>+ wirefaux? Who's this?
A reader of this article, who posted it around several "nostalgia" hivemind circles, only to be met with immense backlash and several bans from many tech circles as a result. They requested that they add more onto this article before Cyberix went back online for the public.

You can view the original article here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20250825125337/https://cy-x.net/articles?id=13

Digital Cargo Cult: How Zoomers Ruined Old Internet Nostalgia

The Aesthetic Obsession

Walk into any zoomer's idea of "old internet nostalgia" and you'll be assaulted by virtual glitter, neon colors, and websites that look like a Lisa Frank folder exploded. They've discovered terms like "Fruitiger Aero" and "Y2K aesthetic" - keywords that literally didn't exist before 2018 - and decided this constitutes understanding internet history.

fruitiger aero computer on reddit.png

>Surely by listening to my frootiger ayyrohh playlists on Google's YouTube platform while browsing r/oldyoutubelayouts and r/nostalgia, it will all magically get better!

But here's the problem: they've confused the wrapping paper for the gift.

The old internet wasn't good because of how it looked. It was good because of how it worked. And on that fundamental level, modern "old internet" enthusiasts have learned absolutely nothing.

2016 youtube bootleg.png

>Because 2016 YouTube was clearly the best the "Old Internet" had to offer, right?

The Discord Delusion

Windows Longbridge.png

>Making Windows 10 skinwalk an older version of Windows? Having an entire website, but forcing people to join your Discord server instead of having an IRC channel or a forum?

I recently witnessed this cognitive dissonance firsthand while observing a group of students panic because their school was monitoring their Discord server and Reddit community for cheating. They were genuinely afraid of administrative oversight on these corporate platforms.

So I offered them a solution: move to XMPP and self-hosted alternatives. Actual privacy. Actual decentralization. The real tools that made the old internet independent and free.

The response? I was muted for an entire day, but then banned shortly after. Two users were "bawling their eyes out at the keyboard" claiming it was a scam and something malicious.

Tech illiterate children afraid of XMPP.png

>THE OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE IS MALICIOUS! DO NOT CLICK ON IT! AHHHHHHHHHH DO NOT CLICK ON THE WIKIPEDIA LINK IT WILL HACK YOU

Think about that. They want the aesthetic of old internet freedom while rejecting the actual tools that provide it. They'll paste ASCII art and use retro fonts while remaining completely dependent on the same corporate surveillance apparatus they claim to want to escape.

The writing was on the wall. Corporate platforms always follow the same trajectory: attract users with freedom, then monetize by restricting it. The zoomers who got attached to early Discord never learned this lesson, so they're still trying to recreate that feeling within the same broken system. Many "old internet" revival projects attach themselves not to a forum or an IRC channel, but rather a Discord server.

The Cargo Cult Mentality

This is classic cargo cult behavior. In World War II, Pacific islanders observed planes bringing supplies and tried to recreate the appearance of airstrips to make more planes come. They built fake control towers and wooden aircraft, missing the underlying systems that actually made air transport work.

wake up its the 2000s again fruitiger aero.png

>Maybe listening to hours upon hours of music that happens to be labeled 'fruitiger aero' will help me truly feel immersed in the "old internet"!

Zoomers are doing the same thing with internet culture. They see the surface aesthetics of old websites - the bright colors, the GIF animations, the "quirky" layouts - and think recreating these visual elements will somehow recapture what made that era special.

Meanwhile, they're completely ignoring the underlying principles:

• Decentralization: The old internet was made of countless independent sites, not a handful of corporate platforms
• Technical competence: Users actually understood their tools instead of being passive consumers
• Privacy by default: You controlled your data because you hosted it yourself
• Resistance to corporate control: The whole point was avoiding centralized authority

The Manufactured Golden Age

gay windows.png

>The Windows 7 logo looked like this and was also gay-themed in 2009. Don't question it! I need to stay immersed!

The most insidious aspect is that these "nostalgic" zoomers are being nostalgic for something they never experienced. When confronted with this reality, they become defensive and dismissive.

In a recent Discord exchange, when I pointed out that someone born in 2007 couldn't meaningfully remember pre-Web 2.0 internet culture, the response was predictable: "people in the 2000s didn't care either... they just lived their lives... they visited websites to learn or connect with people, much as we do today."

This reveals the fundamental misunderstanding. They think centralization happened because people preferred it, not because they were gradually manipulated into accepting it. They assume that because YouTube dominated video sharing and Google dominated search by the end of the 2000s, this was always the natural state.

They miss the entire trajectory: the corporate platforms won by offering convenience while slowly removing alternatives. People didn't choose centralization - they were boiled like frogs.

The Centralized Decentralist

The Paradox.png

This person intellectually grasps that centralization killed the golden era, but their actual behavior shows they're still thinking within the corporate ecosystem framework. Instead of building their own photo sharing solution or joining existing decentralized alternatives, they're asking for "an app like Instagram" - meaning they want someone else to build them a centralized platform that feels like the old centralized platform.

The macOS tweet is the cherry on top - they're worried about animation smoothness on premium Apple hardware while supposedly advocating for returning to simpler, independent web solutions.

They wish for the golden era, but are still latched onto the very things and concepts that took it away.

This pattern repeats everywhere: using Discord to organize "decentralization" projects, creating "old web revival" sites that require joining their Discord server instead of having forums, posting retro aesthetic moodboards from $1,200 surveillance devices while claiming to appreciate "simpler times."

They're trust fund babies or financially irresponsible people cosplaying as minimalists, with no understanding of how to navigate modern society, let alone recreate historical internet culture.

Missing the Source Code

These zoomers don't realize that half their memes and cultural references came downstream from places like 4chan and similar communities, while platforms like YouTube and Reddit simply took and sanitized them. They use the language and references while completely missing the underlying ethos that created them.

Zoomers have inherited the outputs without understanding the inputs. They use the language and references while completely missing the underlying ethos that created them.

The old internet communities they're trying to emulate were built by people who:

• Ran their own servers
• Wrote their own code
• Understood networking protocols
• Valued anonymity and pseudonymity
• Rejected corporate gatekeeping

Modern "old internet" enthusiasts do none of these things. They want the aesthetic rebellion without any actual rebellion.

The Defensive Response Pattern

When confronted with actual alternative ideas and beliefs, the response is always the same dismissive pattern:

Stage 1: "Why do you talk like that?" (attacking communication style instead of addressing substance)
Stage 2: "Go outside and tell someone on the street" (appeal to normalcy fallacy)
Stage 3: "You have a superiority complex" (projection and ad hominem)
Stage 4: Mob harassment and eventual banning

Notice the pattern: no engagement with the technical alternatives offered, just personal attacks and deflection. They're defending their corporate platforms the same way addicts defend their dealers.

Nostalgia for the Unexperienced

When you point out that someone born in 2007 has usernames like "Xx_M4xH4xx0r1337_xX" and describes themselves as "a nomad of the interwebz," the response is predictable: "And what does my age even say in this case? Will it invalidate my argument?"

Yes, actually, it does. You cannot be nostalgic for something you never experienced. Your "interwebz" persona and leetspeak username aren't authentic old internet culture - they're Halloween costumes based on pop culture representations.

The irony is that they frequent modern 4chan (a hollow shell of its former self) while claiming to understand internet history. Modern 4chan is just pornposting and political bait - the actual culture and original content creators left over a decade ago.

The Design Language Trap

When pressed, they fall back to: "the entire point for those people IS the design language... they were never interested in anything else."

This misses the point entirely. Design languages emerge from underlying technical and cultural constraints. Skeuomorphic design existed because early computer users needed familiar metaphors. Web 1.0 aesthetics emerged from bandwidth limitations and HTML constraints.

Recreating the visual style without understanding the context is like wearing a spacesuit to the grocery store - you've got the appearance but none of the function.

The Convenience Fallacy

They claim centralization won because it was more convenient, ignoring that this "convenience" came with invisible costs that only became apparent after lock-in occurred. Early YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter were free and open precisely to eliminate competition. The restrictions came later, once alternatives had been killed.

People in the 2000s didn't choose surveillance capitalism - they were gradually acclimated to it through a series of small compromises, each individually reasonable but collectively devastating.

Aestheticizing the Corporate Shell

OHHHHHHHHHH PENK MEDYSINE OHHHHH FROOOOOOOT AERO.png

>taking medysine gives me nostalgia! i feel so nostalgic rite now for chugging tasty pink medysine as a child! give me medysine now, mammy! my froootiger ayyrooooh nostalgiacore setup demands it or i won't feel immersed!

The cruelest irony is that the aesthetics they're obsessing over weren't even representative of the actual 2000s internet. The "Y2K" look they worship was mostly corporate branding and early social media platforms. The real independent web looked nothing like their glittery recreations.

They're being nostalgic for a commercial interpretation of an era they never experienced, while ignoring the actual principles that made that era valuable.

The Real Alternative Still Exists

The tools to recreate the actual old internet still exist and work perfectly:

• XMPP has been around since 1999 and runs on every platform
• IRC still provides real-time chat without corporate oversight
• Self-hosting is easier than ever with modern tools
• RSS still delivers content without algorithmic manipulation

But suggesting these solutions gets you labeled as suspicious, difficult, or having a "superiority complex." Why? Because actual independence requires effort and technical understanding. It's easier to slap some glitter GIFs on a Carrd page and call it "old web revival."

The Consequence

This matters because it represents a complete failure to learn from history. The old internet offered genuine alternatives to corporate control, surveillance, and centralization. Instead of learning those lessons, a generation has reduced it to aesthetic trends they can consume and discard.

They've turned internet history into fast fashion - something to be worn briefly, photographed for social media, then thrown away when the next trend arrives.

What We Actually Lost

The old internet wasn't about how websites looked. It was about:

• Independence: You could build something without asking permission
• Durability: Sites lasted because people cared enough to maintain them
• Community: Shared interests mattered more than demographic targeting
• Learning: Users became more technically competent by participating
• Privacy: Your data was yours because you controlled the servers
• Resistance: The infrastructure itself was designed to route around corporate control

None of these require retro fonts or neon colors. All of them require understanding systems instead of just consuming aesthetics.

Breaking the Cycle

Want to honor the old internet? Stop making glittery websites that link to your Discord server. Start learning XMPP. Stop posting on Reddit about decentralization and actually host your own services. Stop buying new devices every year and use your current hardware until it breaks.

The tools exist. The protocols work. The knowledge is freely available. The only thing missing is the will to actually use them instead of just aestheticizing them.

Conclusion

The old internet is dead, and zoomers killed it by turning it into a fashion trend. They've created a cargo cult that worships the appearance while rejecting the substance, demanding the aesthetic of rebellion while embracing the corporate systems that killed what they claim to love.

But the principles that made it great are still available to anyone willing to put in the work. The question is: do you want to build something real, or just play dress-up with its corpse?

The choice is yours - but choose quickly, because the window for genuine alternatives is closing as fast as the corporate noose is tightening.

TLDR: Real internet culture was never about the aesthetics. It was about the independence. Learn the difference, or stay trapped in the digital plantation while wearing vintage chains.

Jesus Christ, man, you are joyless. Not only that but you are immature.

ou didn’t even bother listening to my further reasoning which is:

• I am expressing myself however I want, you’re basically telling me to quit having fun. You are judging me purely by the basis of my username, which mind you existed since mid-2010s, prior to that I had no username at all yet I was present on the internet, be it using my real name or staying a silent observer, lurking through old DeviantArt (I even have an old USB with proof that I did have a lot of things downloaded from DeviantArt, mostly those related to Windows ricing because I used to be passionate about it) and whatnot.
• The fact that I’m not in 4chan because of bygone trends but more so because the Discord circlejerk got boring (I’ve been on Discord since 2019). I literally told you this on AngelBruni’s server (from which you got kicked from) yesterday yet you ignored my point so I have to repeat myself here.

I wouldn’t have written this if you didn’t decide to make it personal, and yet you did. I was right about you being a nuisance just from judging you by your grammar.

• M

On top of that, after further reading your article I can’t help but ask one question. What is your opinion on LGBT? I’m not even a member but one particular part stuck out to me because I feel like you have ulterior motives with that bit. It’s a question regarding basic human decency, not politics, which I agree with the other article, have become increasingly polarized.

>The Nomad of The Interwebz
you are a minor

>you are a minor
With that dismissive (ironic since you call others dismissive) remark you’re only proving my point of you being massively immature. It’s clear you are unwilling to discuss this matter in a civil manner (even if yesterday wasn’t as civil either, both of us being to blame because I did start it by calling you pedantic (you were) and you swivelling to judge me on the basis on how I express myself for no reason other than to boost your ego about your point on retroslop).

Also, I’ll be frequently screenshotting this discussion in case you and the admins are directly involved in your circlejerk. In the event you attempt to further defame me by doctoring my own messages or removing proof of their existence, I’ll be prepared.

who let this colossal faggot out of his cage?

>I’ve been on Discord since 2019
That was when I left discord lmao. You must really be underage if you think 2019 was a long time ago.

It was fine back in 2015 when it was an "alternative to ts3 and skype" as they marketed it towards gamers and people used it as a free voip alternative to ts3, but as it grew it became more like social media, all communities I had been a part of eventually died or changed completely in spirit.

It not only killed the ts3 servers I used, it killed internet forum culture completely. It's sad to see the extent of damage it did to online communities.
I watched the history as it was happening, and unfortunately I was part of the problem.

> That was when I left discord lmao. You must really be underage if you think 2019 was a long time ago.

I don’t think it’s a long time ago, I wasn’t insinuating that, the point I wanted to make is being there (or matter of fact any corner of the internet) for more than half a decade grew old, I was striving for new experiences and the only corner I was in at the time was really Discord, you strive for variety, and that was my sole motivation.

Also, dude who impersonated me, please get a life.

>filler text filler text filler text

>prior to that I had no username at all yet I was present on the internet, be it using my real name or staying a silent observer

>using your real name
>on the internet

stupid retard
you are obviously a young child who is desperately trying to pretend that they are indeed a full grown adult whose only experience on the internet was discord

This article only consists of the wails of a dent-headed grumpy retard that hasnt gotten its candy yet. Nothing else.
No substance, just >WOGH EDGY GREENTEXTZ!!1!1! and paragraph slop about LE DECENTRALIZACIONE!!1!1
You only label other people's actions as predictable just to make people think that you're smart and your moaning and whining was acktzch💦ually all part of your 'master plan'.
With all due respect, Suck a meter's worth of dick.

>I was striving for new experiences and the only corner I was in at the time was really Discord
and where were you before discord?
why did it take so long for you to discover it, if you were online and "striving for new experiences"?

>sir captor is typing in the same exact manner as the underage faggot
>ad hominem ad hominem
why are your actions actually very predictable?

> you are obviously a young child who is desperately trying to pretend that they are indeed a full grown adult whose only experience on the internet was discord
I’m glad to be 17 and still have my life and development ahead of me, meanwhile (I assume) you are adults with fully developed brains bearing such profound mental retardation it’s beyond me. As for internet experience, I am being serious about being present on the internet beyond Discord, on top of that, you seem to be the type of dude who was busy spending life away writing greentexts sulking about your chud life or whatever.

>weeps about ad hominems
>ad hominems in the middle of weeping about ad hominems
>proves the point of what sir captor said about calling people predictable
lul. fucking lul

>wall of nothing
>now is desperately trying to pretend to be other people
>obvious samefag is obvious
>I am being serious about being present on the internet beyond Discord,

give us examples saar

what the fuck is this autism

>What is your opinion on LGBT?
>It’s a question regarding basic human decency, not politics,
Yes it is a question regarding politics. No one even talked about "LGBT" before ~2016. And why do you care about what OP thinks about your friends?

Why does everyone needs to have an opinion on everything nowadays?
You are not allowed to simply abstain from having an "opinion" on anything you don't care, because then people claim you don't have "basic human decency".
This is another problem with the modern internet that OP should've written about.

>and where were you before discord?
why did it take so long for you to discover it, if you were online and "striving for new experiences"?
YouTube and a bit of DeviantArt if you wish to delve into my roots which go all the way to early mid 2010s. If you want to talk modern, there was Twitter (it was ass), Mastodon (I did jackshit, ass), still DeviantArt (ass, have an account to bypass a login wall, but use it to post some of my shit too because why not) and Bluesky (to bypass a login wall, also ass). Every website is ass really but what can I do about it? Go to places literally no one wants to follow me along? Please, I’ve tried that, you guys better snap back to reality and op, there goes gravity.

Isn't invalidating an argument voer a fallacy, a fallacy in-and-of itself?

> Why does everyone needs to have an opinion on everything nowadays?
Just say neutral and call it a day, I’ll leave you alone on that.

>I am being serious about being present on the internet beyond Discord,

where are my examples saar where were you on the internet asides from discord saaaar

>Just say neutral and call it a day, I’ll leave you alone on that.
I'm not OP, but if you care about the opinion of a random anon who came from the /g/ thread:
I'm a misanthrope. I hate the entire human species equally.
That includes you and your faggot friends for being underage, OP (who is also a faggot) for posting his blogposts on /g/, and even myself for wasting my time in this garbage thread.

>I’m glad to be 17

This thread is for discussing the article's points about internet culture and community decay. If you want to share your internet biography or ask unrelated political questions, start your own thread.

Keep responses focused on the actual arguments presented.

>>>>>>>reposted from /g/

zoomers' entire identity is about being "internet natives" so yeah they get intensely triggered when informed that They Weren't There

> The Windows 7 logo looked like this and was also gay-themed in 2009. Don't question it! I need to stay immersed!

It's obviously not the Windows 7 logo. In fact, it's the Windows 95 logo, but with the colors tweaked a bit. It's not supposed to match anything, it's supposed to represent the server.

> The old internet communities they're trying to emulate were built by people who ran their own servers, wrote their own code, understood networking protocols, valued anonymity and pseudonymity, rejected corporate gatekeeping

I do all of those things, and I'm pretty certain a lot of other people in the community also do. Some examples: I run https://teknixstuff.com/ and https://chat.teknixstuff.com/, both of which were written by hand by me (no crappy frameworks or drag-and-drop site builders here). I very much understand networking protocols (how else am I going to manage to come up with a websockets-like protocol which works on IE 5.0?). I do value anonymity and pseudonymity, and I definitely have made efforts to reject corporate gatekeeping (what's ChatDot for? ah yes, it's an alternative to a corporate platform, discord!)

> Yes, actually, it does. You cannot be nostalgic for something you never experienced.

If it's better, you certainly can agree that it's a lot better than the modern stuff. Nostalgia might be the wrong term, but there's definitely a similar thing even if you never experienced it originally.

> The "Y2K" look they worship was mostly corporate branding and early social media platforms. The real independent web looked nothing like their glittery recreations.

Have you actually looked at any of it? Sure, not all of it did (plenty of it was just unstyled html), but a significant portion did look a lot like that.

> The tools to recreate the actual old internet still exist and work perfectly:
> XMPP has been around since 1999 and runs on every platform
> IRC still provides real-time chat without corporate oversight
> Self-hosting is easier than ever with modern tools
> RSS still delivers content without algorithmic manipulation

indeed, they do, but the convenience is often lost there, and many platforms depend on having a lot of users to make sense. XMPP I've barely heard of anybody using, IRC is missing numerous features that are rather important these days (eg: file uploads and being able to read previous messages). Self-hosting definitely does exist and work, thought depending on what you mean by modern tools, it doesn't always make it easier. RSS is useful and still commonplace on websites, even if not commonly used by users, but it doesn't require the same popularity that a chat platform does.

Why have the trolls not been banned?

you're arguing with underage tourists who will forget about your thread in 2 days tops, you will never change those animals' minds because there are no minds. also don't use tldr because it incentivizes those same subhumans to engage without reading anything

these replies are a mess

> where are my examples saar where were you on the internet asides from discord saaaar
I accidentally anon’d my examples list, all it takes is to find a very poorly formatted forum post mentioning websites like Twitter, DeviantArt and Bluesky being ass. Other than those I already listed, I just remembered I had a Reddit account at some point, I deleted it because Reddit was ass too. I was on Instagram too after refusing to join it for a while and my account got nuked on the second day of my presence.

Also, I like how you think captor and I are the same people. The 4chan format truly is wondrous.

> you're arguing with underage tourists who will forget about your thread in 2 days tops, you will never change those animals' minds because there are no minds.
Clearly the dude who mentioned me in the article by name is mindless, I wouldn’t have started this kerfuffle here had he not done so. I think it’s more brainless given the fact that he decided to target my Steam usernames just because I judged him on the basis of the grammar without looking to the further argument unfolding at AngelBruni’s. Dude made it personal for no other reason other than to fuel this article, which I find as a rant of a man who went mad from the internet, plunging into attempting to rewind the internet without realizing that it is damn near impossible for others to follow along (I know from experience, I tried to get others to more open platforms only to be faced with failure). It’s not as simple as making a switch in terms of your software like switching to Linux. The only option here is to accept the harsh reality of the corporates winning the internet and every way to overturn this reality will result in failure.

It’s not even about tech literacy, it’s about convenience, and they have grown far too accustomed to corporate slop and no one can convince them to move away because everyone else is using it. The big issue is market share, if the thing has a microscopic market share, there is barely any incentive to invest in it.

At the very least it doesn’t seem that open modern platforms are dying anytime soon. As much as I do not like Mastodon’s user base it truly is a promising platform given its background. Lemmy is also rather emerging.

(insert "wall of text" "tl;dr" remark here)

Not my problem if some here, ironically, have just as short of an attention span as a median Skibidi Toilet viewer.

>Why have the trolls not been banned?

They have been banned. Really hesitating on deleting the posts themselves though since they have all done nothing but indirectly prove the article's points.

This 'Nomad' pissed his pants over being called out on the Internet. Is this really the level of maturity we should expect out of these people?

> The Windows 7 logo looked like this and was also gay-themed in 2009. Don't question it! I need to stay immersed!

What fucking argument is that? It's obviously not the Windows 7 logo. If anyone there actually thinks that is the Windows 7 logo I will ban their retarded ass. They can go infest WWF and LSC Discords.
It was only meant to be the pride month logo and I have been way too busy to care about changing it either to the orb or weebshit again

> Making Windows 10 skinwalk an older version of Windows? Having an entire website, but forcing people to join your Discord server instead of having an IRC channel or a forum?

Yes, I agree, but after taking a cheap shot at the logo, they completely fail to mention Eclipse Community. Eclipse Community is supposed to be a public information repository of the stuff on the server. You don't need to join it to get Windows 7 Updated v5, r3dfox, Lun3r, etc. The forum is meant to make that public.

I pretty much only "run" the server so the LSC and WWF don't control all Windows related development on Discord. W7LS server has to exist so they don't get a supermajority and turn it all into shitty slop or fleece their users.

The original idea was to keep the community parts away from Discord, there was no link to W7LS on Eclipse. Maybe you could find one buried in a forum post in the past, but nowadays it's two clicks from eclipse.cx to get to <https://eclipse.cx/servers&gt; for an invite to W7LS. r3dfox also originally didn't have an invite to the Discord anywhere, it was only until later when I recognized the importance of this fight that I added it. Like I didn't want to support the server at the expense of the forum or the projects, but it's basically mandatory now.

> posting retro aesthetic moodboards from $1,200 surveillance devices while claiming to appreciate "simpler times."

I will have you know that I use a 10+ year old laptop, a Dell M4800 running hardened Windows 7 with a custom firewall, as my main workstation now. (I only use 5950X to compile shit nowadays)
I also use an 8 year old phone, a Xperia XZ1 Compact running Android 8 (my own compile of LineageOS 15.1 + MicroG), as my main phone, and I have been using it pretty consistently as my main phone since 2020.

> Zoomers have inherited the outputs without understanding the inputs. They use the language and references while completely missing the underlying ethos that created them.

Eclipse main website, no JavaScript, no cookies, loads instantly on even mediocre connections. Scales pretty well on older devices. While also looking better than any modern fuckoff xyz website. and before you say "Skeuomorphic design existed because early computer users needed familiar metaphors." it looks better than modern slop, fuck off. It's not an opinion, it's a fact, and I will die on this hill.

Eclipse forum, it does use JavaScript and cookies, but that's on phpBB and it works well enough with them blocked. (Unless someone wants to resurrect eBoard2 and make it a competent replacement.) Legacy theme can get the forum working well in even IE6.

Also bro glazes IRC, bitch that shit is ass. Close IRC, boom your chat history is gone, and if there's a conversation while your client is closed, you never get to know it happened. Yes I know you can just leave your PC on 24/7 or run a bouncer, but that shit is not feasible for most people. I used to have a bouncer for one fuckoff IRC channel until they banned me for bullshit, exactly like how it goes on pisscord. That bouncer was a bitch to configure and nowadays it's long gone and I sure as shit am not going to configure another. I'd rather move to Matrix but the clients are all ass. Discord seems to be the only viable chat platform for now until they fuck it up badly enough that I make a good enough Matrix client or if ChatDot comes to exist before then then I will just use it instead.

Nah zoomers aren't the problem, normies are. Zoomer normies are just the worst of the worst because they're both children (or young adults) and normies. I'm a zoomer and I use XMPP and host webservers but I'm not a normie by any means.

Normies are raised from birth to believe that their government (usually some form of "democracy") offers them freedom when in reality it only provides a pale imitation. So it really isn't a giant leap for them to accept a watered-down, corporate imitation of the "old internet". It's just in their nature to follow and not question things.

>I pretty much only "run" the server so the LSC and WWF don't control all Windows related development on Discord. W7LS server has to exist so they don't get a supermajority and turn it all into shitty slop or fleece their users.

aren't you a pedophile?

this argument... it's an ad-hoc

the actual true internet nomads are soyjak.party users (and their splinters) but y'all oldcacas are too obsessed with dead 4cuck oldcaca tranime kultur to admit that zoomerBVLLS are capable of using actual old internet shit and bringing the torch forward. any time a zoomerDEITY makes a site, you clittycels are the first to screech about how "DA HEGGIN ZOOMIES" are "ROONIN MUH OLDCVCK KULTUR".

That said, trvthnvke of an article. Attached is a relevant XKCD comic about this exact subject.

coal forum that doesn't put posting instructions on the reply award.

>YOU WILL JOIN MY TRANS-PRIDE CENTRIC FRUITEGER AERO DISCORD LINKED ON MY HEGGIN NEOCITIES PAGE

>OH MY FRIGGIN YAAAAS MUH FROOTIGER AERO RETROSLOP CENTRIC NEOCITIES DISCORD IS TOTALLY TAKING OFF

>YOU WILL RESPECT MY OLDCVCK KUTLUR ZOOMER HATE
>YOU WILL USE MY DOGSHIT ATTACHMENTS SYSTEM
>YOU WILL REINVENT THE WHEEL WITH SHITTY PROPRIETARY NIGGERWARE FORUMS THAT MOOTXICO LARPERS USE
>YOU WILL HAVE TO REPOST YOUR POST 8 TIMES BECAUSE OF MY DOGSHIT FORAMTTING SYSTEM THAT'S TOTALLY HEGGIN OLD INTERENT
>YOU WILL NOT GET A DELETE POST BUTTON BASED COOKIES BECAUSE IM A SELFISH LITTLE NIGGERFUCK WHO REFUSES TO MAKE A FUNCTIONAL BACKEND

works on my machine

football.png

works on my machine as well

wait are anonymous attachments broken?

The server's SQL time was off compared to our site's time, causing anonymous attachments to break. Sorry!

Here is proof that attachments now work:

attachment:1

It will disappear after 15 minutes, of course.

>The server's SQL time was off compared to our site's time, causing anonymous attachments to break. Sorry!

just rewrite ts in nodejs already 🥀🥀🥀

BTW your article was posted on kiwifwrms

Yes, I will convince all my online friends of over a decade to migrate to something else.

correct

holy fucking AUTISM.

true

I remember when shitposting was reserved for idiots. I remember when being anonymous didn’t mean you could just go around offending and disrespecting everyone. You could usually tell who was a kid or just plain dumb by the way they engaged with others online.

The 2000s boom brought a lot of Millennial kids into IRC, XMPP, MSN, forums… slowly learning about the internet from their Windows or MacOS computers. But it also brought a lot of trolling. Unsupervised and unleashed, Gen X and Millennials built the internet as we know it today. No single generation is ultimately to blame for the state of things — we all either accept or reject ideas as they come.

In the end, it’s obvious that new generations want to experience times gone by. That’s natural curiosity (“Wow! Things were so different back then? I wish I’d been there to see it myself”). I wish I could have lived through different ages of human civilization too, but the closest I can get is going to a reenactment: medieval fairs, Egyptian-themed parties, Victorian high-society events, and so on. What we have left are the aesthetics — we can’t actually live those times.

I think OP is pointing at something deeper than they realized. We humans are extremely visual. We’re drawn to videos, images, decorations, ornaments, artifacts… so it’s no wonder newer generations try to relive the past. And that’s OK! Who cares if it’s not perfectly accurate? It doesn’t matter. Those who actually lived through those times can remember, reminisce, or write about them for the future.

The toxicity between generations, I think, comes from how people deal with change. Some are born into it, others adapt, and others reject it outright.

OP — opinions are just that: opinions. The way you see the world is yours. The way we all see the world is ours.

Big love to everyone here.

The thing i hate the most about Zoomer "retro" websites is how they don't really have any content in them. I could wager that like 70% of Neocities pages basically contain

>the main homepage full of the same kawaii gifs and wacky artsy 88x31 buttonz!!!1!
>an about me page
>an art gallery that eventually gets dropped and just redirects to the artist's xitter
>a blog about videogames or complaining about your job or the school system, that gets abandoned after two months max (and with no RSS feed)
>a list of links (mostly just their friends' sites, other pretty popular neocities pages or pretty surface websites)
>a contact page (social media shilling, maybe a personal e-mail they never read if you're lucky)

I get that decades of social media has molded most of the internet into consumers who don't remember a lot of what went into creating websites worth a damn. But man, most of them either end up as glorified carrd/strawpages from the start or end up feeling like even more of abandoned voids than actual abandoned Geocities pages from 2006.

Good article, liked how you talked about how people don't really understand why older stuff was "better" but partially falls flat where you seethe about how it's le zoomers fault that internet culture died (but I will say that discord chat screenshot is genuinely pathetic so I can't blame you here). Shit like XMPP stayed obscure because they got rugpulled by their own major backers and no one wanted to pick up the pieces until Discord ate everyone's lunch and lured zoomers into their walled garden. But back to internet culture dying (more like going into hibernation really, this site is proof that it isn't fully dead), it's a travesty, and a lot of people are trying to live in both worlds without realizing that the corporate web and internet culture are mutually exclusive.

how cute. retarded zoomer larping as a "le ebin oldefag millenial" who thinks that """"self-hosting"" is the norm back in the day.

umm no, sweaty...self-hosting wasn't even the norm back in the day, either. only the most geeky of nerds would self-host, or at least had their own Geocities page (thats not a typo, btw. not to be confused with Neocities, btw). most normies back then are just like most normies today, they wouldn't give a shit.

but we get it, you're SOO tech literate and you're not like other teens your age, you self-host your shit, and you're so damn proud of it. as if its the peak achievement of your lifetime. you're also probably brainwashed by old cyberpunk media and literature, you think that the 90's were full off edgy hackers in trenchcoats, and all the teens had their own servers in their bedroom. it makes you think that you were born in the wrong era. but sorry sweaty...the 90's were sure cool, but not THAT cool.

"The thing i hate the most about Zoomer "retro" websites is how they don't really have any content in them."

Agreed. They're all style and no substance.

>umm no, sweaty...
Yet another underage faggot who wants to either derail the thread or yank someone's chain.

We can spot you people from miles away.

>NOOOOO I AM LE COOL HACKER YOU'RE UNDERAGE KYS

can the next article be about how "millennials" or whatever they are, can't behave themselves on more lenient and niche websites like this and can't help themselves from exporting their needlessly obnoxious, argumentative and edgy culture wherever they go, without even having the decency to provide lulz, based on these previous posts?

centralization mayhaps?

ITT retards cockfighting about who's le most retro

>1% were actually there

Who the hell brought all these butthurt 4chan zoomers here at the comments?

Nice article dude
The issue with your complaints is that realistically reconstructing what used to be is basically impossible because of the convenience that the walled garden provides.

Yes, people did know how to use IRC, they were on average a bit more tech literate if they actually used the computer often, but that shit went away because easier alternatives were presented.

Archeological digs are fun, I agree. Reading into penis pump (irc trolls) made me realise just how much lost civilisation shit there was on the Internet. The reality is though, most of these people were products of circumstance. Just like the nigger porn raids of Zoom in 2020 during covid, this shit is not coming back because of the following reasons:

>the platforms are dead
even if you get a bunch of your buddies to talk on irc, you won't use it for anything else. it is also much less convenient for the average niggercattle to install or use than goycord, which is THE IM of today
forums died because of goycord. noone wants to spend 20 minutes registering on a forum for a ban appeal or whatever. noone wants to have to log into all accounts they have on individual forums and navigate them. goycord was a forum-like IM and everyone immediately troonsitioned to it BECAUSE it was convenient, because you had one account for everything.

>the culture is dead
Noone is going to call you a cock smoking nigger outside of niche cliques like the soyim, KF and the remnants of 4chan. Edge nowadays also attracts faggots who post child porn and gore, because go hard or go home is their mentality.
The people are fundamentally different and it is not coming back.
If you want to talk about the self host, privacy oriented mentality, this was never a mainstay of the internet. Self hosting was not that prevalent, dont kid yourself, and it was mostly something out of necessity which no longer applies for most people, hence it was unlearned by many and is now more niche than ever. Most people also dont give a shit that the ZOGman has their data, no matter how much they espouse these principles when convenience allows them, a-la the EU's pretty interesting privacy laws. (big gubmint will change shit for me, the corpo will have to comply, my convenience remains)

>convenience always wins
why do you think things got centralised? aside from requiring some accounts for basic communication and/or work (snowball effect) it was easier for the niggercattle to use these websites over twenty million various forums and et cetera. You can even see how facebook, which is less convenient and more cluttered got ditched for instagram, tiktok and whatnot. It is easier to lap up slop from one trough than to spend hours on end searching for it in the shithole of the Internet.

>windows is kang
The reason why so many people stick to windows is that it just works, and it is nigger proof. Windows is written by thousands of paid pajeets to have negromancer level ECC and self repair to manage survival on even the most abused and neglected drives. It has safety rails to prevent niggers from fucking up their system. It is deliberately made to be as simple and dumb as possible so that anyone can use it. If your random normgroid installs linux, which is made by corporations that do not give a shit about desktop on one side and by unpaid trannies that do it for free (with quality matching that) on the other.
Windows is compatible with video gaymes, which people want to play, with old shitty software that often comes up and has to be installed for one specific reason or another, its rot is relatively graceful and slow as compared to linux's. There is literally no alternative to windows unless you want to spend time learning linux, which is outside the reach of a normalnigger.

>noone cares about privacy
Yes, the ZOGnigger has your data. Congratulations, he knows what you jerk off to. At the end of the day, principles are often discarded for convenience and this is no surprise. The realistic reply to that concern about college spying at the beginning is to suggest telegram or another more niche IM, not self hosting XMPP.

>its a cargo cult
No shit, but what would you have these kids do? There is not enough of them motivated enough to actually recreate the ecosystem that made this culture possible. No, two irc cliques of 20 trannies each that die in a month do not an old internet make. None of their buddies will go on irc anymore. The knowledge of using these services and systems is gone from the minds of the normgroids, and asking them to relearn it is a tall ask.

Yes, call these kids out all you want. But the reality is, playing in the rotting entrails of the old internet is quite literally the only thing they can realistically do.

>>convenience always wins
This, came here to write this. OP does not understand software marketing. Even if this forum and the other means cited were shilled everywhere and captured every dissatisfied living soul alive today, it wouldn't ammount to 5% of internet users and social media would still be king. Most of the people who use the internet today don't make their life spin around it like most here, me included. They have jobs and family and they want to post about it, they'll use whatever service that lets they do it with the least amount of knowledge required. They don't want to learn or simply don't care. In fact, most internet users today don't know what a computer is. Look up device trends. Jews won because they were destined to, we cannot do anything but look for our own arses when the government starts tightening the chains.

This is ultimately what happens when Eternal September takes its course and every single fucking child and every single fucking third worlder is given cheap internet access without anything stopping them from shitting up the places where the first world adults reside

Being mad at zoomers is lame and nostalgia is sense of loss placated by materialism

not even mad at OP

I'm nostalgic for having relationships that felt real, with (You) anon can not look away at phone because businessmen/employees were the only ones who could afford/see the point in one

We just need to educate them on right from wrong.

i don't think you need to have experienced the old world to yearn for it's promises, which are spouted by yourself
i do think it's good that kids are realizing something is wrong - but don't expect the kids to do the thinking

I don't use Reddit and Discord (why do you, OP?) so I didn't know about this stuff. I did know about HeySpace and Neocities which basically have this problem. Yeah, those people are irritating. I don't like personal sites designed to be visually cluttered, hard to read, and typically just a list of someones favourite anime/music/movies as if anybody cares. The HeySpace roleplaying in the text is even worse as well.
But are they harmful? It's quite easy to ignore after all.
>The old internet is dead, and zoomers killed it by turning it into a fashion trend.
This implies that zoomers playing dress-up are the reason the Internet is centralized, which is silly. It was already dead. This isn't anything more than the cycle described by McLuhan, that new technology creates the nostalgia for the old. Industrialisation created the conditions for romanticism and appreciation of nature that didn't exist before. To a less profound extent, this is what happens here: a nostalgia for the recent past of media has been caused by our radically different current media, all part of an inevitable process.
We can continue to focus on our own business, doing as we do and encouraging others to actively participate too.
I don't appreciate any of these doomsayer posts. Why should we care if this is a small scene? Why do we want a large audience? We can work for the few who care, and be satisfied with that. And so what if some people act superficially? That will always happen. If you get mad every time it happens, you will always see red. Best to get over the fact that people are superficial, as well as stupid, insincere, antisocial, acting in bad faith, lazy, etc. etc. and get on with doing what you want to actually do.

>>51131

LMAO zoomzoom went boomboom in his diapies over this! 😝

>>51142
You will never be a RealPlayer, kid.

I find the claim that "zoomers" killed the internet somewhat bizarre. Which generation were the primary users of the internet while it was dying? What generation do the tech CEOs that were in charge of the stultification of the web hail from? You're claiming that the first generation raised on a dead web were somehow retroactively responsible for the aforementioned death. Beyond this, you're engaging in a very similar routine as the zoomers you hate, being that you've created shibboleths out of "self-hosting", and "decentralization". How do these things lead to a superior web? You've taken some aspects of a version of the internet that was superior, and then claimed that they were the aspects that lead to it's superiority without any backing to this claim. The "old internet" had way more illegal content than the modern internet does. Do we know that this wasn't the reason for it's superiority?

I get being pissed. I hate clicking through endless "sign in with google" or "create an account to see anything"[/b] that the internet has become.

How could zoomers do that? Looking at any half-decent neocities page, their [i]"personal site on the interwebz" is all just filler with no actual content. They gained sentience after the internet had already lost both engines.

Zoomers are just the scapegoat, the last kid with their hands in the cookie jar of corporate convenience.

>"sign in with google" or "create an account to see anything"[/b] that the internet has become.
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