convenient. The web you like is still there, it just takes some effort and know-how to get to.
I miss the days of playing Halo as a kid, and jumping on internet forums. MSN being the primary chat app that everyone used. Facebook was in its infancy, but everyone who had hobbies or a community was on a purpose made forum. People who knew how to write html/css/php build basic websites and blogs. Gaming clans came together, and xfire/steam was a great way to talk to and play with the same people.
Now days, I don't have Facebook, I don't play games, and the only forum I call home is this one. Times have changed, but so have I. At least I can reminisce on the good times.
Two things happened at least near that time: (1) mobile phones began to eclipse desktops as the primary devices for interaction online, and (2) social media started to wholesale adopt algorithmic feeds, infinite scroll, and hard-core addiction engineering.
The doom scrolling era started on or around 2012.
This was also when the looniest forms of "alt-right" and "woke warrior" stuff took over, and I blame algorithmic feeds for that. Rage bait and crazy divisive opinions maximize engagement, so that's what the algorithm is going to learn to boost. Algorithms amplified all the dumbest and craziest opinions across the entire political landscape and sidelined rational thought. Gotta keep people on the site/app. People don't slow down to look at good drivers. They slow down to stare at a wreck.
Along with algorithms, I think the mobile form factor itself is to blame. Small screen, slow typing, limited nerfed OS that is better for consumption than creation. It's generally a much more limited interaction than what a large screen PC with a real OS gives you, and a lot of the more information-rich early Internet doesn't translate well to a phone. It encourages brief, scattered, disjointed, low-information modes of communication or just consumption of "content."
I think that's another reason online discourse got dumb. Dumb opinions work well when interactions are brief and attention spans are short. You get memes, slogans, and sound bites, not long form nuanced deep discourse.
I miss the whole dot-com boom era - that was the best. I was working in Austin at the time and would drive to work down a road that was lined with all the latest dot-com goodness like DrKoop.com, Living.com, et al. And who can forget reading f*ckdcompany.com every morning and marveling over the latest startups rumored to be hitting the skids.
This is the classic 'things were better back then' crap. It was easy to let people set up their own website on your platform when CSAM was unheard of. It was easy to host a website when IPv4 addresses were plentiful and free. It was easy to get more land when you could declare war on the previous owner. It was easy to dump toxic waste when that was legal. The world changed for a reason.
90 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 66.3 ms ] threadThere are still niche blogs and even phlogs.
And you can still use Pidgin and libpurple plugins to connect to a huge array of protocols. Ditto with core Biltbee or Bitlbee+libpurple allowing you to use any IRC client (even the ones without TLS for DOS and Win9X) to connect to modern networks such as Discord, Mastodon, Telegram and whatnot.
On games, well... JS and Itch.io ate Flash and indie/shareware games. But even today people creates hackroms (esp. Pokémon) and games for RPG Maker 2k/2k3 which they can be run under EasyRPG anywhere.
On loggin' in today:
- No Windows. Slackware in a NUC with a debblobbed kernel from Linux-Libre, propietary packages with Flatpak for corporate crap. OFC that's the work/HD movie player/libre 'high end' games, for the rest I use an n270 netbook with hyperbola.
- I update when I want, but slapt-get and flatpak do everything. On the netbook, I can spend ages without updating anything.
- No ads on any $GNULINUX or $BSD distro/branch.
- Dillo on the netbook, Librewolf on the NUC, Crapium because of $CORPORATE, isolated under bubblewrap and a separate user account. Is not my computing technically, so it's 'GNU kosher'.
- No browser nagging, ever.
- I have a either https://wiby.me or a blank homepage.
- I disabled remote searching for the URL bar.
- I don't use Google. DDG, searx and the like.
- Dillo and a hosts file cuts down both ads and cookies/trackers: https://github.com/stevenblack/hosts. On the NUC, using a browser with UBo today it's digitally suicidal.
- For news, I avoid all mainstream political bullshit except for:
I have both set as RSS feeds and everything loads under sfeed_curses to read anything without ads, popups or distractions at crazy speeds. If I need images, I press 'o' and it opens up the news under Dillo costing me near nothing.Finally, there's:
As is the future.
Live long enough, and you'll find yourself a stranger in a strange land.
>I was born in the late 1990s
>2001: The Family Computer
I was both in 1975 and my first experience with the Internet was in 1991 when I was 16. I thought it was amazing. There were Usenet forums for thousands of topics and places where nerds could talk about stuff from bands to TV shows to programming languages. There was no graphical World Wide Web (unless you worked at CERN) We had to use Archie to find an FTP site and download a file based on the name.
Does that Internet exist anymore? Well Usenet is still around but since 2000 it is mostly spam or for sharing files now.
Then the author says:
> 2012: When Everything Started Changing
I think everything changed when Eternal September happened. When I first got on Usenet the older students told me to lurk for a month and always read the FAQ before asking a question. Then I started seeing all these annoying posts from people ending in @aol.com and that was when the Internet and Usenet really started to change.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
Then I went to university and we got access to the internet directly there, but in the country I grew up in, it was pretty much only university students on IRC etc at the the time. Within a couple of years the commercial providers sprung up and "everything went downhill" (the sentiment being expressed here).
> You open your default browser - most likely Chrome.
> …your browser (most likely Google) will show you an AI summary…
> Once you solve all that, there's a cookie banner waiting for you that gives you two options:
> Oh wait, you're interrupted again. This site requires age verification to view its contents.
Those are your problems. Why not use Linux (or even macOS), Firefox, Kagi, Consent-O-Matic, and avoid websites with stupid captchas and age verification? (Not always possible for government and banking sites, but you use to need to be in person)
The first time I realized there was no permission slip to setting up an onion service I remember thinking this is how it was supposed to be and shocked at the simplicity and ease.
I really don't think there is a big enough billboard about this. Id love to see the community build on top of these principles and make it even easier for the eventualality that people are going to want these abilities back. The ability to create spaces that are yours. Establish a mailbox that's yours. A social platform that's yours. Collaboration tools that are yours. A messaging platform that is yours, all running on hardware you own.
Building on the backbone of tor as the founding principles for the future.
I like the the term stable diffusion to describe this...(not the ai) we need stable diffusion of the simple idea that one can create their own spaces in cyberspace again.
And the stamina, probably. Convenience bred laziness.
It might change though. Change through disruption. Disruption that will not be without collateral. As always.
I for one am curious how hostile of a place the internet will become before the successor arises. How will it even look like? Will it be using IPv12?
___
Man, I wish reticulum wasn't broken by design. It has so many cool future ideas, but pinning all that on a hard dependency to crypto that _will_ be broken is just so dumb.
That and lack of hardening against really any sort of malicious actor.
Someone please build reticulum with those things fixed.
It could be so cool. Decentralized, medium-agnostic, meshing. The spirit of the old web, transported partially via LoRa radio, partially via fiber and partially via pigeon (optional) without you as the user noticing + without the Lord Jesus Christ denying your connection before marriage.
It uses AES because AES is extremely well tested and vulnerabilities have not been found.
The new quantum safe algorithms are still mostly in beta and a few have already been broken. They also have extremely large key lengths which breaks the fundamental idea of Reticulum being able to run over any almost any connection, including LoRa. See what the creator of Reticulum said on the topic [2].
[1] https://csrc.nist.gov/projects/post-quantum-cryptography/faq... "To protect against the threat of quantum computers, should we double the key length for AES now? (added 11/18/18)"
[2] https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum/discussions/181#discu...
We do not know if the quantum safe stuff is actually quantum safe, but we also don't need to. We just need to have a mechanism to use something else in the future if that should turn out to be a problem.
That mechanism is (from my understanding) lacking.
https://boomkat.com/artists/magic-lantern
I also use Linux exclusively at home, with a paranoid-level of lists added to my pihole, so I don't see anywhere near as much friction as the average user.
Really cool times when lots of people published blogs and everyone had rss readers.
The internet is still kind of the same. Yes - some IRC networks changed but people think that facebook/discord/reddit/tiktok are the center of internet. No - just go to the real web - it still exists out there. IRC is still here, and they do not ask about your age/id in order to enter and chat. BTW HN is one of these places where you are free too. Probably when Paul starts demanding my ID in order to post my dull sarcasm here I will move, but for now it is a pretty nice place to be.
Which begs the obvious question - to those whose internet values are formed in the current era, will this feel like a lost "golden era" 30 years from now?
We owned a heavy, wooden CRT TV set from the 1970s or 1980s that hid all buttons behind a fake, black "speaker" that you could press to pop open. A decade or two after we had tossed this TV into our barn for disposal, my brother and I took turns hitting the glass screen as hard as we could with a baseball bat.
It never left a mark, regardless of how hard we hit it. Why don't we produce that quality anymore?
I would hazard that given the inflation adjusted price of a mid-range TV appears to have dropped about 99 percent since 1975, if we were willing to pay 100 times as much for a TV as we actually do here in the year 2026, we could have one made out of bulletproof glass too :)
The first thing about the Internet is that you should know by now how to use it, at least as well as it knows how to use you. If not, you will be subjected to the Internet, not using it but being used. The web has evolved to a point where you need to remove a few layers before you find the actual web.
Don't use predatory social media. Don't use Chrome. Don't use Windows. Those three things will get you 90% of the way back. The rest is using the Fediverse, the small web, moving away from Google and subscription shit like Netflix and the rest of the business who trade with your time.
Learn to identify the things that are actively trying to profit off of you and don't use them, even if they're made to be extraordinarily convenient. The web you like is still there, it just takes some effort and know-how to get to.
Now days, I don't have Facebook, I don't play games, and the only forum I call home is this one. Times have changed, but so have I. At least I can reminisce on the good times.
I have independently dated it to that same year.
Two things happened at least near that time: (1) mobile phones began to eclipse desktops as the primary devices for interaction online, and (2) social media started to wholesale adopt algorithmic feeds, infinite scroll, and hard-core addiction engineering.
The doom scrolling era started on or around 2012.
This was also when the looniest forms of "alt-right" and "woke warrior" stuff took over, and I blame algorithmic feeds for that. Rage bait and crazy divisive opinions maximize engagement, so that's what the algorithm is going to learn to boost. Algorithms amplified all the dumbest and craziest opinions across the entire political landscape and sidelined rational thought. Gotta keep people on the site/app. People don't slow down to look at good drivers. They slow down to stare at a wreck.
Along with algorithms, I think the mobile form factor itself is to blame. Small screen, slow typing, limited nerfed OS that is better for consumption than creation. It's generally a much more limited interaction than what a large screen PC with a real OS gives you, and a lot of the more information-rich early Internet doesn't translate well to a phone. It encourages brief, scattered, disjointed, low-information modes of communication or just consumption of "content."
I think that's another reason online discourse got dumb. Dumb opinions work well when interactions are brief and attention spans are short. You get memes, slogans, and sound bites, not long form nuanced deep discourse.
In those days, RAM was measured in megabytes, not gigabytes. My first Windows 95 PC had a grand total of 16 MB of RAM and a 1.6 GB hard drive.
It ran pretty well from what I recall.