The Internet I Grew Up with Doesn't Exist Anymore

It looks like it starts with: >I was born in the late 1990s >2001: The Family Computer I was both in 1975 and my first experience with the Internet was in 1991 when I was 16. I thought it was amazing. There were Usenet forums for thousands of topics and places where nerds could talk about stuff from bands to TV shows to programming languages. There was no graphical World Wide Web (unless you worked at CERN) We had to use Archie to find an FTP site and download a file based on the name. Does that Internet exist anymore? Well Usenet is still around but since 2000 it is mostly spam or for sharing files now. Then the author says: > 2012: When Everything Started Changing I think everything changed when Eternal September happened. When I first got on Usenet the older students told me to lurk for a month and always read the FAQ before asking a question. Then I started seeing all these annoying posts from people ending in @aol.com and that was when the Internet and Usenet really started to change. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Born in 89, I always feel nostalgic seeing screenshots of Windows 95. It brings back a time of novelty, exploration, and freedom. And what a ride it's been. It's a bit of a shame it went that deep. What started as a fun new technology seems to have turned into a vortex that just absorbed everything (attention spans, social skills, overall IQ) and everyone (we're now more alone and isolated behind screens), save for the few who were smart enough to protect themselves. I wonder how things would've turned out if internet had stayed a place for fun, exploration, and freedom.

The old internet is still there, people just choose to use the modern services of the internet instead. I was around in the 90's and remember very well usenet,irc and gopher sites. FTP'ing text files to a remote folder and then running weird perl scripts via telnet to refresh a website. You can still go down memory lane but you quickly realize you are romanticizing a past that did its time. I pretty much stay away from the worst of social media and the internet is a fairly calm place for me and a tool I wouldn't give back.

This bit feels naive, in 2007: > While there may have been some money in it for a few select games, most were not profitable - they were created for other reasons, such as genuine intrigue in mechanics, users' fun, and curiosity. 2007 places us well into World of Warcraft territory. Online games were already a juggernaut and highly profitable.

With enough pressure, corporate reliance may become unpopular and push people to become more sovereign. The first time I realized there was no permission slip to setting up an onion service I remember thinking this is how it was supposed to be and shocked at the simplicity and ease. I really don't think there is a big enough billboard about this. Id love to see the community build on top of these principles and make it even easier for the eventualality that people are going to want these abilities back. The ability to create spaces that are yours. Establish a mailbox that's yours. A social platform that's yours. Collaboration tools that are yours. A messaging platform that is yours, all running on hardware you own. Building on the backbone of tor as the founding principles for the future. I like the the term stable diffusion to describe this...(not the ai) we need stable diffusion of the simple idea that one can create their own spaces in cyberspace again.