Jeroen
Sarah Jamie Lewis"The data you have given us is too valuable to let other people freely read it"
"Your web browser is rendering content in a way that we think is morally wrong"
It's just pathetic at this point.
I miss the old internet, hanging out in irc channels, posting in small forums, wasting an afternoon jumping from niche site to niche site, trying to track where you were in a haze of dozens of browser windows.
A set of places, and people. True connection.
But even the modern web held some resemblance of that.
As many friends as I met in weird irc channels and niche forums, I met similar numbers on Twitter.
Now all those warm, welcoming places exist only in the past.
Part of me hopes we can recapture some of that...but I fear those days are gone. They were a beautiful bubble destined to pop.
Where once stood a diverse sprawling forest filled with mysteries now stands a managed woodland. Same raw materials, an entirely different experience.
We are not the same world. We are not the same people. Our relationship to this thing has changed.
I fully realize that I am getting older and nostalgic.
But I was once young, and naive, and truly believed this thing would save us.
To answer a common reply trend:
I clearly did a bad job at underlying the exact cause of my lament.
The reasons I left the communities I discussed is because they don't exist anymore - they were killed during a phase of the interenet that predated the rise of the proto-social networks like myspace and orkut.
Many were small hosted forums bought for beer money by startups that didn't survive the year. Others slowly dwindled into obscurity, as search engines directed people elsewhere.
When new communities formed they took a different form..."groups" and a little later subreddits, and much later on group chats.
The communities still exist, there are still awesome people doing awesome things. Some people still write blogs. Some people still maintain idiosyncratic websites unencumbered by decades of attention-driven UX "best practices". Sometimes a search engine might even recommend one.
But the ecosystem, that wonderful weird entangled world, is gone.
intelatiI do see (read: use a few forums that seem to hit your original) that sort of "decentralized" nonSEO sites that are high signal to noise ratio for the specific topic at hand.
I feel like the big mixing pot has hit the ground and the groups will "find" their new place in a smaller place.
fanf42@sarahjamielewis this is very well explained, thank you for verbalizing it for me
Michael Gurski@sarahjamielewis I'm nostalgic, too. But IRC still lives. Channels have had to hop a few networks over the years, but OFTC still exists, and libera took the place of FreeNode after the hostile takeover. I think I miss Usenet most of all, even after the Eternal September.
@emag To better put it...IRC still exists in the same way that the house I used to live in while at university still exists - sure I could go back there, but the friends and the times that happened there are gone, the weirdly shaped walls and odd sized rooms all now subdivided into neat little apartments. A different place.
@sarahjamielewis I guess I'm lucky that the communities that I'm in have been more a ship of Theseus over the years. There are still original parts, but new parts, too, but it's still essentially the same place. Some because they're *really* insular, but some because they're specifically broad enough. And that's with maybe a decade of non-active participation during normal hours due to $job[-1] not allowing access.
Julian Lam@sarahjamielewis we were young and naïve back then too, but I definitely think #forums are due for a resurgence. I've been ringing this bell for years now after #CambridgeAnalytica broke, but this latest round of closing off the internet is just pushing more and more people away from walled gardens and closed platforms.
I'm hoping @nodebb (N.B. this is my #foss project) can lead the way on this, with a modern take on the tried and true #forum formula.
Maria Varmazis 
@sarahjamielewis I miss mid & late 90s internet *so* much.
Guilherme (CWB.social)@sarahjamielewis I'm finding the Fediverse is pretty similar to that early-internet experience.
We have indeed changed though.
Greg@sarahjamielewis Samesies
enmodo ⚛️ 🧬 🇺🇦 🍉@sarahjamielewis it happens to us all, the inevitable realization that all the things we hoped to see happen in your youth never did, and the things that did happen we'll never live to see undone.
@sarahjamielewis that deeply echoes in me. Not the same river. Still water, sure. But it was more than that
Devil Doll, Esq.@sarahjamielewis I was there.
⊥ᵒᵚ Cᵸᵎᶺᵋᶫ∸ᵒᵘ ☑️@sarahjamielewis meanwhile the kids are hanging out in some weird Bluetooth mesh social network where the Corps can't see
Shanya (Over at BlueSky)@falken @sarahjamielewis We don't talk about Br/iar where the cops can hear, and all public social networks are cops
@Almafeta @sarahjamielewis you wanna name names, feel free :-)
Naeva@sarahjamielewis That's actually a fascinating analogy because I think the cause is actually the same as what drives people to manage forests (well, humans have always managed forests in various ways but in the regimented modern way).
In general as organisational power has grown people have tried to make things more legible. This often requires immense simplification (and a suspicious number of rectilinear lines).
1/2
@sarahjamielewis unfortunately making something more legible often requires massive simplications and kills off diversity. A thing becomes easier to exploit in some way, in forests for lumber, in the internet adds/constant feeds/casual browsing but it also becomes much less resilient and often less enjoyable or useful to those that knew how to work with the old thing.
If you grew up with the confusing tangled mess of web 1 and early 2 what we have now is sterile and fragile by comparison.
KevinFlynn 
@sarahjamielewis
Different social media exist for different reasons, and for different times. I moved on from facebook years ago, and I've moved on from Twitter to Mastodon. I used to prowl websites, now I join Discord communities. Things will always change, and it's ok to be nostalgic about it. I also wasted time in AOL and ICQ and used ventrilo and teamspeak and powwow an IM etc. :) It's all good, we change
Different social media exist for different reasons, and for different times. I moved on from facebook years ago, and I've moved on from Twitter to Mastodon. I used to prowl websites, now I join Discord communities. Things will always change, and it's ok to be nostalgic about it. I also wasted time in AOL and ICQ and used ventrilo and teamspeak and powwow an IM etc. :) It's all good, we change
@sarahjamielewis when we mention IRC we date ourselves, how many know what a netsplit is without googling it? Ironically now we get corporate manufactured perma-splits, fracturing off giant swaths of humanity into their monitor, controlled, and exploited "social" networks.
The Beethoven Group@sarahjamielewis same I guess it’s nostalgic but IRCs helped me discover so much back in the mid ‘90s
etsy 
@sarahjamielewis this what I love about matrix and i2p
Kensan@sarahjamielewis Lest we forget webrings and all the under construction GIFs… there were so many Geocities sites with these :)
mivox is exhausted 
@Kensan @sarahjamielewis I miss webrings. 🥲 You could find so many fun weird little sites that way.
Kevin Karhan 
@sarahjamielewis we can bring that back together...
@vantablack 's #FediPact [ https://fedipact.online ] and @aral 's #Web0Manifesto [ https://web0.small-web.org ] are just the first steps to end the #GAFAM-ruled #corporatocracy of the #Interwebz!
LR@sarahjamielewis i um ... am still on irc
Jeroen Baert@sarahjamielewis I find that some of those things can still be found in private filesharing communities. People *care* about the media they share, and discuss and go on weird tangents at length.
Brian@sarahjamielewis the old internet with my current speed/access would be fun, instead of channel bonding dial-up modems due to lack of broadband.
ZYDRATEI used to hang out all the time on IRC [late 2000s to mid 2010s, recently got back into it]
I'd spend good 8+ hours a day in IRC even connecting my old BlackBerry to my ZNC bouncer so I could check in between classes
Alexander (Sasha) Wait Zaranek@sarahjamielewis I'd like to think I'm more idealistic at 50yo than my already very idealistic 20yo self. 💔♥️ Fwiw I still believe in tech and people and what we can do for each other.
Fedi is far from perfect and still feels possible -- maybe even practical -- to build something better than we ever had?
Cassandrich@wait_sasha @sarahjamielewis It's already far better than anything we ever had. So easy and dangerous to only remember the good parts of what we had.
The anonymity, leet hacker aliases, vagueness of any real human identity or body? That was a consequence of all the shit you'd get if ppl knew your gender or relation to it or a number of other personal things.
Being k-lined everywhere for not having a leet enough ISP was awesome too.
Arale Xan@sarahjamielewis where's that from?
Ivan_Ko🏳️🌈🇺🇦@sarahjamielewis he is being dramaqueen with once again 🤷🏻♂️
@sarahjamielewis You must sign 3 terms of service, and agree to 4 privacy policies, and load 5 stateware services for every page load.
The data these extraneous documents cover:
Ben@sarahjamielewis I wasn’t as active back in the day but still find it very easy to get lost on a bunny trail or fall into a rabbit hole of personal blogs. True, much is happening on the main sites and it’s also easy to find yourself standing on the big data highways, but maybe it’s just that the whole internet has grown.