Where can I find the old internet?
84 points by kghose
84 points by kghose
It's a very poorly phrased question, sorry. The best I can do is this example:
I'm reading a book called Phule's Company and got interested in a particular aspect of it and started to research the book then the author. Soon I was knee deep searching why he was in trouble with the IRS and, to my surprise, found answers (The IRS caught him for back taxes and he arranged for only his single-authored works to be garnished. So his later output was all jointly authored).
During this lovely rabbit hole dig I ran into a page that seems to be a bit like a corner of a four dimensional object sticking out into our (modern internet) universe.
It seems to be a copy of "Alt.Fan.Asprin" which is usenet, which came before my time I think. I can only see that page. I can't go to the top domain.
It is a whole page full of lovingly organized minutiae about an obscure thing. I didn't post the address out of a peculiar fear of invading someone's peace. It's silly, I know.
It reminded me of an internet that I have begun to miss. It's an internet that often doesn't show up in web searches, it is an internet where the taint and pressure of money is quite minimal. It is an internet driven by quirky people who seem to hyperfocus on one particular thing. They spend their time writing up things/creating things, just for the love of it, and then put it up.
I liked that internet better, and I kind of pine for it.
Sorry, I'm rambling, and probably rambling worse than usual, but perhaps someone knows what I'm talking about.
I you don't mind the self-promotion, I built Marginalia Search to help find exactly that Internet.
You can’t go home again, sadly.
But I was there, Gandalf. 3000 years ago. Talkers. MUDs. MOOs. IRC. FTP, Archie, Veronica, Gopher. I remember being amused when “HTTP has now overtaken FTP as the most popular protocol on the Internet.”
Usenet was inundated by spam and then became basically a pirate’s cove. A million fora centralized onto one place and then another and another and now the Internet is just five companies.
So. Embrace the small web. Mastodon/the Fediverse. Gemini is…eh. It’s fine. What’s truly missing is the little niche corners. A random FTP server that had all the textfiles you could want on some obscure topic that you hit by IP directly and added to your hosts file and you knew it would vanish at any moment. A MOO where you spent hours designing your house so you could talk to three or four other people sometimes from across the world!
So. Yeah. The world was infinite and accessible, all at the same time.
You gotta be the change you want to see in the world. Use the small stuff, use the alternative services, post your own little websites that you host yourself for fun. Be excited that 37 people visited your website and not 200,000 because at least you know the 37 genuinely care.
MUDs mentioned! They still kinda exist! Here's two:
telnet t2tmud.org 9999telnet discworld.starturtle.net 4242I was recently surprised by how popular muds (still?) are these days. There's an entire slack and discord devoted just to writing them!
MUDs mentioned! They still kinda exist! Here's two:
And Dartmud, which surely cost me a point on my undergrad GPA... https://dartmud.com/
Edit: LambdaMOO didn't help either...
https://kagi.com/smallweb has been really nice for me. it's not searchable, unfortunately, but it leads you to some very interesting places and people
I discovered it, funny enough, by observing the referers sending traffic into my own blog: https://prose.nsood.in/hits.json
Kagi's main search has a "small web" lens you can toggle off and on - I assume it searches the same set of sites?
Usenet is still somewhat alive. You can sign up for an account at https://eternal-september.org/ for free. I don't know any clients that I'd call good, but Thunderbird supports NNTP and you might already have it installed, and Gnus is the most decent client I've tried.
IIRC the group list in Thunderbird doesn't display the post counts for each group, so you can't really tell which groups are active and which aren't (let alone sort by most active) - the discoverability sucks.
Pan is still great for reading Usenet, and there are a few OS and tech groups still active. I still follow alt.os.linux.slackware as that was my main OS for most of the 2000s up to about 2014 or so.
What did you switch to after 2014?
I did a lot of distro hopping, and that was also when I started exploring OpenBSD. I eventually settled on Void Linux; it's been my main workstation OS for about 10 years now. I also still use OpenBSD, mostly headless but I do have a couple of devices with screens running it.
Incidentally, I published a new version of my little project called Wander Console just 15 minutes before you posted this 'Ask Lobsters' thread.
I announced my project here on Lobsters a few weeks ago at https://lobste.rs/s/hjipba and now there is a growing community of people who host this tool on their website. Console owners often (though not always) link to personal and obscure websites, the part of the web that is endearingly called the 'smol web'.
It is a decentralised tool, so you can use anyone's console to start browsing recommendations from the network of consoles. For example, you can start with mine here: susam.net/wander/
More information on how it works is available in the project README: codeberg.org/susam/wander
What I'm realizing more and more is that I have also changed a lot. Recently I was remembering my time in forums, or my first year in World of Warcraft, or my times chatting with random people over the internet. And I'm sure there are similar things nowadays, but I've changed a lot.
I think a lot of what we miss of the old internet can be found today easily, but we are corrupted ourselves and we won't enjoy it with the sense of wonder. We are saturated with information, we've seen it all and that sense of absolute wonder, is... gone. It's glib, but at least for me that's the truth I think.
neocities, discord, VRChat, Roblox
The communities and quirky people are on discord now, I'm on a server where people document the minuta of Minecraft history. Kids are larping napolianic army squadrons on Roblox or recreating historical events. I've seen lots of esoteric Web 1.0 fan pages on neocities, and I have found some very specialized rooms/instances in VRChat.
It's younger people mostly, using the technology of their times to meet and collect and creates. It's less discoverable and hard to archive, but it is what it is
i like how 3/4 of these are proprietary services that prohibit custom clients. doesn't really sound like places where "the taint and pressure of money is quite minimal"
Unfortunately these are the primary spaces I know of that fit the "old internet" experiences he talks about and I remember. The taint and pressure of money is minimal within the activities of these communities, nobody is getting paid to message people about old alpha Minecraft versions or coordinate 30 people for a military roleplay.
It's an internet that often doesn't show up in web searches, it is an internet where the taint and pressure of money is quite minimal. It is an internet driven by quirky people who seem to hyperfocus on one particular thing. They spend their time writing up things/creating things, just for the love of it, and then put it up.
Discord is full of these quirky communities, and they usually won't care about what is proprietary or not. They just want to do the quirk.
There are some communities on Tor or matrix and other privacy-centric services that may fit this, but most are specialized enough to only be for the tech-literate.
If there is a more convenient way for normies to deploy static sites or JavaScript applications via llm only, this may see a resurgence of non proprietary clients if people can just say "make me this site using open source technologies and host the code on sourcehut" and iterate on it without tech knowledge. But this doesn't fix discovery and the network effects of what is popular right now.
Edit: Lobsters is probably the closest I've felt, high quality articles usually hosted with love on someone's personal blog. But it's only for the tech inclined.
Discord is full of these quirky communities, and they usually won't care about what is proprietary or not. They just want to do the quirk.
Yeah, I think the fundamental aspect here is less technical, more social. I think a more useful term is "cozy web", since that selects for things outside of nerds writing HTML 3.2 like it's 1998. That gets you a far more diverse set of people (and interests outside of computer touching), since the people outside of 1998 aren't going to be writing HTML.
I agree with you. I think when people reminisce about the early 2000s web, they attribute its qualities to the technology at the time, instead of the people.
The average person who is sharing information online is not running their own blog or web server anymore. So if you want to see what these people are making, you have to go to the same platforms you mentioned.
they attribute its qualities to the technology at the time, instead of the people.
The web being searchable certainly played a role.
There's still a lot of people doing that: making websites for the fun of it or to share something they are interested in (although the blog format has kinda taken over). The problem is that most search engines just don't show it.
Here's a few manually curated lists of cool places:
... and marginalia's random sites feature often has some good things:
Check out blogs for webrings!
My blog has couple webring links you could start clicking through: https://akselmo.dev/ (theyre all in the footer)
Maybe stupid question but do I want my blog to be on a webring? Why? Why not? Which ones? :)
Entirely up to you. I find webrings by browsing other peoples blogs and join them if they seem something that fits the general topic of my blog, that being computers.
It's more a social thing I think. Helps you find other likeminded people and such. And they're just fun to me.
When I was looking around for webrings, I started by surfing a webring I liked. It's not uncommon for a site to be part of more than one, so I looked at the other rings linked on each website as they piqued my interest. I thought it was pretty fun. It's also a good way to learn about good and bad ways to present your own webring badge on your site. Some sites make it surprisingly difficult to traverse the ring they're on.
I joined a webring so that I'd have "neighbors" on the web. I think that's fun.
The Gemini ecosystem has something close to that.
Though of course, since it's still relatively niche, you won't find things like cooking blogs there, but it is still very fun to browse through.
From my (admittedly limited) time spent look into it, Gemini and Gopher have massive communities with nothing to say.
Blogs are huge, but there's rarely anything interesting to read: there will be a manifesto about leaving social media and another post where the explain how they run the server: always some BSD with software written in a fashionable language like go.
Expect lots of ASCII art on the homepage because that just bleeds cool.
... oh, and it will have been abandoned in ~2021.
It's not completely empty, there are some people that actually write stuff... but it's all the same Linux nerd stuff. Programming is rare and computing-adjacent topics like electronics or radio are almost non-existent.
Fun game, find any tilde that provides hosting and click around: 30% will have the default homepage with a few words changed. 30% are blank (usually admitting they have no use for it) The rest have blogs, but it's the same blog everyone else has.
Anyways, there's definitely a lot of potential, but the userbase just diverse enough to where I'd recommend it to someone looking for interesting places. The fun of the old web is the huge variety of stuff people write about.
Yes, I've always been reminded of the Simpsons joke about ham radio, where the person on the radio can think of nothing worth saying except, "I have a ham radio"
The reason why the "old web" was diverse was because it was the only game in town and people outside of nerds had to put up with it. In a world where i.e. knitters and hikers don't have to learn HTML et al, they're not going to do it.
... but those few that go to the trouble of publishing outside of social media certainly won't do it on gemini. They don't even know it exists, and would have to convince all their friends to install a client.
Even though the markup is somewhat simpler than HTML, setting up a server is far more intimidating. Besides, most people will use a markdown based tool or a fully hosted CMS (wordpress, etc) which make it just as easy as social media.
If you're looking for fragments of the old web, you are better off sifting through the modern web than using an alternative protocol.
Gemini is exactly like that. I would say the opposite : it is not that Gemini/Gopher is empty, it is more than web users are now completely used to hyper-targeted-engagement-optimized content.
On Gemini, I surprise myself by reading about a scandal hitting the price of renting flats in UK, someone getting into ham radio in germany, a librarian raising chicken in the USA or a French person trying to watch every movie in the IMBD top 1000.
That’s the kind of stuff I was reading on the web in the 90’s but you could never find in 100 years on modern social media. That’s the kind of stuff you would never look for and thus, it feels empty if you are used to skim through titles to find "interesting stuff".
But if you play the game and start reading, you discover a whole new aspect of humans. I even start reading more and more Spanish gemlogs, a language I have not practiced for the last 20 years !
https://ploum.net/2022-10-05-there-is-no-content-on-gemini.html
Fun game, find any tilde that provides hosting and click around: 30% will have the default homepage with a few words changed. 30% are blank (usually admitting they have no use for it) The rest have blogs, but it's the same blog everyone else has.
That doesn't mean you won't find interesting stuff on the tildeverse - but that many people, when they get an account, mess around a bit with all the available stuff but then don't stay around all that long, or don't maintain an interest in everything. The index of all available user pages admittedly isn't good for discoverability, though :/
cooking blogs are actually a great example of the internet I want to see. people poke endless fun at them for the whole "I don't want your life story, just give me the recipe" thing, but by and large these are people who genuinely love both cooking and sharing their love of cooking, and they put a tremendous amount of time and effort into maintaining their sites. sure, some of them are low effort and meant to attract ad traffic, but that has been true of the internet for ages, all the way back doubleclick banners. the good stuff is still out there alongside it.
also I happen to know this because cooking is one of my passions; I bet there is similarly an ecosystem of blogs and websites devoted to knitting, or music, or woodworking. the problem is not that no one is making these things, it's just that they are super hard to pick out of the noise.
the missing piece of the puzzle is not content creation, it's indexing and navigation and curation and all the things we let google provide for us until suddenly it didn't any more.
but my point is you don't need to go to gemini or usenet (which I will admit I do miss the glory days of) to find this stuff, it's right there on the same web as the facebooks and twitters and reddits of the world.
One old cooking blog I recall is Cooking for Engineers. Light on the story, and full of pictures of the procedure, as well as a chart showing the parallel steps in the recipe, but I don't think it's been updated in a few years.
sure, but i would say that was more of a novelty blog, or at least pretty niche. my point was that mainstream cooking blogs like recipe tin eats or once upon a chef, while they might not fit the aesthetic of the geocities-era internet, are very much in the spirit of the old sites where someone loved a topic and put up an extensive page devoted to it. just because they look more slick and modern (and yes, probably have ad and/or sponsor revenue) does not make the content any less part of the non-corporate created-with-love-by-a-human internet that is really what i miss being more ubiquitous.
A long time ago, Google read a bunch of old Usenet archives off someone's dusty backup tapes and put them online in searchable form. I was amused to find stuff I’d posted back in 1986. I have no idea if any of that is still around.
The other era I miss is LiveJournal from ‘01 to about ‘07, when people (many of them non-nerds, which was refreshing) were more willing to be open about their lives because it was pseudonymous and there weren’t yet tools to de-anonymize.
The only “big” site that reminds me at all of those days is tumblr, which is also the only social site I have any presence on, as eyepool. It’s still home to a lot of quirky eccentric people and endearingly obsessive single-topic blogs, and the reblog feature works like a collective improv session where people toss strange memes around and evolve them, like “spiders Georg” or “Goncharov”.
I would recommend start reading books written by experts on their area of expertise. It's much slower world, far away from hurry and hype, but it's hiding depth of knowledge and joy.
The Old Net is an attempt to piece together the web as of certain dates via Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. The developer could use some help working with IA to manage rate limiting.
They also have internet adapters for very old computers, if that's your thing
It is an internet driven by quirky people who seem to hyperfocus on one particular thing. They spend their time writing up things/creating things, just for the love of it, and then put it up.
TikTok!
I'm completely serious. TikTok is absolutely crammed with delightful obsessive weirdos investing vast amounts of time and energy into creating and sharing the results of their hyperfocus.
The trick is to find them, then like and watch their stuff, then wait for the Algorithm to find you more.
Here's a chap who makes beautiful mechanical art, and a French guy who attached a singer sewing machine to a hurdy gurdy and a theremin, and a raccoon biologist who I think may secretly be a raccoon herself, and a lady who grows giant vegetables.
it is an internet where the taint and pressure of money is quite minimal
for all of the admittedly great independent content on tiktok or reels or what have you (content which probably wouldn’t exist if not FOR platforms like these), my experience is that you will have a very hard time avoiding the “taint and pressure of money” on modern social media. even if you carve out a beautiful little algorithmic niche, the Service is relentless in trying to redirect that towards monetized content.
my experience is that you will have a very hard time avoiding the “taint and pressure of money” on modern social media. even if you carve out a beautiful little algorithmic niche, the Service is relentless in trying to redirect that towards monetized content.
You could try writing a bot to do the browsing for you, download scrape and reblog the interesting blogs into html3. 2
I remember stumbling upon the Brick Testament about 20-25 years ago when it was in progress. The creator was obsessively illustrating every Bible verse with artful Lego dioramas. I thought, "This is what makes the Internet amazing!" Nowadays there are certainly plenty of obsessives, but they seem to be editing Wikipedia pages (in which case their individual personalities are suppressed) or they're influencers on YouTube or Substack (so we can see the rest of their audience, and we don't have that magic feeling).
Thesis: the old Internet seemed more magical because when we found an individual obsessive, we couldn't see the rest of their audience and we couldn't see their financial motives. The Brick Bible guy eventual published a book and I hope he made plenty of money. But when I first found him I felt like he was my special discovery. Nowadays, if I read e.g. A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry I'm aware of the many thousands of other fans, and I know the author is doing this partly for fame and money, and it doesn't seem as magic.
I think the old and new Internets are less fundamentally different than we think, but more superficially different, because other fans are visible to us, and so are the authors' business models.
You can’t go back home. Because the ads industry cancer, and the AI super-cancer, destroyed the will (and even the memory) to post anything outside of (ads- and AI-infested) social networks.
Epic times, when bots were less than a single-digit percent of the internet.
You can also play with the Finger protocol. There is a public free server, Happy Net Box, and clients are available for all the major operating systems.
This wasn't the initial intention, but it turned out that Nostr became kind of a place that is very conducive to the old internet vibes.
Not the main social network feed you see if you try to use Nostr by any conventional means, but the niche relays with exclusive messages and limited posting, the hard-to-find groups and the weird UIs give me that feeling all the time.
It's not big, by any means, so have patience, but it's a start. Try https://grimoire.rocks/ and https://impromptu.relays.land/ for example if you are curious.
Sorry for an opinionated comment, but you need to scrape the modern web, reformat it for your liking and reblog somewhere.
You would have to spend some money on breaking captchas, but for a single user it should be an acceptable price.
For blogs, I can share my curated directory/search engine for personal human-written blogs: https://minifeed.net/blogs
I've been maintaining it since 2023.