Asklemmy

I miss the days before it became all corporatized. The days of the early world wide web and gopher made the internet a whole lot of fun. I had a blast with usenet and internet relay chat as well. Even email was freaking awesome. I remember getting excited when I'd receive messages. Thankfully that excitement is getting rekindled due in a large part to corporate's own hubris. The growth of the fediverse is making the internet fun again.

It being much less busy with the general populace and corporation

I miss the HTML chats. It was like a whole world to explore.

I remember when you could use a credit card generator (I actually learned whatever "algorithm" to create valid Visas as a party trick) and sign up for porn sites for free. Then you could download a crappy, compressed, ten second video if you waited for what seemed like forever.

Now that I think about it, that aspect of it was terrible. Thank goodness I'm alive now and didn't die before free HD porn was readily available on tap.

I do miss ICQ. And running BBS softwares.

Did anyone else play digimon quest to save the net? That was one of the first online games I played on dial up.

When you jumped on to chat (IRC) you didn't get pressured into upgrading to nitro (Discord).. IRC is still around but all the nice free networks have been decimated in acquisitions and other things.. there are still a lot of great Niche communities if you look hard however.

I don't miss anything about it. And certainly not the modem dial sounds I knew from memory/intuitively.

Imagine having to dial into the internet and having to wait 30s with beeping and whooshing sounds.

/e: It seems OP question was stated more broadly than the linked article addresses and people seem to reply to.

Static websites, they may have looked terrible, but all that dynamic loading nowadays is infuriating.

Also I feel like I can't find things on websites anymore. 9/10 times it seems easier to just use a search engine to find the specific part of a website, instead of using the sites navigation. I remember that being different around the 2000s.

I remember the pre-facebook era, it was about the same as now just less visually appealing. Ads were worse; they were able to redirect people to pay per view (on your phone bill) sites without notice; if you had a windows pc viruses could literally be installed by visiting a website; installing crackz was a gamble of wether you were infecting your pc or actually getting o play a game; downloads took an entire night and a day for an album; albums actually were sold per song; songs cost money; YouTube didn’t exist so TV was god; we called Friends via landline and listend to them to walk down the stairs as their mother held the apparatus in their hand, waiting to be relieved from her duty. That and most of my now bosses made most of their money scamming people and their competitors. It’s much more civilized now - trust me

Java chat applet embedded in niche websites

@Provider I miss how people have lost the art of self-curation. Those of us who remember took to the fediverse like a duck to water. People who don't have that skill hate it here.

@Provider It's the "Just call!' of the internet. Somehow, people think that having an extended interaction is peoples' preference.

I would kill for a transcript.