I was there. And it stood on the shoulders of volunteers. And we collectively gathered money so our favorite imageboard could pay for hosting. And we discussed how unethical it was to block ads, cuz the imageboard needs to pay for hosting. So either donate or click on the ads, ane make sure the revenue flows. (Remember the tiny text "please click on the ads, it supports the site"?)

We offloaded imagehosting to shady weird websites with virus autodownloaders, where you absolutely had to block JS just so you don't get pwned. And so some suckers would eventually get pwned, have their screen locked, pay ransom, and finance our collective love for zipgifs.

I was there, Gandalf, I was there 20 years ago. YouTube and Tumblr were the holy saviors.

[–] Count042@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I'm a system admin who self hosts a bunch of shit off of a 48 Ru rack in his washroom.

The internet used to be run off of the collective will of a bunch of people like me. I was there, back when it was FIDOnet and pirate bbs's.

P.S. while I disagree with your viewpoint, this was a hilarious read, and I didn't down vote you.

[–] where_am_i@sh.itjust.works 0 points 2 months ago

What's there to disagree with? you prove my point.

it stood on the shoulders of volunteers

Yeah. A classic story. A sysadmin took the old server from his work after they upgraded and now runs <insert video game guild imageboard/wiki/chat> on it.

With the amount of traffic modern web pipes through Google's and Cloudflare's servers, all of you homebrewers wouldn't be enough to take over even 5% of that.

You can't go back to the good old days because you'll break your back trying to, and the collective lemmy anon can't, because they're too used to freeload while getting big tech quality service.