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The old internet died long before these centralized services appeared. The old internet was when we ran our own servers, built and hosted our own websites, and

The old internet died long before these centralized services appeared. The old internet was when we ran our own servers, built and hosted our own websites, and we were truly free in the wild wild west. Its easier than ever to run your own servers, but today few do. The old internet is dead (for now) and it looks more like the BBS era today. But we innovated past that then, and we will innovate past that now. I am greatly looking forward to all of the decentralization work that is in progress from the numerous people on HN and the internet.

shantly 7y ago
If we want a (return to the) boom in open-source and paid standards-based solutions, we gotta ban collecting & monetizing user info. Monetized user info & related advertising paying for "free" walled services are keeping those down. We won't see widely-successful standards-based social networks or messaging services until that option is gone. [EDIT] and wide success/adoption matters for those in particular because much of their utility is in "everyone's on it" (where "it" may be some other, but interoperable, service)
- zozbot234 7y ago
  The "old" internet was all static or lightly server-rendered pages, that can be developed and hosted at minimal cost today. Back in the day we didn't expect that "everyone" would sign up for whatever niche forum you were hosting, it was enough to have "everyone who's into that niche". These services don't need "monetization", they can be kept up with minimal amounts of crowdfunding, while federating through well-known standards (ActivityPub, etc.) can help them achieve a network effect that might ultimately rival the big walled gardens and incent them to open up in turn.
  - shantly 7y ago
    Sure, and those old sorts of forums still exist (well, the ones that didn't get eaten by Reddit and Facebook—OK, so I guess they kinda don't) but if you want the Web as it exists for most people to go back to standards and competing paid & free+libre solutions, I'm pretty sure banning spyvertising is gonna be a necessary, since those are the two main "services" most people use online, other than email (the rest is mostly shopping and reading news-type sites, both of which would also be improved by banning spyvertising).
  - icedchai 7y ago
    The actual "old" Internet is the stuff that predated the web: Gopher, IRC, Usenet, MUDs, Public Access Unix systems, telnet...
    - rasengan 7y ago
      I agree with this. It was when we designed protocols with consensus thru RFC, and apps communicating with those protocols.
      - shantly 7y ago
        And companies started dropping that when it became very important to their business model that they maximize the amount of data they can collect about a user. 3rd party clients for my service? Unacceptable, can't spy on the user as much there, and can't advertise at them. Communicating with users on other services? Unacceptable, I need those users on my service so I can spy on them too, and besides those other services won't talk to mine for the same reasons.
        sneakernets 7y ago
        Don't know why you're being downvoted when this is exactly the case in my experience. They never said "spying" outright but it's definitely why walled gardens like AOL popped up like wildfire in the 90s and why stuff like AIM was the exception and not the rule.
        lubujackson 7y ago
        AOL was not about spying on you, it was about collecting that sweet monthly fee. And anyone who lauds Apple for bringing tech to the masses should consider that AOL did the exact same thing for the Internet and really brought a glimpse of the Internet (not just the web!) to the people. Yes, real techies might want to install their IRC client of choice and fine tune settings and all that, but Grandma just wanted to click on Chat from her home screen, go to the "Recipes Room" and talk about cookies. It was the same "less choice/more consistency" of technology that let Apple get so big, with the same huge mass appeal (but with less panache).
  - chongli 7y ago
    The problem isn’t hosting, it’s discovery. Discovery was easy on the old internet because we weren’t yet drowning in spam, link farms, and cloned/scraped pages. To bring the old internet back we need search that filters out all that commercial noise and we can’t rely on Google et al to build it. Why not? Because those companies have a conflict of interest due to their ad-driven business model. A new “Old Internet” needs to be non commercial. I don’t know how we do that.
    - zozbot234 7y ago
      Bring back webrings, "favorite links" pages and the ODP/DMOZ. Good niche forums (both on Usenet and elsewhere) tended to gather FAQs and information pages that would ultimately aid discovery. That whole dynamic is quite dead these days.
      - chongli 7y ago
        Webrings were great but you still need search as a starting point. Now we've got all this spam out there which essentially creates fake webrings (private blog networks [1]) as a form of black hat SEO. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_farm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_farm
    - naravara 7y ago
      I feel like content discovery in those days didn't primarily happen via search so much as word-of-mouth though. Blogs kept a blogroll on the side which had an overlapping network of other bloggers, people in IRC channels or BBSes would recommend other places for you to check out if you were interested in something, webcomics would host guest strips so other artists could cross-promote each other, etc. In that respect, I feel like Reddit and Instagram are much bigger culprit than Google for sucking up all of the space for socializing and referrals. At one point several of the forums I was on all basically just focused on linking to or talking about Reddit posts, which is when I realized those forums were not long for this world.
      - shantly 7y ago
- ekianjo 7y ago
  > we gotta ban collecting & monetizing user info anything that runs across a network can be monitored, and such data is valuable when you are able to merge it across several data sources. It's very unlikely tracking can even be banned or un-monitized.
  - shantly 7y ago
    Making it illegal so no legitimate business can do it without incredible risk of being sued/charged out of existence seems quite feasible.
    - AndrewUnmuted 7y ago
      You really don’t think companies would figure out a way around any such “illegality” or just use it anti competitively as is being done throughout the EU with its ham-handed policies?
      - shantly 7y ago
        I find this kind of defeatism entirely baffling. Regulating corporations is hard so we shouldn't try? This is a lot less complicated than many sorts of regulation we attempt. Just give up on all of it, it's pointless? Where's the bottom on this line of thought?
        AndrewUnmuted 7y ago
        Yes, it's pointless. There is nothing illegal about what is going on now, and nothing which should be illegal about what is going on. In this context, "regulating" simply means making a behavior we didn't see coming illegal. It's a short-sighted, unimaginative, and blatantly violent way to solve a problem which stems entirely from the consumer public, not from big bad corporations. It will be used by major corps as an anti-competitive weapon against smaller up-start competition - an outcome we should expect from all such attempts at "regulating" the tech oligarchy.
        7y ago
StavrosK 7y ago
The problem is economies of scale, as it's easier to pay someone who specializes in that sort of thing to host your things for you than to do it yourself. Even I, a nerd who otherwise loves the old internet, don't self-host my website but use a provider (Neocities). When you compare learning HTML/CSS to make your own, quirky, beautiful website with spending five seconds making a Facebook/whatnot page, convenience will almost always win.
7777fps 7y ago
It's easier than ever to rent your own servers, it's harder than ever to run your own servers. There was a time when you could serve anything from a home ISP connection.
- rasengan 7y ago
  Agreed. I still remember though being on dialup and using a UUCP method of mail receipt and delivery since I didnt have 24/7 connectivity. It was hard. With everyone on 24/7 cable connections, I really did expect something different. Its too bad IPv6 isnt taking off like it could and should.
- LargoLasskhyfv 7y ago
  Why are you all writing that? See [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21926228 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21926228 please.
w0m 7y ago
> we ran our own servers, built and hosted our own websites .. Like... the AOL days? GeoCities? Different bubbles we've moved to
- LinuxBender 7y ago
  One of those was forked and is alive and well. Neocitites [1] [1] - https://neocities.org/ https://neocities.org/
foobarian 7y ago
I feel like the ratios changed a lot which makes it seem like the old Internet died. But there are probably more people running their own servers than there used to be. It's just that that makes up just something like 1% of the user community instead of 100%. "The old internet" is what you got when only nerds were online. Replicate that and you got your old internet back. Cue the above mentioned decentralization work...
- anongraddebt 7y ago
  This comment should be at the top of the thread.
- xg15 7y ago
  I feel the ratio is the important thing - at least if your goal is to let the broader society benefit from your work and not just an ivory tower of people with similar background. In that regard, the "nerds" utterly failed. We're looking back at the "old" internet with some kind of sentimental sadness, but we've evidently failed to convince the general public that a noncommercial, decentralised internet is the way to go.
  - shadowgovt 7y ago
    The UX on the old Internet was terrible, and I remember a solid generation of veteran users telling newbies to RTFM instead of either putting the hard work in to educate or improve the UX of the toolchain so education was less necessary (work that is hard because it is less about understanding the code and more about understanding how users think and why they don't think like the developer of the protocol or application). Average users who don't have the time to understand IPs, sockets, or authentication schemas have been served by companies willing to shoulder the burden of relieving them of those special-knowledge requirements.
    - ohyes 7y ago
      And terrible UX was a feature to some extent. The people who got through it put in some effort to do so, so it filtered out a lot of low effort people. (Think about all the garbage on reddit, facebook, twitter). Average users aren't necessarily the people I want to interact with on a daily basis. It's like an advanced version of a captcha. Maybe I'll make a technology and discussions site that is purposefully difficult to connect to. Maybe I won't use a standard protocol and you'll have to use netcat & gpg to read / upload posts or something absurd like that.
netcan 7y ago
The article doesn't necessarily mean "old internet" in terms of internet culture or even the hosted services & structure of as such. She's talking about content, though most big swaths of that content was hosted on services, proprietary platforms or whatnot. It's a noteworthy point. Over the last decade or two there has been quite a bit of churn and not much archiving. You can kind of estimate a default rate of social media bitrot, linkrot or whatnot...
Timberwolf 7y ago
I thought similar. To me what Buzzfeed are calling the "old Internet" here is something I very much remember bemoaning as the "new Internet" in which dedicated protocols such as NNTP and IRC got displaced by brattish commercial upstarts whose web-based versions had 10% of the quality-of-life features and about 5% of the community etiquette. However they displaced everything that came before them because you could embed images, have an animated avatar and (most importantly) not have to delve into the world of finding a client of choice and connecting it to your ISP's news servers. What I find myself missing more than anything else is that news server was something you paid for, either as part of an ISP package, as a dedicated service or your university tuition fees. The commercial model was purely the provision of that resource - not selling your data, nor being a vector for targeted political ads. There was no incentive to make the basic mechanics of discussion worse or promote flame wars in the name of "engagement" or "monetisation", and while I'm sure the smaller community size played a part things seemed to bump along with a far greater degree of civility and allowance for misunderstanding.
- flir 7y ago
  You've put your finger on something important - innovation moved from collaborative protocols to antagonistic web sites, and we're all the poorer for it.
  - rasengan 7y ago
    Exactly. The protocol era was hijacked for profit. I believe that incentivized, decentralized protocols are the evolution of all of this and will bring the protocol era back AND properly incentivizes participants.
    - api 7y ago
      I hope so, but if you mean cryptocurrency wake me up when there is more to it than speculation and gambling. Other than the "wire transfer" classic use case for Bitcoin I see nothing new that anyone is actually using that is not one of those two things.
tiborsaas 7y ago
I do build my websites, I do run my servers and I still feel like in the wild west. Noise increased however by orders of magnitudes thanks to social media that's why you don't see the "old internet"
agumonkey 7y ago
Was it really a matter of self hosting ? or a matter of what people meant by "web" ? early internet had no strong goal, but when it became a soil for a new economy the vibe changed from genuine, wild and funny to structure and optimized (for business, for users it's de-optimized).
papito 7y ago
TTT
shadowgovt 7y ago
I honestly don't think the decentralization is going to succeed. Most users prefer the benefits of centralization and aren't concerned with the drawbacks. Replacing the occasional collapse of a big central service with the low-grade noise of a distributed service run by a thousand unrelated sysadmins isn't going to be improved UX for most users, so most users won't sign up.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  E-mail and Usenet (or even Fidonet, for that matter) were a vast UX improvement over Compuserve. Today's monopolized walled gardens are more like that Compuserve of old than a truly open ecosystem.
  - shadowgovt 7y ago
    But I believe th UX of the modern monetized wallef garden would also have displaced CompuServe. Maybe CompuServe is a bad example because their UX was just poor (and they survived in an era of near zero competition).
to0w1r3d 7y ago
RFC 1436 Gopher - the joy http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?a=gopher%3A%2F%2Fhngopher.com%2F http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?a=gopher%3A%2F%2Fhngoph...
AndrewKemendo 7y ago
The "old internet" isn't dead. It just looks dead, because the BILLIONS of people who joined the internet since 2002 simply never venture outside of the major centralized services. There are more privately run servers, self hosted websites and bb's now than there were back then. Its cheaper, safer and easier to start and run your own network and service today than ever. So in aggregate, there is 100x (1000x?) the niche, kooky, wierd, fun, specific internet that we had in 1997. But there is also 10^5x the giant consolidated internet that most people see.
- keiferski 7y ago
  But this doesn’t factor in that smaller communities have been eaten by the bigger sites. Reddit, for example, has replaced hundreds of niche topic forums in the past decade, and done a rather poor job doing so, in my opinion.
  - TulliusCicero 7y ago
    The advantage of the big centralized services is that they're more accessible. They're generally very easy to use, it's harder to fuck things up there. A lot of the kind of nerds that post on hacker news, myself included, frequently discount how much of a barrier technical difficulty is. For us, setting up an IRC client, or even a server, is hardly a big deal at all. But for the average person, they either can't or won't bother with that. So setting up an IRC client for them, is like a wall. Responses to pointing this out often go along the train of thought of, "It's not that hard! People could totally do it!" Well, regardless of whether they could or not, they won't. So you're basically just yelling into the void.
    - Eikon 7y ago
      > For us, setting up an IRC client, or even a server, is hardly a big deal at all. I administrated huge systems at massive scale, I deliver, what I believe is very high quality software which solves complex problems. And you know what? I would never want to setup a freaking IRC client that has such poor UX that you wonder if it was intentional. Oh, wait, you have to deploy a server to host your bouncer too! Oh, and then you have to interact with the nicserver! What a joy! Really. We have to forget about “state of the art protocols”, “unix philosophy” and very dumb UX if we want to see adoption of decentralized services. You know why HTTP is fucking great and so ubiquitous? Because it fucking works. IRC and what not protocols are so broken that it’s not even funny. I read too many RFCs of protocols that are so dumb that you understand they were never really written to be implemented and even less to be used but are more there to serve an intellectual challenge.
cptskippy 7y ago
> The old internet was when we ran our own servers, built and hosted our own websites, and we were truly free in the wild wild west. Very few people did this. Unless you were at a university or paid for an ISDN line, you didn't have a persistent connect and could not host your own server. Even when DSL and Cable appeared, ISPs actively blocked hosting. Also don't forget registering a domain cost like $100 and required mailing or faxing paperwork. Getting an SSL certificate required even more paperwork. It's not like today where and can get a wildcard SSL cert faster than it takes to squeeze out a fart. People did build servers and host them in Data centers but that was the exception and they usually had a side gig or solicited donations for covering hosting fees. Again it was unusual. I worked at an insurance company in the early 2000s and setup an old machine with NT and a bunch of those Emachine softmodems to work as a poor man's ISP for a few of the IT staff. It also had an FTP server hosting stuff for an IRC channel I frequented. It was unusual and coveted because back then it was very rare for people to get access to a server they could host anything on.
seomint 7y ago
BBSes live on today in all their ASCII glory. Logged on to an Apple ][+ BBS yesterday running on port 6502 ~grin~. Ah, good times... https://www.telnetbbsguide.com/ https://www.telnetbbsguide.com/
JohnFen 7y ago
> The old internet is dead (for now) and it looks more like the BBS era today. But we innovated past that then, and we will innovate past that now. I hope so. While I don't think the old internet is dead at all (it can look that way because the new internet has grown much larger), it is true that the web (for me) is getting less useful and more dangerous as time goes on. I 100% expect that the day will come in my lifetime that I'll stop using it entirely. I hope that something magical happens to change that trajectory, but I honestly don't see anything like that on the horizon. But the old internet does still exist, and so the internet will remain very useful to me even if I stop using the web.
winternett 7y ago
It's not necessarily easier to run your own web servers... It's more costly than ever, and with the collapse of Net Neutrality going on (legal or not) and Google's stranglehold on search results and browsers, your likelihood of being seen are next to nil unless you have serious amounts of operational cash... This is also why brilliant people in school aren't inventing the next Twitter or Facebook. Big industry has stepped in to carve the Internet to suit it's profit needs and to put up walls for those who aren't accepted into the fraternity. Now company employees are encouraged to develop their ideas on company time, so instead of having to buy companies for a billion dollars, they get the same innovation (in house) for just a few annual salaries. Share holder driven companies are not our friends... The Internet how we knew it is indeed dead, and everyone was warned long ago, several times. :/
- LargoLasskhyfv 7y ago
  I don't fully understand what you mean by your first few sentences. You could use some dynamic DNS service for your domain, or host your own on the lowest end VPS and point that to your own connection, if it is reasonably fast, and then have some cheap and energy efficient SBC/NAS running some Linux serve your content with something like [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caddy_(web_server) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caddy_(web_server) or whatever else works for you. That doesn't cost me more than about 35 €uros per month (of which i have to pay 29,99 anyways for my line) and maybe 3 to 4 €uros energy (which is expensive where i live). While having 31Mbit/s upstream, which is the bandwith the external internet sees and could use. I don't need the scale the FAANGS have, do you really?
  - BrandoElFollito 7y ago
    I host my stuff more or less like you (also caddy, and docker automatically served by caddy). Internet is 49€, could be 30 but when I got fiber I gifted myself the max throughput because I could :) Domain is 2x8€/year Server was 600€ bought a few years ago. Power I do not know, never cared to measure but it will be 200€/y, roughly. So this is not that an expensive hobby. Then of course comes the maintenance effort, but that part is pure joy
madeofpalk 7y ago
> Its easier than ever to run your own servers, but today few do. My completely uninformed guess says that more people are running their own servers now than ever before.
thrwaway69 7y ago
> Its easier than ever to run your own servers, but today few do. fewer in ratio/percentage or pure numbers. If it is later, I disagree. Running your own instance of federated platform or forum has never been this easier. I have a discourse, pleroma etc running currently. There are lot of people running them when you dig around. What you find the problem is noise and search - both of which are dominated by big companies and pesky marketers hijacking. Anything big with traction has people paid by companies in big sums trying to game their post to the top. If you don't have shit ton of traffic or content, you won't even get on google search unless you search for very specific keyword or direct name which very few do. The search everywhere not just your search engine but on social media is optimized for the lowest denominator who searches for x when he wants y. The search learns the way to ignore your words or meaning completely. So both social media and search are hijacked. What else is there for discovering things? specific niche forums which also needs to be discoverable for people to land on. With so many gate keepers on what should be installed on your device - app store or playstore. I am surprised lot of quirky things still pop up from time to time. But then I look into my surrounding, no one else gets the same stuff that I do....which means I am living in an echo chamber. Edit: example of companies fucking with search - https://ibb.co/Lzh5ktQ https://ibb.co/Lzh5ktQ
m463 7y ago
The promise of computing has sort of died too. We buy computers, but they are owned and restricted by others, especially and problematically phones.
buboard 7y ago
i m not so optimistic. The old internet died because it's not as profitable as the new internet, not because it's not sustainable, but because it doesn't stand a chance to grab the attention of makers, when compared to the obscene profits of the new internet. People either build a B2B SaaS (which is assumed to have higher unicorn probability), or go work for Faang. communities are over
jimthrow 7y ago
Decentralized services won’t help at all unless the means by which people find stuff on the web is decentralized: google.

shantly 7y ago

If we want a (return to the) boom in open-source and paid standards-based solutions, we gotta ban collecting & monetizing user info. Monetized user info & related advertising paying for "free" walled services are keeping those down. We won't see widely-successful standards-based social networks or messaging services until that option is gone. [EDIT] and wide success/adoption matters for those in particular because much of their utility is in "everyone's on it" (where "it" may be some other, but interoperable, service)

zozbot234 7y ago
The "old" internet was all static or lightly server-rendered pages, that can be developed and hosted at minimal cost today. Back in the day we didn't expect that "everyone" would sign up for whatever niche forum you were hosting, it was enough to have "everyone who's into that niche". These services don't need "monetization", they can be kept up with minimal amounts of crowdfunding, while federating through well-known standards (ActivityPub, etc.) can help them achieve a network effect that might ultimately rival the big walled gardens and incent them to open up in turn.
- shantly 7y ago
  Sure, and those old sorts of forums still exist (well, the ones that didn't get eaten by Reddit and Facebook—OK, so I guess they kinda don't) but if you want the Web as it exists for most people to go back to standards and competing paid & free+libre solutions, I'm pretty sure banning spyvertising is gonna be a necessary, since those are the two main "services" most people use online, other than email (the rest is mostly shopping and reading news-type sites, both of which would also be improved by banning spyvertising).
- icedchai 7y ago
  The actual "old" Internet is the stuff that predated the web: Gopher, IRC, Usenet, MUDs, Public Access Unix systems, telnet...
  - rasengan 7y ago
    I agree with this. It was when we designed protocols with consensus thru RFC, and apps communicating with those protocols.
    - shantly 7y ago
      And companies started dropping that when it became very important to their business model that they maximize the amount of data they can collect about a user. 3rd party clients for my service? Unacceptable, can't spy on the user as much there, and can't advertise at them. Communicating with users on other services? Unacceptable, I need those users on my service so I can spy on them too, and besides those other services won't talk to mine for the same reasons.
      - sneakernets 7y ago
        Don't know why you're being downvoted when this is exactly the case in my experience. They never said "spying" outright but it's definitely why walled gardens like AOL popped up like wildfire in the 90s and why stuff like AIM was the exception and not the rule.
        lubujackson 7y ago
        AOL was not about spying on you, it was about collecting that sweet monthly fee. And anyone who lauds Apple for bringing tech to the masses should consider that AOL did the exact same thing for the Internet and really brought a glimpse of the Internet (not just the web!) to the people. Yes, real techies might want to install their IRC client of choice and fine tune settings and all that, but Grandma just wanted to click on Chat from her home screen, go to the "Recipes Room" and talk about cookies. It was the same "less choice/more consistency" of technology that let Apple get so big, with the same huge mass appeal (but with less panache).
- chongli 7y ago
  The problem isn’t hosting, it’s discovery. Discovery was easy on the old internet because we weren’t yet drowning in spam, link farms, and cloned/scraped pages. To bring the old internet back we need search that filters out all that commercial noise and we can’t rely on Google et al to build it. Why not? Because those companies have a conflict of interest due to their ad-driven business model. A new “Old Internet” needs to be non commercial. I don’t know how we do that.
  - zozbot234 7y ago
    Bring back webrings, "favorite links" pages and the ODP/DMOZ. Good niche forums (both on Usenet and elsewhere) tended to gather FAQs and information pages that would ultimately aid discovery. That whole dynamic is quite dead these days.
    - chongli 7y ago
      Webrings were great but you still need search as a starting point. Now we've got all this spam out there which essentially creates fake webrings (private blog networks [1]) as a form of black hat SEO. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_farm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_farm
  - naravara 7y ago
    I feel like content discovery in those days didn't primarily happen via search so much as word-of-mouth though. Blogs kept a blogroll on the side which had an overlapping network of other bloggers, people in IRC channels or BBSes would recommend other places for you to check out if you were interested in something, webcomics would host guest strips so other artists could cross-promote each other, etc. In that respect, I feel like Reddit and Instagram are much bigger culprit than Google for sucking up all of the space for socializing and referrals. At one point several of the forums I was on all basically just focused on linking to or talking about Reddit posts, which is when I realized those forums were not long for this world.
    - shantly 7y ago
ekianjo 7y ago
> we gotta ban collecting & monetizing user info anything that runs across a network can be monitored, and such data is valuable when you are able to merge it across several data sources. It's very unlikely tracking can even be banned or un-monitized.
- shantly 7y ago
  Making it illegal so no legitimate business can do it without incredible risk of being sued/charged out of existence seems quite feasible.
  - AndrewUnmuted 7y ago
    You really don’t think companies would figure out a way around any such “illegality” or just use it anti competitively as is being done throughout the EU with its ham-handed policies?
    - shantly 7y ago
      I find this kind of defeatism entirely baffling. Regulating corporations is hard so we shouldn't try? This is a lot less complicated than many sorts of regulation we attempt. Just give up on all of it, it's pointless? Where's the bottom on this line of thought?
      - AndrewUnmuted 7y ago
        Yes, it's pointless. There is nothing illegal about what is going on now, and nothing which should be illegal about what is going on. In this context, "regulating" simply means making a behavior we didn't see coming illegal. It's a short-sighted, unimaginative, and blatantly violent way to solve a problem which stems entirely from the consumer public, not from big bad corporations. It will be used by major corps as an anti-competitive weapon against smaller up-start competition - an outcome we should expect from all such attempts at "regulating" the tech oligarchy.
        7y ago

StavrosK 7y ago

The problem is economies of scale, as it's easier to pay someone who specializes in that sort of thing to host your things for you than to do it yourself. Even I, a nerd who otherwise loves the old internet, don't self-host my website but use a provider (Neocities). When you compare learning HTML/CSS to make your own, quirky, beautiful website with spending five seconds making a Facebook/whatnot page, convenience will almost always win.

7777fps 7y ago

It's easier than ever to rent your own servers, it's harder than ever to run your own servers. There was a time when you could serve anything from a home ISP connection.

rasengan 7y ago
Agreed. I still remember though being on dialup and using a UUCP method of mail receipt and delivery since I didnt have 24/7 connectivity. It was hard. With everyone on 24/7 cable connections, I really did expect something different. Its too bad IPv6 isnt taking off like it could and should.
LargoLasskhyfv 7y ago
Why are you all writing that? See [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21926228 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21926228 please.

w0m 7y ago

> we ran our own servers, built and hosted our own websites .. Like... the AOL days? GeoCities? Different bubbles we've moved to

LinuxBender 7y ago
One of those was forked and is alive and well. Neocitites [1] [1] - https://neocities.org/ https://neocities.org/

foobarian 7y ago

I feel like the ratios changed a lot which makes it seem like the old Internet died. But there are probably more people running their own servers than there used to be. It's just that that makes up just something like 1% of the user community instead of 100%. "The old internet" is what you got when only nerds were online. Replicate that and you got your old internet back. Cue the above mentioned decentralization work...

anongraddebt 7y ago
This comment should be at the top of the thread.
xg15 7y ago
I feel the ratio is the important thing - at least if your goal is to let the broader society benefit from your work and not just an ivory tower of people with similar background. In that regard, the "nerds" utterly failed. We're looking back at the "old" internet with some kind of sentimental sadness, but we've evidently failed to convince the general public that a noncommercial, decentralised internet is the way to go.
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  The UX on the old Internet was terrible, and I remember a solid generation of veteran users telling newbies to RTFM instead of either putting the hard work in to educate or improve the UX of the toolchain so education was less necessary (work that is hard because it is less about understanding the code and more about understanding how users think and why they don't think like the developer of the protocol or application). Average users who don't have the time to understand IPs, sockets, or authentication schemas have been served by companies willing to shoulder the burden of relieving them of those special-knowledge requirements.
  - ohyes 7y ago
    And terrible UX was a feature to some extent. The people who got through it put in some effort to do so, so it filtered out a lot of low effort people. (Think about all the garbage on reddit, facebook, twitter). Average users aren't necessarily the people I want to interact with on a daily basis. It's like an advanced version of a captcha. Maybe I'll make a technology and discussions site that is purposefully difficult to connect to. Maybe I won't use a standard protocol and you'll have to use netcat & gpg to read / upload posts or something absurd like that.

netcan 7y ago

The article doesn't necessarily mean "old internet" in terms of internet culture or even the hosted services & structure of as such. She's talking about content, though most big swaths of that content was hosted on services, proprietary platforms or whatnot. It's a noteworthy point. Over the last decade or two there has been quite a bit of churn and not much archiving. You can kind of estimate a default rate of social media bitrot, linkrot or whatnot...

Timberwolf 7y ago

I thought similar. To me what Buzzfeed are calling the "old Internet" here is something I very much remember bemoaning as the "new Internet" in which dedicated protocols such as NNTP and IRC got displaced by brattish commercial upstarts whose web-based versions had 10% of the quality-of-life features and about 5% of the community etiquette. However they displaced everything that came before them because you could embed images, have an animated avatar and (most importantly) not have to delve into the world of finding a client of choice and connecting it to your ISP's news servers. What I find myself missing more than anything else is that news server was something you paid for, either as part of an ISP package, as a dedicated service or your university tuition fees. The commercial model was purely the provision of that resource - not selling your data, nor being a vector for targeted political ads. There was no incentive to make the basic mechanics of discussion worse or promote flame wars in the name of "engagement" or "monetisation", and while I'm sure the smaller community size played a part things seemed to bump along with a far greater degree of civility and allowance for misunderstanding.

flir 7y ago
You've put your finger on something important - innovation moved from collaborative protocols to antagonistic web sites, and we're all the poorer for it.
- rasengan 7y ago
  Exactly. The protocol era was hijacked for profit. I believe that incentivized, decentralized protocols are the evolution of all of this and will bring the protocol era back AND properly incentivizes participants.
  - api 7y ago
    I hope so, but if you mean cryptocurrency wake me up when there is more to it than speculation and gambling. Other than the "wire transfer" classic use case for Bitcoin I see nothing new that anyone is actually using that is not one of those two things.

tiborsaas 7y ago

I do build my websites, I do run my servers and I still feel like in the wild west. Noise increased however by orders of magnitudes thanks to social media that's why you don't see the "old internet"

agumonkey 7y ago

Was it really a matter of self hosting ? or a matter of what people meant by "web" ? early internet had no strong goal, but when it became a soil for a new economy the vibe changed from genuine, wild and funny to structure and optimized (for business, for users it's de-optimized).

papito 7y ago

TTT

shadowgovt 7y ago

I honestly don't think the decentralization is going to succeed. Most users prefer the benefits of centralization and aren't concerned with the drawbacks. Replacing the occasional collapse of a big central service with the low-grade noise of a distributed service run by a thousand unrelated sysadmins isn't going to be improved UX for most users, so most users won't sign up.

zozbot234 7y ago
E-mail and Usenet (or even Fidonet, for that matter) were a vast UX improvement over Compuserve. Today's monopolized walled gardens are more like that Compuserve of old than a truly open ecosystem.
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  But I believe th UX of the modern monetized wallef garden would also have displaced CompuServe. Maybe CompuServe is a bad example because their UX was just poor (and they survived in an era of near zero competition).

to0w1r3d 7y ago

RFC 1436 Gopher - the joy http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?a=gopher%3A%2F%2Fhngopher.com%2F http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?a=gopher%3A%2F%2Fhngoph...

AndrewKemendo 7y ago

The "old internet" isn't dead. It just looks dead, because the BILLIONS of people who joined the internet since 2002 simply never venture outside of the major centralized services. There are more privately run servers, self hosted websites and bb's now than there were back then. Its cheaper, safer and easier to start and run your own network and service today than ever. So in aggregate, there is 100x (1000x?) the niche, kooky, wierd, fun, specific internet that we had in 1997. But there is also 10^5x the giant consolidated internet that most people see.

keiferski 7y ago
But this doesn’t factor in that smaller communities have been eaten by the bigger sites. Reddit, for example, has replaced hundreds of niche topic forums in the past decade, and done a rather poor job doing so, in my opinion.
- TulliusCicero 7y ago
  The advantage of the big centralized services is that they're more accessible. They're generally very easy to use, it's harder to fuck things up there. A lot of the kind of nerds that post on hacker news, myself included, frequently discount how much of a barrier technical difficulty is. For us, setting up an IRC client, or even a server, is hardly a big deal at all. But for the average person, they either can't or won't bother with that. So setting up an IRC client for them, is like a wall. Responses to pointing this out often go along the train of thought of, "It's not that hard! People could totally do it!" Well, regardless of whether they could or not, they won't. So you're basically just yelling into the void.
  - Eikon 7y ago
    > For us, setting up an IRC client, or even a server, is hardly a big deal at all. I administrated huge systems at massive scale, I deliver, what I believe is very high quality software which solves complex problems. And you know what? I would never want to setup a freaking IRC client that has such poor UX that you wonder if it was intentional. Oh, wait, you have to deploy a server to host your bouncer too! Oh, and then you have to interact with the nicserver! What a joy! Really. We have to forget about “state of the art protocols”, “unix philosophy” and very dumb UX if we want to see adoption of decentralized services. You know why HTTP is fucking great and so ubiquitous? Because it fucking works. IRC and what not protocols are so broken that it’s not even funny. I read too many RFCs of protocols that are so dumb that you understand they were never really written to be implemented and even less to be used but are more there to serve an intellectual challenge.

cptskippy 7y ago

> The old internet was when we ran our own servers, built and hosted our own websites, and we were truly free in the wild wild west. Very few people did this. Unless you were at a university or paid for an ISDN line, you didn't have a persistent connect and could not host your own server. Even when DSL and Cable appeared, ISPs actively blocked hosting. Also don't forget registering a domain cost like $100 and required mailing or faxing paperwork. Getting an SSL certificate required even more paperwork. It's not like today where and can get a wildcard SSL cert faster than it takes to squeeze out a fart. People did build servers and host them in Data centers but that was the exception and they usually had a side gig or solicited donations for covering hosting fees. Again it was unusual. I worked at an insurance company in the early 2000s and setup an old machine with NT and a bunch of those Emachine softmodems to work as a poor man's ISP for a few of the IT staff. It also had an FTP server hosting stuff for an IRC channel I frequented. It was unusual and coveted because back then it was very rare for people to get access to a server they could host anything on.

seomint 7y ago

BBSes live on today in all their ASCII glory. Logged on to an Apple ][+ BBS yesterday running on port 6502 ~grin~. Ah, good times... https://www.telnetbbsguide.com/ https://www.telnetbbsguide.com/

JohnFen 7y ago

> The old internet is dead (for now) and it looks more like the BBS era today. But we innovated past that then, and we will innovate past that now. I hope so. While I don't think the old internet is dead at all (it can look that way because the new internet has grown much larger), it is true that the web (for me) is getting less useful and more dangerous as time goes on. I 100% expect that the day will come in my lifetime that I'll stop using it entirely. I hope that something magical happens to change that trajectory, but I honestly don't see anything like that on the horizon. But the old internet does still exist, and so the internet will remain very useful to me even if I stop using the web.

winternett 7y ago

It's not necessarily easier to run your own web servers... It's more costly than ever, and with the collapse of Net Neutrality going on (legal or not) and Google's stranglehold on search results and browsers, your likelihood of being seen are next to nil unless you have serious amounts of operational cash... This is also why brilliant people in school aren't inventing the next Twitter or Facebook. Big industry has stepped in to carve the Internet to suit it's profit needs and to put up walls for those who aren't accepted into the fraternity. Now company employees are encouraged to develop their ideas on company time, so instead of having to buy companies for a billion dollars, they get the same innovation (in house) for just a few annual salaries. Share holder driven companies are not our friends... The Internet how we knew it is indeed dead, and everyone was warned long ago, several times. :/

LargoLasskhyfv 7y ago
I don't fully understand what you mean by your first few sentences. You could use some dynamic DNS service for your domain, or host your own on the lowest end VPS and point that to your own connection, if it is reasonably fast, and then have some cheap and energy efficient SBC/NAS running some Linux serve your content with something like [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caddy_(web_server) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caddy_(web_server) or whatever else works for you. That doesn't cost me more than about 35 €uros per month (of which i have to pay 29,99 anyways for my line) and maybe 3 to 4 €uros energy (which is expensive where i live). While having 31Mbit/s upstream, which is the bandwith the external internet sees and could use. I don't need the scale the FAANGS have, do you really?
- BrandoElFollito 7y ago
  I host my stuff more or less like you (also caddy, and docker automatically served by caddy). Internet is 49€, could be 30 but when I got fiber I gifted myself the max throughput because I could :) Domain is 2x8€/year Server was 600€ bought a few years ago. Power I do not know, never cared to measure but it will be 200€/y, roughly. So this is not that an expensive hobby. Then of course comes the maintenance effort, but that part is pure joy

madeofpalk 7y ago

> Its easier than ever to run your own servers, but today few do. My completely uninformed guess says that more people are running their own servers now than ever before.

thrwaway69 7y ago

> Its easier than ever to run your own servers, but today few do. fewer in ratio/percentage or pure numbers. If it is later, I disagree. Running your own instance of federated platform or forum has never been this easier. I have a discourse, pleroma etc running currently. There are lot of people running them when you dig around. What you find the problem is noise and search - both of which are dominated by big companies and pesky marketers hijacking. Anything big with traction has people paid by companies in big sums trying to game their post to the top. If you don't have shit ton of traffic or content, you won't even get on google search unless you search for very specific keyword or direct name which very few do. The search everywhere not just your search engine but on social media is optimized for the lowest denominator who searches for x when he wants y. The search learns the way to ignore your words or meaning completely. So both social media and search are hijacked. What else is there for discovering things? specific niche forums which also needs to be discoverable for people to land on. With so many gate keepers on what should be installed on your device - app store or playstore. I am surprised lot of quirky things still pop up from time to time. But then I look into my surrounding, no one else gets the same stuff that I do....which means I am living in an echo chamber. Edit: example of companies fucking with search - https://ibb.co/Lzh5ktQ https://ibb.co/Lzh5ktQ

m463 7y ago

The promise of computing has sort of died too. We buy computers, but they are owned and restricted by others, especially and problematically phones.

buboard 7y ago

i m not so optimistic. The old internet died because it's not as profitable as the new internet, not because it's not sustainable, but because it doesn't stand a chance to grab the attention of makers, when compared to the obscene profits of the new internet. People either build a B2B SaaS (which is assumed to have higher unicorn probability), or go work for Faang. communities are over

jimthrow 7y ago

Decentralized services won’t help at all unless the means by which people find stuff on the web is decentralized: google.