The old internet is still there, it's still growing. It's just covered in a thick layer of corporate shit sites. All you have to do is be the change you want to see. Start hosting your website from home. Code it by hand. Don't use any javascript frontends. It's a good time.
As for finding others, well, HN isn't a bad place to start. Just install an RSS reader client and every time you find yourself enjoying an article check the site to see if it has an RSS feed. In fact, do this with every web interaction. Pretty soon you can completely decouple yourself from content aggregators and start perceiving the web as a community again.
https://millionshort.com/ lets you exclude that thick layer of corporate shite. Search without the top million (or 100k, 10k etc) sites. !mill from DDG.
Not perfect but often turns up those personal homepages, hobby sites and esoterica the early internet thrived on. Stuff that Google and co forgot existed - or is down on page 200+
I've been missing the old internet. A little while ago I tried to find StumbleUpon and discovered it's transformed into more of a social media thing. I took a couple days to recreate what I thought of as the core StumbleUpon functionality - click button, get random site. And I've been trying to aggregate what feel like unique, individual, not well known sites into my index for it.
I used to love StumbleUpon. I haven't thought about it for years. Thanks so much for making this. Let me know if you need an extra human to moderate submissions or whatever :)
Thanks - I have thought about a browser add-on. Making it work based off a link seems like an easy upgrade too. I'll add it on to my to-do list for the site.
I like that I'm not tracking anyone, it doesn't require UI/UX, I have little to nothing to gain from it - it's just a human connection. Something fun we might have seen in the early years of the internet.
Because getting content on the web is only as difficult as people make it, and beneath all the bloat of "modern front end development practices" there is still a simple set of tools to work with.
You can create a free account or a site on blogspot or Wordpress with significantly less friction. That is still a full-fledged website, and not an IG page or Twitter that's a walled garden serving only logged in users.
In this day and age, nobody is going to bother with writing HTML markup when they've used rich text editors to compose everything from emails to Tumblr posts.
Back in the early 2000s I used to write music reviews for a site called Epinions. They didn't have a rich text editor, so if you wanted to do bold, you needed to wrap those words in a <b></b> tag, or <i> tag for italics. It was extremely irritating to have to do that, especially if you were pasting in the content from a pre-existing Word doc that already had all the proper formatting.
If you use the same JS frontend as everyone else it isn't very individual and form constrains content. The reason people use JS frontends is because they're at work being paid to do it. Time and the ability for your coworkers to contribute matters. You don't have to bring these compromises forced on you at work to home.
>If you use the same JS frontend as everyone else it isn't very individual and form constrains content.
You seem to be confusing the implementation of a site with its content, and assuming that homogeneity of layout corresponds to homogeneity of content. It's an understandable bias to find in a community of programmers and web developers, but it isn't true.
The pages of a book are uniformly sized, generally speaking uniformly colored with one of a very narrow set of fonts and typefaces, spaced and typeset according to an industry standard - and yet this places no constraint at all on the nature of the content that can be displayed within those pages. In the same way, a website rendering content on the frontend rather than the backend is an implementation detail which has nothing to do with what content is rendered.
And even in the 90s, many sites looked similar. Rather than having standard templates focused around typography, people just copied what other sites were doing, using the same table-based layouts with black backgrounds and GIFS, and none of that necessarily made the content any better than what exists today.
JavaScript is the first path down a road that leads to tracking and ads and optimization. It's too easy to think, "I'll just serve this JS library off X CDN" and voila, you've enabled someone to track your users. "No JavaScript" keeps you honest.
This isn't feasible for a large chunk of the population, mainly because ISPs like Comcast love to give you 500 mbps down while limiting your upload to a pitiful 10 mbps.
Host a single 100K image that hits the front page of reddit and your home internet gets hugged to death.
How many 100k image hits do you get on your personal website you made for fun? In the entire 20 years I've hosted my website on my comcast connection I have never had this issue. If you're going to post an image to reddit (which is kind of going backwards from the point of all this) then just mirror it onto some popular image host (or your VPS). This doesn't prevent you from also serving up a copy from your local disk to visitors.
1 megabit of upstream is plenty for a personal website. I can say this from long experience.
If that 15 minutes of fame is so important, put up a load balancer with autoscaling or make sure the Wayback machine archives every post upon publication.
Obviously, if I'm going to share the image, I won't link it directly and would use an image hosting service, or just upload it directly to reddit for them to host.
That does nothing if some other rando decides to link to it.
But wouldn't it solve the problem of your server exploding during your sites 15 minutes of fame? So many users at once could use the P2P of IPFS and take load off the server.
The only difference is that your final SSL termination would occur on a host that's better placed to handle the load. Literally everything else could be done on-prem e.g. at home.
Realistically this 'oh no I got hammered by HN' case is something that is irrelevant anyway. If you're really worried about it, don't host large image files, sorted. The "old internet" didn't have that stuff anyway because we were all on slow connections, 100KB took 10+ seconds to load on dialup.
You don't, the reality is it's extremely unlikely this happens and if it does the worst outcome is high bandwidth use + the image doesn't load for everyone. Hardly the end of the world.
You can very easily host things on a paid server though, which these days cost very little, use another image host or S3/similar when if things went crazy popular.
I think most isps also block outgoing traffic on port 80 these days. At least, that's the issue me and some friends found when we tried to host websites on our various ISPs.
We need our personal websites to start linking directly to each other again… friends, coworkers, mentors, related topics, etc…
This trend died out, it used to be on practically every website. Maybe people just figured Google would find and sort everything for them. But now the search engines are packed with SEO garbage and offer no discoverability or serendipity.
So much this. Unfortunately post google reader I never found an rss reader that really clicked with me as much. Part of it is because I followed a mix of text and just pure image sites, and par of it is the sites come and go and I haven’t found new sites. RIP ffffound and the like...
Neocities[1] and tilde servers like tilde.town[2] is a pretty large hub of old-internet sites. It's a free Geocities-like host that's home to a lot of neat, creative sites.
You can also get a VPS for about $5/mo and have your own self-hosted server with whatever servers and web apps you want, like an RSS reader, an IRC client, FTP/Gopher server, etc. (Shameless self plug: this is what I do with my own personal site, https://invisibleup.com)
As for finding others, well, HN isn't a bad place to start. Just install an RSS reader client and every time you find yourself enjoying an article check the site to see if it has an RSS feed. In fact, do this with every web interaction. Pretty soon you can completely decouple yourself from content aggregators and start perceiving the web as a community again.