5 ms·

The small, real, original web

60 points by speckx 3mo ago

MarkusWandel 3mo ago
Mostly true but not quite. You can't do email the "old way" because you'll be buried in spam, and even if you can handle that, others who don't do it the old way may never get your mail. You can't put a server on the internet the old way because there is nonstop automated door knocking for security violations. In the old days, the attacks were much less sophisticated and mostly a "gentleman's agreement" meant they didn't happen at all. You can't just open a port and expose a service if you're on CG-NAT or if your provider prohibits or blocks it otherwise. You can't really do instant messaging the old ways (remember pidgin?) because 99% of the people you'd want to message are on systems with no external API to connect to. Aside from that yes. I still have an old school static IPv4 address that serves an old school, mostly static HTML web site (and behind authentication some other useful stuff to immediate family members). Uh oh, did I just invite more door knocking?
- gerdesj 3mo ago
  I'm still running multiple email systems the "old way". Been doing it for 30 years and don't intend to stop now, both at work and at home. There are a few extra hoops these days to jump through ... but still it moves.
  - stackghost 3mo ago
    Eh, I used to be in that camp. I did it the right way. I set up SPF, DMARC and DKIM. I shopped around for a dedicated box with a v4 address that had a clean reputation. I ensured the provider's ASN was also clean. I used a well known TLD. I sent absolutely zero spam. No newsletters no nothing, just regular correspondence. But I don't send enough emails to keep my IP reputation warm, I think, because deliverability into the big providers like Microslop and Google was very hit and miss. The end result is I would never know if someone just didn't want to reply, or if my message has been silently dropped. It stopped being fun and started becoming a chore and a headache. Nowadays I pay fastmail to worry about that bullshit. I have more important things to do with my time.
- rw_grim 3mo ago
  The networks you remember fondly in Pidgin (AIM, Y!M, MSN, ICQ, etc) didn't have external APIs to connect to either.
doug_durham 3mo ago
An alternate framing for these types of "the old web was better" articles is: "I really liked the web better when only privileged, highly educated people could put up content". The reality is that there was a lot of implicit gatekeeping going on in the early web because of the technical hurdles.
- TFNA 3mo ago
  The early web that many people are nostalgic for stretches to the early millennium, by which time it was pretty straightforward for ordinary people to set up a blog on a number of platforms. That era of the web was still characterized by longform text that could actually express nuance, and there was either only gentle or no monetization (as opposed to the SEO and attention economy), and that is what people are usually contrasting the later web to.
- nine_k 3mo ago
  Won't it still be useful to have access to content posted by educated and well-meaning people without a direct commercial intent? The ancient original filter (access from universities) is long gone, and both low-content posts (a minor problem), and intentionally intrusive, addictive, and deceptive content (the major problem) abound. Hence the longing for the times when this was not yet the case, and the quest for places that still maintain these qualities. (These places are often intentionally hard to find from outside; see the dead forest hypothesis.)
- manytimesaway 3mo ago
  The era of MSN, MySpace and self/ISP-hosted pages didn't feel like gatekeeping at all; sure, there was some privilege involved (internet access still is a privilege in 2026), but there was less shame about attempting stuff.
  - doublerabbit 3mo ago
    In the golden era the care wasn't there. I didn't care someone said something offensive. You just kind of shrugged and moved on. It shouldn't be said but hey they did; report & ignore. That's why 4chan is 4chan, Encyclopaedia Dramatica et cetera. Political correctness eventually tainted the internet as then if someone's values were hurt, drama would roll around only fuelling the troll further. This later led to gatekeeping and entitlement; Tumblr as example. The internet has now made everyone so sensitive and now most want to broadcast their feels upon social media or whatever, you end up with elitism of groups and communities who think they know best.
TFNA 3mo ago
Articles like this one, talking about how the original web is still around, miss a key point IMO: that indie web that exists today is socially irrelevant. In the early millennium it was common for people meeting IRL to feel a sense of community because they followed a shared ecosystem of blogs, whether about a band, a religious denomination, a city neighborhood, or a travel subculture. Today if you read indie web content, it is highly likely that you are the only person you know IRL that reads it. So, when social isolation is a problem many people today complain about, it can be glaring that the indie web doesn't scratch that itch as it once did.
euroderf 3mo ago
Didn't a lot of people come to the internet proper after first using outfits like AOL and Compuserve ? I wonder if those outfits served as "training grounds" or "boot camps", and what kind of culture shock their customers had upon hitting the "real net" (newsgroups etc.), and whether they learned "enough" netiquette before "graduating to" the wider net.
nkapias 3mo ago
> And obviously you’ll want a VPN too (skip Mullvad) — Proton’s VPN works fine for that. Why skip Mullvad ? I thought it has a great reputation.
- CM30 3mo ago
  Wonder if they're one of those people who thinks one of the founders donating to a right wing political parties make the service not worth dealing with: https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2026/7/20/donation-controversy https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2026/7/20/donation-controversy Alternatively, it could be a lack of servers meaning that a few services seem to be blocking all traffic from them. I've had that issues when trying to use it for services like Reddit.
- ooterness 3mo ago
  Previous discussion: "The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48717469 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48717469
  - nkapias 3mo ago
    Thank you (and everyone else who replied). I wasn’t aware of this controversy. I wouldn’t express an opinion on the subject, however, I’m glad when information is made public, as it allows everyone to weigh whether it should influence their decisions.
- judah 3mo ago
  The post author mentions in the comments he doesn't like the politics of the Mullvad and Brave creators. Brave creator Brendan Eich is also the creator of JavaScript, which powers most of the web today. Eich donated to Republicans and pro-marriage causes, yes. The author thinks that should disqualify his tooling from the open indie web. I find that kind of political gatekeeping fit for a bygone and dead era. It’s a point of view that says we must cut off from our lives everyone who disagrees with our politics, even in the slightest. Commercialized sites like Reddit are on the decline in part because of over-zealous mods driven by politics who ban and silence dissent. Facebook and pre-acquisition Twitter were also focused on silencing dissent; so much that they banned a sitting US President. But the indie web of the ’90s? It was filled with free speech and live-and-let-live libertarians. Reddit originally was a bastion of free speech, and its founders were libertarian-leaning. Their vision has been polluted by the commercialization and big media takeover of Reddit.. The indie web is not likely to revive for many reasons. But it certainly will not revive with the kind of political gatekeeping the blog author is advocating.
manytimesaway 3mo ago
Quite ironic to post this on a platform that uses 1/4 of the screen for advertisement and a drowning GDPR prompt. (Also the CSS makes it tedious to read on a computer.) Why the refusal of Mullvad, though?
- doublerabbit 3mo ago
  The Founder of donated to a controversial political party of Sweden. Same reasoning to why we shouldn't be using Kagi because the founder uses Yandex, a Russian state search engine for a data source. Yolo I guess.
  - mghackerlady 3mo ago
    At least with kagi it's not like they have a better option. They could go with bing but then they'd just be another bing frontend
  - itsbczurstupid 3mo ago
    [flagged]
viccis 3mo ago
The medium is the message. People posted websites and interacted other websites like that back then because hypertext static webpages were the medium of the time. We've already progressed through forums, social media, app-ified social media, image and then video and then short form video content, etc. Trying to go back has historically been challenging and mostly the realm of enthusiasts whose usage is warped by the fact that they sought it out. See also: typewriters, horse carriages, etc
magic_hamster 3mo ago
It's true that the old web was personal, fun, experimental, and in many ways quite whimsical. There was a sense of discovery, sharing, and being in the verge of a new era. Like many others, I miss it dearly. But I also don't think keeping it on life support is the solution. The old web is gone, it's sad, but it was a different time and you can't bring back the past. I say this even though I have an affinity and a modest collection of old hardware and software. I literally see some of this tech every day in my home. Nostalgia is fun, but still, you can't live in the past. The only way to get something similar to the old web back, is very unpractical. Reduce bandwidth so videos are no longer the main content form; nullify profit from polarizing content; give people an easier interface for typing or participating in forums (touch is still awful for text), etc. In other words: it won't happen. The old online experience is a fun memory, but there's no going back.

60 points by speckx 3mo ago

Mostly true but not quite. You can't do email the "old way" because you'll be buried in spam, and even if you can handle that, others who don't do it the old way may never get your mail. You can't put a server on the internet the old way because there is nonstop automated door knocking for security violations. In the old days, the attacks were much less sophisticated and mostly a "gentleman's agreement" meant they didn't happen at all. You can't just open a port and expose a service if you're on CG-NAT or if your provider prohibits or blocks it otherwise. You can't really do instant messaging the old ways (remember pidgin?) because 99% of the people you'd want to message are on systems with no external API to connect to. Aside from that yes. I still have an old school static IPv4 address that serves an old school, mostly static HTML web site (and behind authentication some other useful stuff to immediate family members). Uh oh, did I just invite more door knocking?

gerdesj 3mo ago
I'm still running multiple email systems the "old way". Been doing it for 30 years and don't intend to stop now, both at work and at home. There are a few extra hoops these days to jump through ... but still it moves.
- stackghost 3mo ago
  Eh, I used to be in that camp. I did it the right way. I set up SPF, DMARC and DKIM. I shopped around for a dedicated box with a v4 address that had a clean reputation. I ensured the provider's ASN was also clean. I used a well known TLD. I sent absolutely zero spam. No newsletters no nothing, just regular correspondence. But I don't send enough emails to keep my IP reputation warm, I think, because deliverability into the big providers like Microslop and Google was very hit and miss. The end result is I would never know if someone just didn't want to reply, or if my message has been silently dropped. It stopped being fun and started becoming a chore and a headache. Nowadays I pay fastmail to worry about that bullshit. I have more important things to do with my time.
rw_grim 3mo ago
The networks you remember fondly in Pidgin (AIM, Y!M, MSN, ICQ, etc) didn't have external APIs to connect to either.

doug_durham 3mo ago

An alternate framing for these types of "the old web was better" articles is: "I really liked the web better when only privileged, highly educated people could put up content". The reality is that there was a lot of implicit gatekeeping going on in the early web because of the technical hurdles.

TFNA 3mo ago
The early web that many people are nostalgic for stretches to the early millennium, by which time it was pretty straightforward for ordinary people to set up a blog on a number of platforms. That era of the web was still characterized by longform text that could actually express nuance, and there was either only gentle or no monetization (as opposed to the SEO and attention economy), and that is what people are usually contrasting the later web to.
nine_k 3mo ago
Won't it still be useful to have access to content posted by educated and well-meaning people without a direct commercial intent? The ancient original filter (access from universities) is long gone, and both low-content posts (a minor problem), and intentionally intrusive, addictive, and deceptive content (the major problem) abound. Hence the longing for the times when this was not yet the case, and the quest for places that still maintain these qualities. (These places are often intentionally hard to find from outside; see the dead forest hypothesis.)
manytimesaway 3mo ago
The era of MSN, MySpace and self/ISP-hosted pages didn't feel like gatekeeping at all; sure, there was some privilege involved (internet access still is a privilege in 2026), but there was less shame about attempting stuff.
- doublerabbit 3mo ago
  In the golden era the care wasn't there. I didn't care someone said something offensive. You just kind of shrugged and moved on. It shouldn't be said but hey they did; report & ignore. That's why 4chan is 4chan, Encyclopaedia Dramatica et cetera. Political correctness eventually tainted the internet as then if someone's values were hurt, drama would roll around only fuelling the troll further. This later led to gatekeeping and entitlement; Tumblr as example. The internet has now made everyone so sensitive and now most want to broadcast their feels upon social media or whatever, you end up with elitism of groups and communities who think they know best.

TFNA 3mo ago

Articles like this one, talking about how the original web is still around, miss a key point IMO: that indie web that exists today is socially irrelevant. In the early millennium it was common for people meeting IRL to feel a sense of community because they followed a shared ecosystem of blogs, whether about a band, a religious denomination, a city neighborhood, or a travel subculture. Today if you read indie web content, it is highly likely that you are the only person you know IRL that reads it. So, when social isolation is a problem many people today complain about, it can be glaring that the indie web doesn't scratch that itch as it once did.

euroderf 3mo ago

Didn't a lot of people come to the internet proper after first using outfits like AOL and Compuserve ? I wonder if those outfits served as "training grounds" or "boot camps", and what kind of culture shock their customers had upon hitting the "real net" (newsgroups etc.), and whether they learned "enough" netiquette before "graduating to" the wider net.

nkapias 3mo ago

> And obviously you’ll want a VPN too (skip Mullvad) — Proton’s VPN works fine for that. Why skip Mullvad ? I thought it has a great reputation.

CM30 3mo ago
Wonder if they're one of those people who thinks one of the founders donating to a right wing political parties make the service not worth dealing with: https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2026/7/20/donation-controversy https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2026/7/20/donation-controversy Alternatively, it could be a lack of servers meaning that a few services seem to be blocking all traffic from them. I've had that issues when trying to use it for services like Reddit.
ooterness 3mo ago
Previous discussion: "The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48717469 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48717469
- nkapias 3mo ago
  Thank you (and everyone else who replied). I wasn’t aware of this controversy. I wouldn’t express an opinion on the subject, however, I’m glad when information is made public, as it allows everyone to weigh whether it should influence their decisions.
judah 3mo ago
The post author mentions in the comments he doesn't like the politics of the Mullvad and Brave creators. Brave creator Brendan Eich is also the creator of JavaScript, which powers most of the web today. Eich donated to Republicans and pro-marriage causes, yes. The author thinks that should disqualify his tooling from the open indie web. I find that kind of political gatekeeping fit for a bygone and dead era. It’s a point of view that says we must cut off from our lives everyone who disagrees with our politics, even in the slightest. Commercialized sites like Reddit are on the decline in part because of over-zealous mods driven by politics who ban and silence dissent. Facebook and pre-acquisition Twitter were also focused on silencing dissent; so much that they banned a sitting US President. But the indie web of the ’90s? It was filled with free speech and live-and-let-live libertarians. Reddit originally was a bastion of free speech, and its founders were libertarian-leaning. Their vision has been polluted by the commercialization and big media takeover of Reddit.. The indie web is not likely to revive for many reasons. But it certainly will not revive with the kind of political gatekeeping the blog author is advocating.

manytimesaway 3mo ago

Quite ironic to post this on a platform that uses 1/4 of the screen for advertisement and a drowning GDPR prompt. (Also the CSS makes it tedious to read on a computer.) Why the refusal of Mullvad, though?

doublerabbit 3mo ago
The Founder of donated to a controversial political party of Sweden. Same reasoning to why we shouldn't be using Kagi because the founder uses Yandex, a Russian state search engine for a data source. Yolo I guess.
- mghackerlady 3mo ago
  At least with kagi it's not like they have a better option. They could go with bing but then they'd just be another bing frontend
- itsbczurstupid 3mo ago
  [flagged]

viccis 3mo ago

The medium is the message. People posted websites and interacted other websites like that back then because hypertext static webpages were the medium of the time. We've already progressed through forums, social media, app-ified social media, image and then video and then short form video content, etc. Trying to go back has historically been challenging and mostly the realm of enthusiasts whose usage is warped by the fact that they sought it out. See also: typewriters, horse carriages, etc

magic_hamster 3mo ago

It's true that the old web was personal, fun, experimental, and in many ways quite whimsical. There was a sense of discovery, sharing, and being in the verge of a new era. Like many others, I miss it dearly. But I also don't think keeping it on life support is the solution. The old web is gone, it's sad, but it was a different time and you can't bring back the past. I say this even though I have an affinity and a modest collection of old hardware and software. I literally see some of this tech every day in my home. Nostalgia is fun, but still, you can't live in the past. The only way to get something similar to the old web back, is very unpractical. Reduce bandwidth so videos are no longer the main content form; nullify profit from polarizing content; give people an easier interface for typing or participating in forums (touch is still awful for text), etc. In other words: it won't happen. The old online experience is a fun memory, but there's no going back.