The "old web" to me was GeoCities and Angelfire, it was customizing your NeoPets shop, it was hosting a web server on your home network on port 8080. It was mailing a check to an address you found on a website in hopes that you'd receive a bootleg anime VHS in the mail a few weeks later. It was webrings, banners, and websites reviewing and promoting other sites through a "links" section. It was right-clicking to copy an image and getting a Javascript alert telling you the image was "copyright". It was learning that you could copy it anyway if you spammed enter. It was hotlinking those same images in protest. It was waiting 5 hours to download a 37 second 320x240 RealPlayer video. It was having a password "protected" area where the password is base64 encoded in the source. It was trying the same search query in multiple search engines because they would return different results. It was typing random URLs in to see if you could find something interesting yourself. It was playing midi files on loop in the background. It was Macromedia Flash, explicit popups, pure yellow text on black backgrounds, and reformatting your computer to get rid of viruses.
The "old web" was McDonalds in the early 90's. This looks more like McDonalds today, maybe tomorrow it will be a Starbucks.
It was also visiting pages like pages.small-isp.net/~username and digging through the HTML to see if somebody had <!-- hidden comments adding private commentary but only for folks who were knowledgeable and curious enough to look -->
I once bought a SNES game that couldn't be found at local stores (final fantasy 2) by 1/ finding a guy on a message board with the cartridge, 2/ mailing that person a check, and 3/ waiting (probably weeks?) to receive the cartridge in the mail. The old Internet. I still have that game btw.
It really is crazy how much was lost when Apple killed Flash. Absolutely miss Newgrounds. It's still around of course, I'm reflecting more on the vibes when it was in its heyday. Unbelievable the games people were making with Flash back then and how it spawned the careers of a ton of indie darlings. Also, not Flash at all, but does anyone remember Exit Mundi? Absolute gold.
Honestly, I kind of look back on blogging unfavorably. Before that people made websites to showcase their interests and hobbies, and because of that even the most basic looking websites could have a lot of "color" to them. Then blogging became a thing and people's websites became bland and minimalist. Arguably blogging culture is as responsible for the death of creativity on the internet as much as the constraints of mobile-friendly web design and Apple's aforementioned killing of Flash.
Wow this hit too close to home but describes my internet experience of the 00s exactly. Except for anime vhs tapes it was fansubs on irc or mailing burned cds/dvds.
neocities.org for http is nice, gopher sphere is still a thing, Gemini is pretty cool. The old web is still around and pretty fun to surf. Recommend Lagrange.
Creator of Bear here. Suggesting that because one project fails, others will too is a bit of a fallacy. Fact is that whether you self-host or not, you're still using someone else's platform (unless you're a real self-hoster with a box in your closet, in which case, good on you and godspeed).
I think as long as platforms have an easy way for people to backup and migrate, that's fair.
Additionally, part of the appeal of Bear is that I've made it my personal mission to get the platform to outlive me. Take that as you will. I can't prove that Bear will live on in perpetuity, but I can try my best.
"No ads" is possible. It's a choice really. Too many bloggers also want to make money and think ads are the way to do it. That's certainly their right, but it doesn't have to be that way.
Want no ads, start browsing gopher sites. No ads there. Or find people making blogs just because they want to. They exist. Github + Jekyll is a great option for free static blogging if your willing to spend a little time getting it setup and learning something new.
It's like the nostalgia about the "Summer of Love" and the 1960's... it really only lasted a single summer and only in one or two little areas.
Same thing with the "old web." It was about the very early 90s before Netscape Navigator (the Mosaic days) and when everyone was just throwing up a single HTML page with a bunch of links... that's the "old web".
The modern WWW kicked off with the ability to make credit card transactions online (1994). That... and porn (1995).
For "old web" sites that still exist, check out wiby
So, obviously, ads were the norm back in the day. The author had to be wearing several rose tinted glasses when writing that.
But the author isn't entirely wrong. There were/are a lot of websites that simply did not run ads. Hosted not for money, but "for love of the game".
This is something that was lost with the shift to exclusively platform-based hosting. A facebook page or subreddit simply is never going to be ad-free in the way that a lot of former or legacy forums were and are.
The 94/95 web had no banners. Because most of it was hosted on university servers or some random guy/company just wanted to bear the cost.
I remember the big decision on if adverts should even be allowed... Well here we are. Users get free things. Advertisers pick up most of the bill. The second that model doesnt work sites pack it up. The 'before time' could be there but servers/bandwidth/people are not free. You can minimize those but in the end someone needs to pay the electric bill.
The first step to "resurrect the old Web" would be to remove the fonts.googleapis.com dependency from your blog. It enables Google to track people across the Internet.
I do not think "old" helps a discussion and probably impedes it. A better conversation is perhaps about what features we call "old" are good and desirable. Then how we can build a new, sustainable system with those features.
Unfortunately sustainable is somewhat equivalent to money. Whatever work you do, and even if you love it, in general it needs to have a functional business model. Businesses that can financially support the people who provide them, tend to continue.
Personally, I believe this is the fundamental problem with many of the things that we now fondly think of as "old". Google groups? What was the business model? Did it make money? How could you make money from doing something like that?
The fundamental business model IRL used to be "fee for service". Not lock in. Not subscription. It works, because if people want the service they can pay for it. Okay, so hint: what are the issues of implementing fee-for-service on the internet?
hint number 2: someone mentioned banner ads in a comment. Is that fee for service? If not, for extra credit, what would be the side effects of a banner ad type business model? Are there useful services that could be provided with an alternative business model. Etc.
> what are the issues of implementing fee-for-service on the internet?
If you aren't selling porn or whatever credit card companies can't stomach, there's no problem. I recently stumbled upon a way to accept payments without the credit card companies (crypto): https://www.x402.org
> what would be the side effects of a banner ad type business model?
I remember Carbon Ads and BuySellAds being tasteful banner ad companies. I think one or both folded in recent years. In today's era, respectful banner ads probably have a niche market, especially with the prevalence of ad blockers. You'd be better off implementing x402 instead (paying for access to a resource).
But then your end-user needs to already have a crypto wallet, understand what USDC is, and so on...another niche market.
I've seen meatspace communities start to break into factions and have a rise in drama because they've gotten too big; I think that internet communities have the exact same problem. It's worsened by the fact that companies have a hard time properly moderating at scale and that companies can profit from the views from increased drama. All of the fundamentals and incentives seem to work against large scale communities.
So the "old" web that I fondly remember is smaller communities. Some of course had abject shittiness, but the communities were contained -- so shitty groups (every community can figure out what shitty is on their own) are less likely to invade your conversations.
There are, of course, significant forces working against this. Small communities require active administration and moderation. Someone technical has to maintain and pay for the service; someone has to define what an asshole is and give them the boot. And since people seem averse to paying for privacy, I don't think there are enough volunteers for this to scale. There are also huge undeniable upsides to large communities that you simply can't replicate at the small scale.
But it's the web I remember and like. Where I feel like I can get to know people and don't feel like I'm shouting into the void. Where I don't feel like my conversations are constantly interrupted by jerks that have nothing to keep them away.
The old web was great but it broke society in a different way and formed the basis of social media's current problems. Writing about your situation and expecting other people to desire to know you so much that they go out of their way to learn about you is not a substitute for 1-1 or 1-group interaction that formed the basis of human culture for centuries. If you want to do something revolutionary to start restoring a healthy society, once a day, call (or DM or text) someone from your contacts list and say "I saw something today that made me think of you, so I wanted to see how you're doing. What's new in your life?"
I like to go on a nostalgia trip every now and then as well. Loved the old forums that got taken out by social networks. Also loved the various private communities in IRC and Usenet and the blog-o-spheres I was part of and read about. But the sad reality is that its more about the community than the technology. And the communities of old mostly disbanded and moved on and restoring old tech won't bring them back.
Nowadays the main issue for me is that there are too many people in the room. Pick any social network and forum and you're an immediate misfit there. Make one edgy statements and trolls, flamers, live streamers will tear you apart. Not to mention AI tech advancements are making a not-great situation slightly worse. The internet is no longer a happy place. Its a good question if it ever were.
Forums had been better but I wonder how much is about peeple just beeing different. Nowadays people have less time and struggle more, so they favor s.th. more effortless in their free time and also are more egoistic (on average of course only).
Speaking of the "landline" thing for kids that is mentioned at the start of the post, this product is making the rounds amongst my kid's class (3rd grade). Not sure if it will catch on, but seems far too pricey for my taste, though I like the concept: https://tincan.kids/
I think it is good to separate the nostalgia from the actual valuable nugget you want to revive. Nostalgia is great for marketing but parsing the missing nugget is the important part.
I have hundreds of CDs I never got rid of and last Christmas I got my son a cheap CD player. Yes, he could have infinite music through Spotify, but what I wanted to give him was that sense of control over music. The physical element has value, which has been appreciated for a while - a lot of that comes from the purposeful interaction required to select, set up and play the music. To listen to entire albums instead of individual songs. An avenue to explore music you only sort of are interested in but give more time because of switching costs.
But more specifically, I remembered the feeling of being a kid and having my own cassette player, walking around with it and bringing music with me. It was one of the first things I owned that could modify my space and change my mood and affect those around me in a positive way. That is a powerful concept when you are little!
I think the missing element of the "old web" is having that sense of control and influence. Not huge control or huge influence, but self-directed and with some friction. Sometimes, the friction is the most important part!
I've used a lot of social networking systems over the years based on a lot of technologies. I deeply understand the nostalgia for blogs and RSS—I had a blog for many years and have used an RSS reader continuously since probably 2002. I still enjoy reading blogs to this day.
The problem with blogs, though, is that there is no great solution to limit the visibility to certain audiences. It really limits the types of things you can share. At least with Facebook, you can limit posts to your friends or groups of friends. But even that is not really practical—it's too much effort to have every person curate every other person they know into groups for access control (Remember "circles" on Google Plus? It didn't work).
I think the right model is to allow distributed communities to form organically and then use those communities for sharing permissions. By "distributed communities" I'm thinking of things like email lists, Discord servers, phpbb forums—communities where membership is symmetric and there is a shared sense of who is in the community. Blogs don't have anything like that.
I, too, felt the old web was much more creative and limitless. But to be blunt, these attempts to resurrect it feel like the opposite: another collection of 90s-style HTML and artwork about generic "old web" stuff (or about the old web itself, which makes no sense - you don't hear people today reminiscing about 2025).
I think a big problem is desensitization. When I was young, MSPaint art looked good, bitcrushed music sounded fine, and simple flash games were fun. Then the art, music, and games kept becoming more complex and higher quality, so the novelty and perceived opportunity was sustained. Now it has tapered off, so the novelty has run out and the next improvement is hard to imagine.
However, the world is so complicated and technology is still improving such that I suspect (and hope) we'll find more breakthroughs within the next decade. Personally, I'm still optimistic about VR: right now good VR is too expensive and development is too hard, but those are incrementally-solvable problems, and few people have experienced good VR (especially with motion) but I can imagine it.
Not for nothing, the last time I checked the most popular indie games on steam are all intentionally made to look vaguely 8-bit (really prob more like 64-bit, but lofi retro).
What gets a bit tiring with these nostalgia posts is that it never talks about what the web should be in practice, how we achieve it and most crucially: how do we incorporate modern web tech into it?
On top of this we also have to be honest about what is a good old web value and what is pure nostalgia.
Back in its early days it was fresh and exciting, a fun way to connect with your friends that might be far away, or make new friends online.
This doesn't sound like blogs + rss, this sounds like phpBB + AOL instant messenger. Social media is at its best when real people are interacting with real people, not when real people are interacting with a blog post/tweet/etc., (and definitely not an algorithm)...
I think youtube should not be mixed into old web. Either embed your video in website and provide download, or host it on peertube. I know about video file hosting issues and costs, so maybe use appropriatly sized videos? Low quality, low resolution, compress as much as possible, and it will probably won't take more than any average website. :)
There's no way for a video platform to work without some sort of payment. Video costs money. Thankfully, Cloudflare R2 is enough for the average blogger. You just gotta figure out how to use it.
I'm building a short-form video platform with R2 as the storage backend. I figured out transcoding but I definitely need a better server for it. The old web isn't coming back because "free" is rife for abuse.
I've embedded a video on my homepage from my platform (dogfooding). Not sure I'll share the platform here when I soft launch next week or so, HN doesn't like incomplete products.
All this to say, video with decent quality is possible for the average website.
Yeah, back in the day we used to just put a 160x120 or 320x240 .mov or .avi or whatever and link to it with a thumbnail .jpg. Ah, now I'm remembering how sometimes there would be low/med/high quality with a resolution/filesize so you know which one to grab :)
> Recently a local news station in Maine reported a story of some middle schoolers calling their friends with landline telephones.
This reflects on another problem: the sorry state of journalism and willingness to turn press releases into news. That story ran in a wide variety of media outlets, and a Google News search of "children landline phones" turns up a bunch of these.
It turns out that these articles were really ads for "Tin Can," a VoIP phone for kids. Not really a landline at all, it's seriously nerfed, and I'd assume that if it's SIP, it's locked to their service, or else it's their own proprietary protocol. Not really a surprise, given that real landlines are almost extinct, and expensive where available.
Trying to ressurect the old internet by staying limited to a platform like bear blog may be a big limitation. To me, part of what made the old internet so interesting is the expression of ideas in so many things beyond just regular blogs.
Like someone else mentioned, things like GeoCities, but also stories like Ted The Caver, neopets, etc. Blogs are great but to be honest, I get most of my stuff from mailing lists and hacker news and feel quite fine with that.
What i'd love to see more of is people building interesting experiences for the love of the game, that's what feels like builds passion and interest. But there's no returning back to the old internet in the same way, because what's interesting and what's fun to read has changed.
Something that was pointed out to me the other day: Firefox can show you "important dates" in the address bar, but they've yanked RSS support. You now need a plugin to get the RSS feed link for a site.
I miss the old web, but I'm not sure it's coming back. You can still go on Usenet as well, not sure why anyone is spending time keeping the servers running, because I can not find an active newsgroups anymore. It was nice for a time, but the future has lost it's appeal to me.
Maybe the author, and some the comments are right. I should go build an silly personal website, just in HTML, have all the pages be different styles, have silly buttons, weird Perl scripts all over the place and link to like minded people.
The "old web" never really went a way. The "new web" just got better and more engaging. I still use my rss reader as my primary way to connect to the internet, but rss has problems and the readers did not evolve to solve them. The main problems are it is easy to drown in articles and hard to discover new feeds. Social media sites solve booth of these problems with their algorithms, but rss never found a solution for that. Thats why I started my own reader https://ivyreader.com to reduce the issues rss has, because I really hope it stays.
I've never been huge into social media or even blogging when that was en vogue, but I did set up a forum on my site a little over a year ago after realising how much of a black hole for technical discussion Discord has become. I use it as an easy way to document any screwball problems I run across when working with hardware and software, and occasionally people pop in and ask questions, so I'm glad I set it up.
Something I did notice is that Google recently added Discussions and forums as a metric in the Google Search Console, and forums is now an option in the More dropdown menu on Google.com.
I was around for the leap from BBS systems to Fidonet; the bad old days when there were no such thing as graphics. I can absolutely sympathize with what's being said here, and for me, there are two primary reasons why I pine for the elder days. The systems then required some effort to gain access to which kept some of the signal to noise loss down (if you know the difference between CB radio and Ham radio, you know what I'm saying), and while commercialism's always been a part of these systems, more value was placed on content than advertising.
[+] [-] lunias|6 months ago|reply
The "old web" was McDonalds in the early 90's. This looks more like McDonalds today, maybe tomorrow it will be a Starbucks.
I run my own blog on AWS for ~a dollar a month.
[+] [-] Aeolun|6 months ago|reply
The whole transformation stems from there.
[+] [-] hoherd|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] hossbeast|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Bjorkbat|6 months ago|reply
Honestly, I kind of look back on blogging unfavorably. Before that people made websites to showcase their interests and hobbies, and because of that even the most basic looking websites could have a lot of "color" to them. Then blogging became a thing and people's websites became bland and minimalist. Arguably blogging culture is as responsible for the death of creativity on the internet as much as the constraints of mobile-friendly web design and Apple's aforementioned killing of Flash.
[+] [-] rootsudo|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] rufus_foreman|6 months ago|reply
McDonald's then vs. now: https://x.com/JamesLucasIT/status/1903891272496029709
Millenial gray.
[+] [-] AznHisoka|6 months ago|reply
Check? More like actual dollar bills stuffed inside a piece of paper inside an envelope, so nobody could see what it was
[+] [-] NetOpWibby|6 months ago|reply
Can I read your blog? Mine is https://blog.webb.page.
[+] [-] mtillman|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] pif|6 months ago|reply
You mean 80. Ports after 1024 were for wimps.
[+] [-] wiether|6 months ago|reply
If anything else, if one wants to resurrect the "Old Web", one shouldn't do it on someone else's platform.
Parts of the "Old Web" disappeared when the platforms hosting it stopped.
The brutal shutting down of Typepad should be another reminder of this reality: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/08/one-time-wordpress-c...
[+] [-] HermanMartinus|6 months ago|reply
I think as long as platforms have an easy way for people to backup and migrate, that's fair.
Additionally, part of the appeal of Bear is that I've made it my personal mission to get the platform to outlive me. Take that as you will. I can't prove that Bear will live on in perpetuity, but I can try my best.
[+] [-] onion2k|6 months ago|reply
I don't know what "Old Web" the author is remembering but when I was first paid to make a website in 1997, it had banner ads on it.
[+] [-] CIPHERSTONE|6 months ago|reply
Want no ads, start browsing gopher sites. No ads there. Or find people making blogs just because they want to. They exist. Github + Jekyll is a great option for free static blogging if your willing to spend a little time getting it setup and learning something new.
[+] [-] FuriouslyAdrift|6 months ago|reply
Same thing with the "old web." It was about the very early 90s before Netscape Navigator (the Mosaic days) and when everyone was just throwing up a single HTML page with a bunch of links... that's the "old web".
The modern WWW kicked off with the ability to make credit card transactions online (1994). That... and porn (1995).
For "old web" sites that still exist, check out wiby
https://wiby.org/
[+] [-] 2THFairy|6 months ago|reply
But the author isn't entirely wrong. There were/are a lot of websites that simply did not run ads. Hosted not for money, but "for love of the game".
This is something that was lost with the shift to exclusively platform-based hosting. A facebook page or subreddit simply is never going to be ad-free in the way that a lot of former or legacy forums were and are.
[+] [-] davey48016|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] sumtechguy|6 months ago|reply
I remember the big decision on if adverts should even be allowed... Well here we are. Users get free things. Advertisers pick up most of the bill. The second that model doesnt work sites pack it up. The 'before time' could be there but servers/bandwidth/people are not free. You can minimize those but in the end someone needs to pay the electric bill.
[+] [-] corytheboyd|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] NetOpWibby|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] drnick1|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] leptons|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Kovah|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] akho|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] talkingtab|6 months ago|reply
Unfortunately sustainable is somewhat equivalent to money. Whatever work you do, and even if you love it, in general it needs to have a functional business model. Businesses that can financially support the people who provide them, tend to continue.
Personally, I believe this is the fundamental problem with many of the things that we now fondly think of as "old". Google groups? What was the business model? Did it make money? How could you make money from doing something like that?
The fundamental business model IRL used to be "fee for service". Not lock in. Not subscription. It works, because if people want the service they can pay for it. Okay, so hint: what are the issues of implementing fee-for-service on the internet?
hint number 2: someone mentioned banner ads in a comment. Is that fee for service? If not, for extra credit, what would be the side effects of a banner ad type business model? Are there useful services that could be provided with an alternative business model. Etc.
[+] [-] NetOpWibby|6 months ago|reply
If you aren't selling porn or whatever credit card companies can't stomach, there's no problem. I recently stumbled upon a way to accept payments without the credit card companies (crypto): https://www.x402.org
> what would be the side effects of a banner ad type business model?
I remember Carbon Ads and BuySellAds being tasteful banner ad companies. I think one or both folded in recent years. In today's era, respectful banner ads probably have a niche market, especially with the prevalence of ad blockers. You'd be better off implementing x402 instead (paying for access to a resource).
But then your end-user needs to already have a crypto wallet, understand what USDC is, and so on...another niche market.
[+] [-] NegativeK|6 months ago|reply
So the "old" web that I fondly remember is smaller communities. Some of course had abject shittiness, but the communities were contained -- so shitty groups (every community can figure out what shitty is on their own) are less likely to invade your conversations.
There are, of course, significant forces working against this. Small communities require active administration and moderation. Someone technical has to maintain and pay for the service; someone has to define what an asshole is and give them the boot. And since people seem averse to paying for privacy, I don't think there are enough volunteers for this to scale. There are also huge undeniable upsides to large communities that you simply can't replicate at the small scale.
But it's the web I remember and like. Where I feel like I can get to know people and don't feel like I'm shouting into the void. Where I don't feel like my conversations are constantly interrupted by jerks that have nothing to keep them away.
[+] [-] drewchew|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] crnkofe|6 months ago|reply
Nowadays the main issue for me is that there are too many people in the room. Pick any social network and forum and you're an immediate misfit there. Make one edgy statements and trolls, flamers, live streamers will tear you apart. Not to mention AI tech advancements are making a not-great situation slightly worse. The internet is no longer a happy place. Its a good question if it ever were.
[+] [-] randomNumber7|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] NetOpWibby|6 months ago|reply
I still remember being excited to “go online.” So yeah, it was (for me).
[+] [-] lubujackson|6 months ago|reply
I think it is good to separate the nostalgia from the actual valuable nugget you want to revive. Nostalgia is great for marketing but parsing the missing nugget is the important part.
I have hundreds of CDs I never got rid of and last Christmas I got my son a cheap CD player. Yes, he could have infinite music through Spotify, but what I wanted to give him was that sense of control over music. The physical element has value, which has been appreciated for a while - a lot of that comes from the purposeful interaction required to select, set up and play the music. To listen to entire albums instead of individual songs. An avenue to explore music you only sort of are interested in but give more time because of switching costs.
But more specifically, I remembered the feeling of being a kid and having my own cassette player, walking around with it and bringing music with me. It was one of the first things I owned that could modify my space and change my mood and affect those around me in a positive way. That is a powerful concept when you are little!
I think the missing element of the "old web" is having that sense of control and influence. Not huge control or huge influence, but self-directed and with some friction. Sometimes, the friction is the most important part!
[+] [-] nickm12|6 months ago|reply
The problem with blogs, though, is that there is no great solution to limit the visibility to certain audiences. It really limits the types of things you can share. At least with Facebook, you can limit posts to your friends or groups of friends. But even that is not really practical—it's too much effort to have every person curate every other person they know into groups for access control (Remember "circles" on Google Plus? It didn't work).
I think the right model is to allow distributed communities to form organically and then use those communities for sharing permissions. By "distributed communities" I'm thinking of things like email lists, Discord servers, phpbb forums—communities where membership is symmetric and there is a shared sense of who is in the community. Blogs don't have anything like that.
[+] [-] armchairhacker|6 months ago|reply
I think a big problem is desensitization. When I was young, MSPaint art looked good, bitcrushed music sounded fine, and simple flash games were fun. Then the art, music, and games kept becoming more complex and higher quality, so the novelty and perceived opportunity was sustained. Now it has tapered off, so the novelty has run out and the next improvement is hard to imagine.
However, the world is so complicated and technology is still improving such that I suspect (and hope) we'll find more breakthroughs within the next decade. Personally, I'm still optimistic about VR: right now good VR is too expensive and development is too hard, but those are incrementally-solvable problems, and few people have experienced good VR (especially with motion) but I can imagine it.
[+] [-] nativeit|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] 0dayz|6 months ago|reply
On top of this we also have to be honest about what is a good old web value and what is pure nostalgia.
[+] [-] dfxm12|6 months ago|reply
This doesn't sound like blogs + rss, this sounds like phpBB + AOL instant messenger. Social media is at its best when real people are interacting with real people, not when real people are interacting with a blog post/tweet/etc., (and definitely not an algorithm)...
[+] [-] NetOpWibby|6 months ago|reply
Man, what a time.
[+] [-] AndrewStephens|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] dmortin|6 months ago|reply
Why can't at least tech people use only traditional forums which are easily searchable, readable without login, etc?
[+] [-] butz|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] NetOpWibby|6 months ago|reply
I'm building a short-form video platform with R2 as the storage backend. I figured out transcoding but I definitely need a better server for it. The old web isn't coming back because "free" is rife for abuse.
I've embedded a video on my homepage from my platform (dogfooding). Not sure I'll share the platform here when I soft launch next week or so, HN doesn't like incomplete products.
All this to say, video with decent quality is possible for the average website.
[+] [-] amatecha|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] flyinghamster|6 months ago|reply
This reflects on another problem: the sorry state of journalism and willingness to turn press releases into news. That story ran in a wide variety of media outlets, and a Google News search of "children landline phones" turns up a bunch of these.
It turns out that these articles were really ads for "Tin Can," a VoIP phone for kids. Not really a landline at all, it's seriously nerfed, and I'd assume that if it's SIP, it's locked to their service, or else it's their own proprietary protocol. Not really a surprise, given that real landlines are almost extinct, and expensive where available.
[+] [-] endymion-light|6 months ago|reply
Like someone else mentioned, things like GeoCities, but also stories like Ted The Caver, neopets, etc. Blogs are great but to be honest, I get most of my stuff from mailing lists and hacker news and feel quite fine with that.
What i'd love to see more of is people building interesting experiences for the love of the game, that's what feels like builds passion and interest. But there's no returning back to the old internet in the same way, because what's interesting and what's fun to read has changed.
[+] [-] mrweasel|6 months ago|reply
I miss the old web, but I'm not sure it's coming back. You can still go on Usenet as well, not sure why anyone is spending time keeping the servers running, because I can not find an active newsgroups anymore. It was nice for a time, but the future has lost it's appeal to me.
Maybe the author, and some the comments are right. I should go build an silly personal website, just in HTML, have all the pages be different styles, have silly buttons, weird Perl scripts all over the place and link to like minded people.
[+] [-] not--felix|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Venn1|6 months ago|reply
Something I did notice is that Google recently added Discussions and forums as a metric in the Google Search Console, and forums is now an option in the More dropdown menu on Google.com.
[+] [-] lockranore2|6 months ago|reply