Hey all. Since the Internet has just been boiled down to the main big social media sites, it feels like the magic is gone. Whens the last time someone said to you “hey check out this cool website”? It’s always the same: TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, FB, Reddit, Discord. Forums are basically dead. Chat rooms are dead. Message boards are dead.
I miss that feeling of just discovering interesting or quirky websites. Lemmy is cool because it feels fresh and new, and there’s not a boat load of users here yet. But what other sites do you guys use or can recommend? I remember browsing Joe cartoon, Newgrounds, weebls, Ebaums, failblog, damnlol, and a bunch of other stupid but either funny or interesting sites.
Are there sites out there that still have that early Internet vibe? I feel like there is a treasure trove of still active websites out there but I have no idea what they are. Any recommendations would be GREATLY appreciated.
Edit: I created !oldweb where these sorts of sites can be shared!
Yo, a couple years ago I had become fed up with the state of the modern Internet, and I started looking for alternatives. This is what I have found so far:
- Gopher protocol (sdf.org is pretty active)
- Gemini protocol (Modern version of gopher)
- Shared UNIX systems (also called tildes) sdf.org is great!
- RSS
- IRC/Matrix to chat with people
- Session messenger to chat with family
- BBSes via syncterm
- wiby.me and marginalia.nu search engines to find personal web sites
- oldavista.com to browse the ‘Old Net’
- Web forums
- Neocities
- Webrings (They still exist!)
- Lemmy (This is a new one)
The next step for me will be to build my own personal site. The only way to keep the independent web alive is to participate in it.
Hey, this is great. Thank you. I have actually just created a community here !oldweb if anyone is interested. Just a place to share these sorts of sites and lists etc.
Hey, this is great. Thank you. I have actually just created a community here !oldweb if anyone is interested. Just a place to share these sorts of sites and lists etc.
Just joined, thanks :)
Metafilter is very old school in a good way! http://metafilter.com/
Honestly, some of my favourite sites are niche interest groups. One I’ve contributed at lot to (even creating a magazine for) has between 5 and 10 active users in total. They’re just so comfy.
And yes, some of my favourite sites are the ones you may look at and declare dead :)
Care to list some of your faves? :)
I’d rather not, just because they have a spam problem which isn’t under control yet, and we’re talking NSFL spam.
gamecopyworld.com still looks as awesome as ever since the times I used diskettes to transfer a No-CD crack from the local library’s Internet-enabled PC to my offline PC at home, ca. 25 years ago.
wasn’t failblog like really really dumb, like a worse 9gag?
To be fair, yeah. I can’t remember if it was fail blog or some other fail site to be honest. But back then I was into dumb shit.
Have a look at Neocities (a successor to Geocities). My website is here.
You can also have a look at the rest of the Fediverse. There are some cool accounts on Mastodon and PeerTube.
For that true “old web” thing, have you ever heard of gemini? Take a look. My capsule on gemini is here, but you will need a gemini browser in order to see it.
Hope this helps!
But does neocities have neopets?
If NeoPets are what I think they are, yes.
This site lets you create a “GifyPet”.
we gotta start making them again.
No specific recommendation from myself, but I’ve found a lot of the more “personal” feel of the internet has gone underground, ie, off search engines. A lot in discord, some in matrix, and some showing up here. Odd one still on IRC, but that’s slowly shifting to discord/matrix
Out of curiosity, what do you mean by in matrix? Never heard of it before.
Matrix is basically federated discord. It’s to discord what Lemmy is to reddit
Yes, this is the problem. Search engines used to be a way to find stuff. They slowly evolved into more and more effective platforms for monetizing internet users, meaning the only content you can effectively find now is content that’s selling something (or perhaps content that is selling you).
Breaking out of that bubble can reveal that content that isn’t built for selling is still there. It’s just like you said: it’s gone underground. Not by choice but because the ground got moved.
Yeah, hopefully the explosion of Lemmy and Mastrodon leads to more of the message board level of the internet, only without having to maintain five gazillion accounts and checking them daily for new content. That era was pretty nice and was indexed well by search engines.
That was poetic!
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Something Awful is still alive and kicking
I use reddit mostly because it’s a link aggregator for the non-gaming stuff that interests me. Apart from that it’s Ars Technica, Slashdot, or Techmeme.
Not a specific site, but you can get the old internet feel using Tor Browser and exploring Tor websites. Last time I checked it out it felt like going back to the early 2000s or late 90s depending on the website. There are also some sites hosted on IPFS that looks like something from Geocities.
Can you recommend any fun links that aren’t illegal?
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There’s wiby, a search engine indexing older style pages. I sometimes go there, just hit the random button and explore wherever I end up.
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If you are interested in technology and or programming, you might want to have a look at Hacker News. It’s a news aggregator for everything that involves technology and there are many interesting sites linked there on a daily basis.
also, if you use RSS reader, you can add hackernews to it by using hnrss
