Comment by ssl-3
11 days ago
That's not the same Internet.
Patreon, forums, Discord, Facebook, Instagram and so on are all centralized.
With the Internet of the 90s, discussion happened with decentralized Usenet (owned by nobody) with more-focused discussion happening on mailing lists (literally owned by whoever was smart enough to get Majordomo compiled and running).
Email was handled by individual ISPs or other orgs instead of funneled through a handful of blessed providers like Gmail.
Real-time chat was distributed on networks of IRC servers that were individually operated by people, not corporations.
Quickly publishing a thing on the web meant putting some files in ~/public_html, not selecting a WordPress host or using imgur.
Ports 80 and 25 were not blocked by default.
Multiplayer games were self-hosted without a central corpo authority.
One could construct an argument that supports either way being better than the other, but the the Internet of today is not the same thing as it was a quarter of a century ago.
(Anyone can make a "discord server," but all that means is that they've placed some data in some corpo database that they can never actually own or control.)
> Multiplayer games were self-hosted without a central corpo authority.
Losing "dedicated servers" was a huge loss in my opinion. It was fun to play on the same handful of servers and get to know the same group of people. Dedicated servers were also free from profit-driven "matchmaking" schemes since you ended up playing with whoever was on at the time.
I also miss the chaotic multiplayer of the era, where the priority was having fun and not improving your rank on the leaderboard.
Edit: Dedicated servers also each had their own moderation. So if you wanted to play on a server that banned anyone nasty you could. But you could play with a bunch of folks dropping "gamer words" as well.
Then there were custom sprays - something no company would allow in their game today. It's sad how constrained and censored online gaming experiences are today. In many games even dropping the "f-bomb" can get you banned and typing assassin in the chat window yields "***in".
It's crazy to me that custom sprays existed at all in any capacity for so long. They were novel and sometimes funny but man, I really don't miss the days at all of playing a game and having your roommate/family ask why your computer screen is plastered with goatse or meatspin or the like. I remember more than a handful of awkward conversations trying to explain WHY that wasn't actually part of the game itself.
All of this still exists today though. It hasn't disappeared, it has only been drowned.
If you want to find it again, change your search engine. Use wiby.me, or search.marginalia.nu. Subscribe to RSS feeds of sites you find interesting, and go from there. Hop on gemini. Subscribe to some activitypub accounts (you don't even need an account for that). Communal IRC servers still exist, forums still exist, independent emails still exist.
Stop falling for the overall doomism HN is so quick to fall for, start doing and living what you want
Shout out to lemmy as well. Still missing some users to seriously challenge reddit, but also lacks all the spam and astroturfing.
That's a pretty narrow view. My Internet in the 90s and early 2000s was on AOL Instant Messenger and MSN Network, Yahoo! Mail and phpBB web forums hosted by random people with pictures hosted on PhotoBucket. Plenty centralized.
The technology doesn't matter, it's changing all the time. The difference is the size of the community, and the barriers to entry. If these communities were easy to discover and join and hard to be booted out from, they wouldn't be protected from The Slop. It used to be just getting on the Internet was the barrier. Now we need new barriers: paywalls and word-of-mouth and moderation.
I have no reason to doubt your experience.
But AOL IM and MSN were centralized walled gardens that came rather late to the game, and neither PhotoBucket nor phpBB existed at all in the 20th century that is the context here.