My reaction to this post
omg its the same kid! its him hes a skateboarding netrunner now
Honestly I just jumped to Lemmy after dndmemes sent me this way and it feels like I’m delving into early internet forums back in the day, fresh and new and full of excitement for the future
I know exactly what you mean. Fresh optimism. For fun, not for money or algorithms.
Fresh optimism for the communities and the new apps all being furiously worked on right now. I’ve got Memmy, Mlem, and Voyager all installed currently and watching the rapid development of each is a hell of a lot more interesting than the one Reddit app that’s been dogshit since they bought it and stuffed it full of ads and is only getting worse.
I have like 5 android apps installed waiting until I’m reunited with my beloved !syncforlemmy@lemmy.world
Remember when forums would let you put unsanitized HTML in your signature and people exploited it to flood them with pop ups and redirects? Lemmy’s bringing that back, too!
Came for the decentralization, stayed for the nonconsensual lemon party redirects.
This is a Good Joke
put an old man face on that kid and you’ve nailed it
I think fediverse users are on average much older than other social medias. I often see polls on mastodon and the most prominent groups are very often the 35-45 year olds. I feel like im in the minority of my age (19) caring about free software and it makes me sad that nowadays tech has to be so dumbed down because even the young can’t use computers just like my grand parents. It’s crazy how my classes most people only knew how to open instagram, but they had no clue how to save a word document
You might be right. I’m new here but so far I’m amused and surprised by the amount of ‘classic’ memes going around.
I think for many of us in the mid 30s early 40s it boils down to having experienced a version of the Internet where content was king, not personality. Anyone could get their website out there but it was what you put in it that mattered, not who put it there (unless you were an actual celebrity). You could bump into all sorts of new information just by clicking from link to link. Then we saw and experienced first hand the rise of the search algorithms, the echo chambers, click bait and the cult to fluff that social media became pretty much since the beginning.
The Internet we have now is certainly shinnier but only the way plastic is. When I look at the information being churned out and that gets passed around more often I can only think about it in terms of pollution. The equivalent of styrofoam pellets being manufactured for single immediate use that cover the information sphere and that just end up making people’s life worse in the long term. Twitter, Meta and the like (none holds a candle to TikTok though) are no different from the factories that have been spilling poison down the drain for decades. The latter pollute our physical space, the first pollute our emotional an mental environments.
I honestly don’t think I’m being a grumpy old fart (though I am). This is the reason I preferred reddit a while ago and why I now came here. It sort of feels like those days when ‘browsing’ was about stepping out of your own world experience and into completely different ones.
End of rant. Thanks if you made it here. :)
unless you were an actual celebrity
That didn’t matter, because without video there was no easy way to prove it.
Exactly.
May the gods of the internet bless and watch over you
Yes Geocities web rings with rotating skulls was the content king!
Or maybe people rapping in AOL chat rooms
You’re not alone. Most people I know don’t even sort their files into directories anymore, they just search for it (particularly in cloud storages like Google Drive).
In fact, when I took the introductory computer engineering course at my HS, the teacher made everyone sort their Google Drive files as an assignment.
I just found out that people use search on thier computers to find files and have no idea where anything is located. It hurts just thinking about it.
And paradoxically they refuse to use search engines to find anything on the Internet.
I completely lost control of my folder structure after keeping all my old backups (before i had a network storage) on HDDs and later copying them over as Backup-Pc-X, Backup-Pc-Y, etc. I should clean up since years. But hey, so far the search worked :D
That I can understand. I have a folder on desktop I dump everything into that’s loose to sweep under the rug. Desktop23. Desktop22, etc. And these folders go back years on my external drive. They will not be organized ever.
But I have the feeling you understand where things are supposed to go. The people I’m talking about have zero idea what’s in thier computer.
I have been ill this year and as I am pretty limited in what I can do, I am finally sorting stuff properly. It is just that I usually don’t delete anything. Every time I change a device I dump stuff based on file type on folders either on cloud, device or external HDD thinking I will come back to it. Instead, I never come back. And because of my work, a bunch of stuff is pretty depressive so sorting a decade of files and images I would want to forget feels impossible. But I am making a dent.
Even worse that Windows search is slow as hell, can’t imagine the time wasted
How do they find anything on the internet without using a search engine? (I used to love Stumble Upon!)
Same, my first semester we had a course litterally about creating word and excel documents, how to format text etc… in a software engineering program. Or other example, (2nd year, 2nd semester of the year on a 3 year program) last semester, we had a semester team project that we had to give at the end. At first, I litterally had tell them how to commit changes to the github repo, because they only did it though the web UI. How they got this far into the program I honestly have no clue as we litterally had a course in the first year that had a few classes dedicated for proper git usage
What the fuck is wrong with people, first cutlery just being flung in a drawer any which way, now apparently files just go wherever it’s all a cloud or whatever anyway isn’t it
Removed by mod
I think there are a lot of computer illiterate people I most generations but there seems to be an overlap of late gen x/early millennial thst kind of had to learn how computers and the internet worked if they wanted to use them as tech wasn’t as easy to use. Plus anyone older than that who used computers where more often considered nerds.
These days more and more people don’t even have a computer and just do everything through their phones.
but there seems to be an overlap of late gen x/early millennial thst kind of had to learn how computers and the internet worked if they wanted to use them…
That’s exactly what happened. It’s like how my grandfather knows absolutely everything about cars, he had to work on his if he wanted to use it.
Not only you. My age range between 20-30 also felt the same… Haiyah
deleted by creator
Trust me bruv, there more hacker youngsters here then you realise.
This image brought to you by the time-period when anything with young people had to have skateboarding, surfing, or roller blading.
It was the law.
Well in this case it’s quite clever since he’s literally surfing the web
Everything is more extreme when you spell it with an x xaseball
Hard to believe our hover-keyboards used to have wires!
Velcro shoes were the best
Old people got em too!
Hey I’m not even 40!
They still make them, or at least they did when I got shoes last a couple years ago.
This picture makes me nostalgic for an era I barely remember being alive for.
sorry if i made anyone feel oldAm 65. Old. But don’t feel it. No need to apologize.
Hold on to your butts - we’re gonna surf the web
If my calculations are correct, when this baby hits 88 Kb/s, you’re gonna see some serious shit!
If my calculations are correct, when this baby hits 56Kb/s, you’re gonna see some serious shit!
FTFY
Bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbdudududududueeeeperrrrrrpeeeeeeeeeeeeeeuhhhhhheeeeeeeeeg shhhkkkkkkrrrrkakingkakingkakingtshchchchchchchchcch brrrrrr
Did you guys know that lemmy is a series of tubes
For th uninitiated:
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=_cZC67wXUTs&t=0
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Good bot
It’s tubular!
Ngl I’m as high as these kids.
I love you guys. Lemmy is seriously the most fun I’ve had online in a long while. Also loving the serious posts and comments.
Nice to meet you, fellow explorers of cyberspace!
I was told it was weird to use the phrase “surfing the web” the other day. I am not even that old.
It beats doomscrolling. Surfs up, dude! 🤟
??? I’m Gen Z and I use it sometimes, weird according to who?
I’m going online for a bit
If I could find my Encyclopedia Encarta disks, I would look up where this image comes from!
Yes I am old.
I used Encyclopedia Britannica books to do homework.
Oh! Remember when they had yellow pages for the internet
I’m Mr. Fox and I’m here to say, click on the door if you want to play!
Does it really feel like the old web though? I’m a zoomie (22) and I kinda developed a rose tinted nostalgia for the old web (Windows 98 era) where I didn’t even live in (tbf apparently a lot of zoomers have some nostalgia obsession with some sort of era).
Veteran lads, can Lemmy capture the old web feeling?
Right now, because it’s still growing and developing, Lemmy has this sudo-wild west felling to it. Like anything can happen.
This was how things were in the early days of the internet. With no way to know how things are going to turn out, people are just hanging out. Smaller groups interacting with each other, and just having fun.
It feels like a reboot, or a modern revision of the how things were.
Pseudo make sandwich 😉
Ha! I read, and re-read my post at least 3 times and could not figure out why it felt wrong.
Too much bash and not enough books
As an old YTMND user, this is probably as close as it will ever get to what I experienced back then. I’d say have fun with this while you can, lol.
What’s YTMND?
But they will never know what is like to be under the fear of a cold war and a nuclear attack…oh, wait, shit!
Mr. Putin, bring down this wall!!
I think people say it’s got a bit of an old school feeling to it more because it feels a little bit lawless, and new, and experimental - a wild-west with a user base still finding its feet and expanding and figuring out what this place is and what communities will form.
I’ve been kicking around the internet since the 90s so it’s quite a nice feeling, although not quite the same!
Yeah for one we didn’t have up-points on all our posts and comments, and even in more active BBSes, forums, or chat rooms, you rarely had as many people in one “place” at a time. Really your only method of interaction or “reacting” or registering approval/disapproval was through writing something of your own.
And nothing ever went viral, because no one but a bunch of nerds cared about what happened on the internet.
The Internet felt like a brand spanking new wild West back in the 90s like there was so much to discover and explore. You don’t understand the novelty of having all the information at your fingertips immediately. What was that actor’s name in that movie that one time? What was the name of that song with those lyrics? Missed last week’s episode, used to just hope you can catch it on summer reruns, but with internet you could look up whatever you missed.
Lenny right now feels like a wal mart brand replacement for something you had a long time that just broke and you’re still trying to find a long term replacement. It’s got some of the features, a fraction of the content, a bunch of new words to learn, and a lot more bugs, so who knows. It’s just a message board at the end of the day so I’m not sure if it brings anything new to the table like 90’s internet did.
BBS had threaded discussion and different topics and servers in the 80s, a lot like the fediverse
Not even close.
It does a bit. Modern internet has walled gardens and constant rage bait. Havent seen it yet here.
The original vibe was one of lack of consolidated info, extremely niche groups, and a lot of self discovery. This is so far beyond anything of that nature I find the comparison straight up weird. The lack of rage harkens back to maybe late 2000s but definitely not the early 90s to win98 vibe.
Yes and no. It should be a niche forum covering competitive speed fisting but it’s a really bland version of internet 2.0
No, not even close. The web was pretty shit and — get this — nothing you ever did on it counted.
[cries in screeching modem sounds]
Plus there’s not enough dancing baby gifs or under construction signs.
Partially. The main feeling of old is the greater sense of community, even if everyone is a named anonymous. People don’t have to fight for attention around here. If you want to see a better visual representation of mid 90’s internet, check neocities.org
Yeah I’ve already heard about that. I absolutely love those website designs. Each site beautifully represent the creator’s personality, which makes it fun exploring these sites.
