8 ms·

The old internet is still there, it's still growing. It's just covered in a thick layer of corporate shit sites. All you have to do is be the change you want to

The old internet is still there, it's still growing. It's just covered in a thick layer of corporate shit sites. All you have to do is be the change you want to see. Start hosting your website from home. Code it by hand. Don't use any javascript frontends. It's a good time. As for finding others, well, HN isn't a bad place to start. Just install an RSS reader client and every time you find yourself enjoying an article check the site to see if it has an RSS feed. In fact, do this with every web interaction. Pretty soon you can completely decouple yourself from content aggregators and start perceiving the web as a community again.

vinylkey 7y ago
> Don't use any javascript frontends. I'm struggling to find the connection between a Javascript front end and content that has (to quote the article posted) "the voice of individuals"
- superkuh 7y ago
 If you use the same JS frontend as everyone else it isn't very individual and form constrains content. The reason people use JS frontends is because they're at work being paid to do it. Time and the ability for your coworkers to contribute matters. You don't have to bring these compromises forced on you at work to home.
 - danjac 7y ago
 > The reason people use JS frontends is because they're at work being paid to do it And of course employability and the need for buzzwords on your resume.
 - krapp 7y ago
 >If you use the same JS frontend as everyone else it isn't very individual and form constrains content. You seem to be confusing the implementation of a site with its content, and assuming that homogeneity of layout corresponds to homogeneity of content. It's an understandable bias to find in a community of programmers and web developers, but it isn't true. The pages of a book are uniformly sized, generally speaking uniformly colored with one of a very narrow set of fonts and typefaces, spaced and typeset according to an industry standard - and yet this places no constraint at all on the nature of the content that can be displayed within those pages. In the same way, a website rendering content on the frontend rather than the backend is an implementation detail which has nothing to do with what content is rendered. And even in the 90s, many sites looked similar. Rather than having standard templates focused around typography, people just copied what other sites were doing, using the same table-based layouts with black backgrounds and GIFS, and none of that necessarily made the content any better than what exists today.
- amiga-workbench 7y ago
 Because getting content on the web is only as difficult as people make it, and beneath all the bloat of "modern front end development practices" there is still a simple set of tools to work with.
 - PinkMilkshake 7y ago
 Exactly. You can basically pick any subset of web technologies and just use those. And honestly, when teaching the average person how to make a website, they should just be taught the minimum required to make a valid HTML document. I think it's something like: <!DOCTYPE html> <title>My first webpage</title> Hello, World!
 - esotericn 7y ago
 More like: Hello, World!
 - amiga-workbench 7y ago
 HTML is bloat :)
 - rchaud 7y ago
 You can create a free account or a site on blogspot or Wordpress with significantly less friction. That is still a full-fledged website, and not an IG page or Twitter that's a walled garden serving only logged in users. In this day and age, nobody is going to bother with writing HTML markup when they've used rich text editors to compose everything from emails to Tumblr posts. Back in the early 2000s I used to write music reviews for a site called Epinions. They didn't have a rich text editor, so if you wanted to do bold, you needed to wrap those words in a tag, or tag for italics. It was extremely irritating to have to do that, especially if you were pasting in the content from a pre-existing Word doc that already had all the proper formatting.
- kerkeslager 7y ago
 JavaScript is the first path down a road that leads to tracking and ads and optimization. It's too easy to think, "I'll just serve this JS library off X CDN" and voila, you've enabled someone to track your users. "No JavaScript" keeps you honest.
Sohcahtoa82 7y ago
> Start hosting your website from home. This isn't feasible for a large chunk of the population, mainly because ISPs like Comcast love to give you 500 mbps down while limiting your upload to a pitiful 10 mbps. Host a single 100K image that hits the front page of reddit and your home internet gets hugged to death.
- WilliamEdward 7y ago
  Any way around this? Surely i don't need an industrial setup to scale my home website
  - IanCal 7y ago
    You don't, the reality is it's extremely unlikely this happens and if it does the worst outcome is high bandwidth use + the image doesn't load for everyone. Hardly the end of the world. You can very easily host things on a paid server though, which these days cost very little, use another image host or S3/similar when if things went crazy popular.
    - Sohcahtoa82 7y ago
      > worst outcome is high bandwidth use + the image doesn't load for everyone. Hardly the end of the world. No, the worst outcome is that your home internet connection is being effectively DDoSed. You could probably apply some QoS on your router to minimize the effect, of course.
  - GreenJelloShot 7y ago
    Free Cloudflare account
    - Sohcahtoa82 7y ago
      As I'm mentioning in other comments, then you wouldn't be hosting from home.
- superkuh 7y ago
NeedMoreTea 7y ago
https://millionshort.com/ https://millionshort.com/ lets you exclude that thick layer of corporate shite. Search without the top million (or 100k, 10k etc) sites. !mill from DDG. Not perfect but often turns up those personal homepages, hobby sites and esoterica the early internet thrived on. Stuff that Google and co forgot existed - or is down on page 200+
- cannam 7y ago
  Ooh, that's nice. I'm definitely using that. Thank you.
- agumonkey 7y ago
  oh yeah, such a funny and nice idea :)
dencodev 7y ago
Shameless self plug but I did a simple site recently to this effect (though it is hosted on a free Heroku account): http://iwillansweryouremails.com http://iwillansweryouremails.com I like that I'm not tracking anyone, it doesn't require UI/UX, I have little to nothing to gain from it - it's just a human connection. Something fun we might have seen in the early years of the internet.
- keyle 7y ago
  That's fun, well done!
ImprovedSilence 7y ago
So much this. Unfortunately post google reader I never found an rss reader that really clicked with me as much. Part of it is because I followed a mix of text and just pure image sites, and par of it is the sites come and go and I haven’t found new sites. RIP ffffound and the like...
- martin_a 7y ago
  I set up my own FreshRSS instance. Maybe not like Google Reader but I find it better than nothing.
- account42 7y ago
  tt-rss works well enough for me as a google reader replacement Better even since it has plugins to inline some comic strips where the RSS feeds are just links to the pages.
- 5bolts 7y ago
  inoreader is about the only one that gave me the reader feel that i've liked
ALittleLight 7y ago
I've been missing the old internet. A little while ago I tried to find StumbleUpon and discovered it's transformed into more of a social media thing. I took a couple days to recreate what I thought of as the core StumbleUpon functionality - click button, get random site. And I've been trying to aggregate what feel like unique, individual, not well known sites into my index for it. https://stumblingon.com https://stumblingon.com It currently gets about ten unique visitors and one or two submissions a day.
- kristofferR 7y ago
  Awesome site! It would be cool if you made the button linkable, so you can bookmark it and get a random URL each time.
  - jciochon 7y ago
    Yeah, or a quick firefox addon like stumble used to have!
    - ALittleLight 7y ago
      Thanks - I have thought about a browser add-on. Making it work based off a link seems like an easy upgrade too. I'll add it on to my to-do list for the site.
- kerkeslager 7y ago
  This is great! Thanks for making this!
- KnMn 7y ago
  I used to love StumbleUpon. I haven't thought about it for years. Thanks so much for making this. Let me know if you need an extra human to moderate submissions or whatever :)
dingus 7y ago
We need our personal websites to start linking directly to each other again… friends, coworkers, mentors, related topics, etc… This trend died out, it used to be on practically every website. Maybe people just figured Google would find and sort everything for them. But now the search engines are packed with SEO garbage and offer no discoverability or serendipity. Time to start sharing homemade link lists again.
InvisibleUp 7y ago
Neocities[1] and tilde servers like tilde.town[2] is a pretty large hub of old-internet sites. It's a free Geocities-like host that's home to a lot of neat, creative sites. You can also get a VPS for about $5/mo and have your own self-hosted server with whatever servers and web apps you want, like an RSS reader, an IRC client, FTP/Gopher server, etc. (Shameless self plug: this is what I do with my own personal site, https://invisibleup.com https://invisibleup.com) [1] https://neocities.org https://neocities.org [2] https://tilde.town https://tilde.town
- jeannekamikaze 7y ago
  This is great, thanks for sharing. It's great to see a community like Neocities come to life with no ads and no bullshit.

vinylkey 7y ago

> Don't use any javascript frontends. I'm struggling to find the connection between a Javascript front end and content that has (to quote the article posted) "the voice of individuals"

superkuh 7y ago
If you use the same JS frontend as everyone else it isn't very individual and form constrains content. The reason people use JS frontends is because they're at work being paid to do it. Time and the ability for your coworkers to contribute matters. You don't have to bring these compromises forced on you at work to home.
- danjac 7y ago
  > The reason people use JS frontends is because they're at work being paid to do it And of course employability and the need for buzzwords on your resume.
- krapp 7y ago
  >If you use the same JS frontend as everyone else it isn't very individual and form constrains content. You seem to be confusing the implementation of a site with its content, and assuming that homogeneity of layout corresponds to homogeneity of content. It's an understandable bias to find in a community of programmers and web developers, but it isn't true. The pages of a book are uniformly sized, generally speaking uniformly colored with one of a very narrow set of fonts and typefaces, spaced and typeset according to an industry standard - and yet this places no constraint at all on the nature of the content that can be displayed within those pages. In the same way, a website rendering content on the frontend rather than the backend is an implementation detail which has nothing to do with what content is rendered. And even in the 90s, many sites looked similar. Rather than having standard templates focused around typography, people just copied what other sites were doing, using the same table-based layouts with black backgrounds and GIFS, and none of that necessarily made the content any better than what exists today.
amiga-workbench 7y ago
Because getting content on the web is only as difficult as people make it, and beneath all the bloat of "modern front end development practices" there is still a simple set of tools to work with.
- PinkMilkshake 7y ago
 Exactly. You can basically pick any subset of web technologies and just use those. And honestly, when teaching the average person how to make a website, they should just be taught the minimum required to make a valid HTML document. I think it's something like: <!DOCTYPE html> <title>My first webpage</title> Hello, World!
 - esotericn 7y ago
 More like: Hello, World!
 - amiga-workbench 7y ago
 HTML is bloat :)
 - rchaud 7y ago
 You can create a free account or a site on blogspot or Wordpress with significantly less friction. That is still a full-fledged website, and not an IG page or Twitter that's a walled garden serving only logged in users. In this day and age, nobody is going to bother with writing HTML markup when they've used rich text editors to compose everything from emails to Tumblr posts. Back in the early 2000s I used to write music reviews for a site called Epinions. They didn't have a rich text editor, so if you wanted to do bold, you needed to wrap those words in a tag, or tag for italics. It was extremely irritating to have to do that, especially if you were pasting in the content from a pre-existing Word doc that already had all the proper formatting.
kerkeslager 7y ago
JavaScript is the first path down a road that leads to tracking and ads and optimization. It's too easy to think, "I'll just serve this JS library off X CDN" and voila, you've enabled someone to track your users. "No JavaScript" keeps you honest.

Sohcahtoa82 7y ago

> Start hosting your website from home. This isn't feasible for a large chunk of the population, mainly because ISPs like Comcast love to give you 500 mbps down while limiting your upload to a pitiful 10 mbps. Host a single 100K image that hits the front page of reddit and your home internet gets hugged to death.

WilliamEdward 7y ago
Any way around this? Surely i don't need an industrial setup to scale my home website
- IanCal 7y ago
  You don't, the reality is it's extremely unlikely this happens and if it does the worst outcome is high bandwidth use + the image doesn't load for everyone. Hardly the end of the world. You can very easily host things on a paid server though, which these days cost very little, use another image host or S3/similar when if things went crazy popular.
  - Sohcahtoa82 7y ago
    > worst outcome is high bandwidth use + the image doesn't load for everyone. Hardly the end of the world. No, the worst outcome is that your home internet connection is being effectively DDoSed. You could probably apply some QoS on your router to minimize the effect, of course.
- GreenJelloShot 7y ago
  Free Cloudflare account
  - Sohcahtoa82 7y ago
    As I'm mentioning in other comments, then you wouldn't be hosting from home.
superkuh 7y ago

NeedMoreTea 7y ago

https://millionshort.com/ https://millionshort.com/ lets you exclude that thick layer of corporate shite. Search without the top million (or 100k, 10k etc) sites. !mill from DDG. Not perfect but often turns up those personal homepages, hobby sites and esoterica the early internet thrived on. Stuff that Google and co forgot existed - or is down on page 200+

cannam 7y ago
Ooh, that's nice. I'm definitely using that. Thank you.
agumonkey 7y ago
oh yeah, such a funny and nice idea :)

dencodev 7y ago

Shameless self plug but I did a simple site recently to this effect (though it is hosted on a free Heroku account): http://iwillansweryouremails.com http://iwillansweryouremails.com I like that I'm not tracking anyone, it doesn't require UI/UX, I have little to nothing to gain from it - it's just a human connection. Something fun we might have seen in the early years of the internet.

keyle 7y ago
That's fun, well done!

ImprovedSilence 7y ago

So much this. Unfortunately post google reader I never found an rss reader that really clicked with me as much. Part of it is because I followed a mix of text and just pure image sites, and par of it is the sites come and go and I haven’t found new sites. RIP ffffound and the like...

martin_a 7y ago
I set up my own FreshRSS instance. Maybe not like Google Reader but I find it better than nothing.
account42 7y ago
tt-rss works well enough for me as a google reader replacement Better even since it has plugins to inline some comic strips where the RSS feeds are just links to the pages.
5bolts 7y ago
inoreader is about the only one that gave me the reader feel that i've liked

ALittleLight 7y ago

I've been missing the old internet. A little while ago I tried to find StumbleUpon and discovered it's transformed into more of a social media thing. I took a couple days to recreate what I thought of as the core StumbleUpon functionality - click button, get random site. And I've been trying to aggregate what feel like unique, individual, not well known sites into my index for it. https://stumblingon.com https://stumblingon.com It currently gets about ten unique visitors and one or two submissions a day.

kristofferR 7y ago
Awesome site! It would be cool if you made the button linkable, so you can bookmark it and get a random URL each time.
- jciochon 7y ago
  Yeah, or a quick firefox addon like stumble used to have!
  - ALittleLight 7y ago
    Thanks - I have thought about a browser add-on. Making it work based off a link seems like an easy upgrade too. I'll add it on to my to-do list for the site.
kerkeslager 7y ago
This is great! Thanks for making this!
KnMn 7y ago
I used to love StumbleUpon. I haven't thought about it for years. Thanks so much for making this. Let me know if you need an extra human to moderate submissions or whatever :)

dingus 7y ago

We need our personal websites to start linking directly to each other again… friends, coworkers, mentors, related topics, etc… This trend died out, it used to be on practically every website. Maybe people just figured Google would find and sort everything for them. But now the search engines are packed with SEO garbage and offer no discoverability or serendipity. Time to start sharing homemade link lists again.

InvisibleUp 7y ago

Neocities[1] and tilde servers like tilde.town[2] is a pretty large hub of old-internet sites. It's a free Geocities-like host that's home to a lot of neat, creative sites. You can also get a VPS for about $5/mo and have your own self-hosted server with whatever servers and web apps you want, like an RSS reader, an IRC client, FTP/Gopher server, etc. (Shameless self plug: this is what I do with my own personal site, https://invisibleup.com https://invisibleup.com) [1] https://neocities.org https://neocities.org [2] https://tilde.town https://tilde.town

jeannekamikaze 7y ago
This is great, thanks for sharing. It's great to see a community like Neocities come to life with no ads and no bullshit.