>>3676
soulful

>Never put identifying information online. Weird people will do weird things with it.
zoomers:
>HERES A LINK TO MY PROFILE ON EVERY SINGLE WEBSITE I HAVE EVER USED ONLINE x3

Good read. I think discord did offer better features then irc and irc wasn't decentralized but it offered the ability to do so. so that should be mentioned. I used irc for a long time and I had most of the features discord had but required setting up. Embeded thumbnails required plugins, private server or a service for hosting, and using mumble. I loved using mumble for VC you can even upload images in the chat. It really does suck ass that matrix and the discord alternatives are such shit but they really shouldn't be. Also the ironic thing is setting up a fucking matrix instance is harder then setting up ircd server.

tl;dr: my culture is NOT your costume

I've tried to get younger people join my IRC room and it's impossible. We spoonfeed them everything and even in the few cases they manage to get in, they leave after 5 minutes and never come back because it lacks all the bells and whistles of Discord. So it's only my group of older pals and me.

I don't get why zoomers think doxxing yourself to chat (phone number, emails, face scan/ID in certain countries, no VPN) on discord is less inconvenient than registering a username on IRC.

Something I'm somewhat disappointed wasn't mentioned is Usenet. While it was mostly ran by ISPs and businesses for a price back in the day, the core of Usenet (NNTP) has always been decentralized. Actually, the reason why it started sucking was because there was an attempt to centralize it thanks to Google Groups, which ended up de-peering a few years ago making UseNet a much more pleasant experience.

While the paid services are still useful for binaries, the article aspect is available with a number of free services, and it's not too hard to start your own. These servers peering with each other basically encourage anti-censorship and privacy. It's like a decent decentralized forum.


>>495
> 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
It actually was. If you did any research, you'd know the majority of individually ran websites and their services were ran on their own hardware or hardware leased to them by their college with full access opened up from their ISP because everyone had a static IP at the time. Self-hosting wasn't just the norm, it existed for almost everyone. It wasn't until a bit later where ISPs stopped offering this and services like Geocities popped up. The exceptions were established businesses who had their own hardware to handle their service.

the part about early internet experience they forget to mention is the part where you go outside and not use a computer for most of the day

Your first mistake is assuming these people are stupid. They know exactly what they're doing and are deliberately insidious.

Just like all those pooners claiming 4cuck oldtroon culture, these trannies are retconning the cool-but-problematic past as part of the Eternal Present, and vilify all evidence to the contrary, including living people like you guys. But remember, the truth is on your side; much like with everything else, bringing it up makes their fiction collapse and causes meltdowns. If anyone wants to drop that fake shit and actually RETVRN, so to say, they will seek out spaces like this and their knowledge on their own.

i am the frutiger aero. that means zoomer are obsessed of me.

NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER

now they are racists

educate people instead of making fun of them and youll achieve what you seek. you are all assholes

sometimes education requires being a little harsh to get the message across. maybe if you had a growth mindset you could be freed from your shackles rather than having artificial rookie arrogance that will get you nowhere in life

mhmmm

ayy

this would hit harder if it were written by a human instead of AI

>>4175
Should I take this as a compliment or an insult? >_>

You know what's funny about this? That if you didn't have aspergers you would be able to persuade your schoolmates into using another chatroom app just fine

What's even funnier is you're literally this meme


You think you have some noble cause because freedom but you're just a clueless dork that has no idea how the world works, assuming you're not a teenager

You should unironically touch grass and get pussy you massive fucking loser

>>4181
ad hominem

>>4175
HAHAHAHHAA NO WAY YOU THINK THIS IS AI LMAOO

OP's thesis is basically flawed.
geocities is a good example of why. the center of old-web nostalgia, it runs contrary to all four principles.
>Decentralization: The old internet was made of countless independent sites, not a handful of corporate platforms
geocities was a centralized web-host, which is why they were able to kill it. the pages were "decentralized" compared to twitter, sure, but it was just a better breed of corporate platform.
>Technical competence: Users actually understood their tools instead of being passive consumers
the technical side of a geocities page is a big step up from current social media, but usually it's badly hand-written HTML or some frontpage abomination. there's a confabulation here between technical competence, which was lacking, and not being a passive consumer - one can be an active creator who is technically incompetent.
>Privacy by default: You controlled your data because you hosted it yourself
half granted because tracking technology wasn't there yet, but "you hosted it yourself" is mostly wrong: geocities hosted it for you and it was out of your control in that respect.
>Resistance to corporate control: The whole point was avoiding centralized authority
repeating #1: geocities was corporate controlled and the corporation pulled the plug when they decided they weren't making enough money.

the big problem with web nostalgia is that it appeals to nerds who go looking for big technical or weakly-political explanations (it was all good before normies/zoomers/indians showed up!) for something much muddier. a normie throwing together some HTML on Yahoo! GeoCities™ did something that the modern web lacked, but any real explanation of what that was will fail to satisfy because it won't provide an easy person to blame for why we ended up where we are today.

Nostalgia is masturbation. Nostalgiac rhetoric is essentially identical to masturbator rhetoric.
Muh faps arent hurting anybody!! Dont you want to know about my faps??? What if everything was about faps?? We should all fap together bros!!
Mind poison concentrated deliberately through generations of intense psychoscientific rigor to creaTe the perfect breed of consumer retard insects.

I mostly agree with your points, however holy shit do zoomers live in your head rent free.
>t. zoomer who absolutely despises the "frutiger aero" shit, Fluent Design is just better in every way.

>there are aesthetics trends among youngsters
wow great observations being made

zoomers won
skbibidi toilet won
ohio won
labubu won
yt shorts won
millenials LSOT
oldfags LOST

this thread is the funniest shit i've seen all day. OP definitely has a point though. i've been thinking about this stuff on and off pretty regularly for a couple years now, and decided that this year will be the year i take meaningful effort to get off of the web. it's not like you had to be some sort of 31337 haxx0rz to get online 20 years ago, but you had to put a modicum of effort in to learn the basics, you know? low-effort people were filtered as a result, keeping quality of discussion and such on the net at a reasonable level. and re; decentralisation, i would posit that - when combined with an appropriate (read: non-malicious) search engine - it makes indexing sites with specialised knowledge much easier.

for example, if you wanted to learn about, i dunno, albanian basket weaving or some shit, right, you'd punch that in and get some shit from basketweaver's forums and a few autists whose special interest was basketweaving, and you'd be set. nowadays you just get funneled into fucking reddit or some other shithole. and when you go out of your way to find """""alternative""""" sites, it's, yeah, just a bunch of late zoomies early alphas fucking around larping with the most surface-level aesthetics of a given timeframe, without any deeper appreciation of the condition that led to those aesthetics, as well as others, emerging. everything is condensed into some homogenised blob. so instead of getting your basketweaving sites you get a bunch of normies bitching on reddit or, god forbid, bluesky or spacehey or shit like that, going in circles about the same surface-level shit ad infinitum, all while posturing to each other, and it's just... it's just annoying, man.

anyway, tl;dr, start using gopher and usenet again and find a BBS or two that aren't moderated by losers. much more enjoyable experience.

>>4049
>educate me!
No, lurk more. Seriously, just join the cy-x xmpp chat or lurk on some boomer IRC channels. You might learn a thing or two.
>you are all assholes
NIGGER!

>>4393
>start using gopher
Yeah ok bud

>>4486
Woah you said the N-word? That's really crazy and edgy man I don't think that's even allowed. You millenials go to places that zoomers would never hehehe!

>>492
Top notch observation. A huge link dump of such zoomer retro homepages can be found on https://cy-x.net/links
>Lain pictures
>art gallery
>a blog nobody cares about
>Lain pictures
>Lain Lain Lain Lain
>favourite anime list, favourite movies list, favourite cyberpunk books list
>Lain
>links (88x31 buttons) to more Lain-themed homepages

>>4513
because of all the extra crack and aids in their system, if you care about the environment, please be sure to put the niggers you kill in the designated dead nigger storage

It's not a generational issue, it's an IQ and culture issue. Zoomers are gay and retarded, but boomers are just as bad. 60 year old boomers are equally as addicted to their iPhone screens as the most beaten down and sublimated zoomer. What actually made older internet communities thrive is that they were naturally exclusionary. You both had to find out where these communities existed, and learn how to use the tech required to join it. Any attempt at a "revival" misses the fundamental idea of why these communities were special. They were able to effectively distill the 1% of the 1% of the world's population that you actually wanted to talk to.

Now Discord requires a face photo and/or ID. Good luck trying to educate these posers in actual computing freedom. Frutiger Aero? I was using XFCE or Fluxbox with AMSN on every OS, you nuts. If any, we didn't had an actual theme, it was pretty eclectic. KDE3 might have been on par, but Gnome 1.4 and later 2 wasn't really glass shaped, there were corporate themes like Industrial and the like and less serious ones such as Gorilla. And KDE3 itself apart from Everaldo icons came with tons of icon sets and themes, from retro to futurist to WTF I'm using. Oh, Fluxbox, Blackbox... had zillions of styles and no FVWM theme was like any other.

The problem isn't hosting something, the problem is attracting and keeping people you'd want around.
I've been hosting all kinds of stuff since the 2000s. Been founder, admin or mod for countless communities. Started a successful hosting company, sold it in the mid 2010s, used "spare" money to keep a few communities I had grown particularly fond of running post sale. Most communities died out over the years as people vanished into the Discord black hole.
Nowadays the only community I actively participate in is the one I am running which has turned into an extended friend group of a dozen people active daily and ~50 that have access and come around whenever they feel like it. I still run the same game servers, voice servers, messaging, image hosting, email, DNS, so on and so forth. Everything running on my at home server rack (I am blessed with living in a country with good infrastructure so upload speed isn't an issue) or on colocated servers for stuff that benefits from 10G+ networking which is surprisingly little. It's funny because every time "the internet" goes down because some CDN or hyperscaler shat themselves again I only hear about it after the fact when catching up on news and happenings.
We've tried actively recruiting in the last 10 years, we really did. Excluding the core and absolute longest lasting people, since we've all originally gotten to know each other online, we've recruited a grand total of zero (0) people through the internet since the mid 2010s.
I wish I was exaggerating. Everyone else that's come along with us for the ride are people an already existing member invited after they had gotten to know them in real life through a job, internship, friends, university, an amateur cave painting club, sheer happenstance, whatever.
It's not like I use the internet any less than I did ten, twenty, or more (fuck me) years ago, but as far as anyone that isn't a three letter agency is concerned I have gone from a public leader of multiple communities to quite literally less than a ghost. No public profiles, no internet presence, my old usernames haven't been mentioned in forever, started to vanish from Google's search results even if anyone remembered them.
Not like I don't use stuff like youtube/peertube/etc or the occasional imageboard but I have zero presence, interact with no one outside of 4chan and that has also dropped to near zero over the years because quality hasn't so much nosedived but is more approaching the speed of light as it eternally accelerating downwards into a bottomless pit.
I still consider it exceptional that we've managed to build up a group as large as it has turned out to become. From engineers to nurses, ex addicts, even a cop, it's an all around exceptional community but what is even more exceptional and horrifying is even in this at the same time incredibly skewed and yet diverse sample of people we all exhibit this behavior by now. And it just wasn't like this for any of us in the 90s, 2000s or even a part of the 2010s.
Now if every single person in this group, seeing the decline of public spaces, gave up their online presence over the years why would anyone that would likely fit within our community not have come to the same conclusion by themselves?
The only reason I've even initially come here is because someone posted this thread on /g/ a while ago and the high effort OP captured me, less so most of the replies. I didn't expect to post anything here, much less something as relatively long as this ended up being, but the thread has been gnawing at me because I really thought about it all again.
Yet every time I come to the same solemn conclusion that the internet has become such complete and utter poison that most of the people you'd want to have around you will never see on "the internet" again. They've either given up on internet communities outright or retreated into their own gate-kept communities like the one I am running.

The few of us that actually lived through the internet of the 90s, 2000s, and very early 2010s had the chance to experience the absolute peak and sudden end of an unprecedented and probably never to return technological and social golden age that due to its very nature wasn't documented and will fall victim to the passage of time as we few die off and later arrivals completely rewrite our history in their own image.
Finally since I couldn't decide on one over the other I'll leave you with Shakespeare and Tennyson.
>He was a man, take him for all in all. I shall not look upon his like again.
>Come, my friends, 'T is not too late to seek a newer world. Tho' much is taken, much abides, and tho' we are not now that strength which in old days moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are. One equal temper of heroic hearts, made weak by time and fate, but strong in will. To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

They're children. Of course they're going to have trouble articulating ground truths about a mechanism with a million moving parts that they were only just barely even born into. Of course they're going to misattribute the most immediately noticeable outward-facing qualities of a thing they like as the qualities that made it liked in the first place. Of course they're going to judge the book by its cover. Humans are sensory creatures, of course memories of something that made a lasting impact on our lives is going to manifest in such things as "the way it looked", "the way it smelled", "the way it sounded". That's the thing people do, generally.

You all get irrationally angry at the pattern-noticing-and-seeking animal for noticing patterns and seeking them. How haven't you made peace with this yet, at your age? How haven't you moved on yet?

God, what an embarrassment. I have to share a planet with you people.

>>4213
I mostly agree with you there, but I want to add that the old web had an X factor with its userbase.

The modem internet has such a diverse population that any sufficiently large platform basically requires a personalized discovery feed that takes things like your location into account.

We do have a few centralized landlords, but they have countless silos in themselves that try to separate Brazilian motorcycle enthusiasts from Australian woodworkers.

The closest I've seen to a new paradigm is mastadon and it seems okay, but not "this is the next step".

I agree with the discord hate but man you sound like such a bitter cunt.

As an older zoomer, all of my other zoomer friends definitely care more about the ethos of the old internet than the aesthetic of it. My best friend just started self-hosting a media server, and she's the most obsessed with the aesthetics of the old internet out of everyone I know. I think you just got unlucky interacting with younger folk.

Given the recent news about Discord requiring age-verification soon I hope other zoomers -- like the ones that you met -- finally move onto something better. I think XMPP is great, and I use it for communication with loved ones, but VoIP fucking sucks on it. VoIP also sucks on Matrix too. Discord's advantage is that it provides great service for chatting and voice calls in one platform. As much as it would be nice for younger people to use XMPP for chat and Mumble for VoIP separately, I don't think people are willing to go back to having separate applications for chat and voice.

Haahaha, hilarious man good post OP

The problem with this article is that its blaming the victim.

>>10201
>she
post womb and tits

>>10201
the problem with any Discord alternative is going to be it needs to support six platforms out of the box (windows, linux, mac, browser, ios, android) or no one will even test it out. we've seen that time and time again I mean did you know that there is an open source 1:1 reverse engineered version of Discord already and has existed for years? Wanna know why neither you nor anyone else knows about it?
>no mobile clients and no planned mobile clients
people can complain all they want but even muh privacy focused people will just not use your shit if it doesn't come with mobile apps day one and that is the big issue.
the tech stack for a server with voice support, video, persistent chat, some file sharing and inline images is so simple a competent 10 year old with access to any 100B+ LLM model could do it. the problem is having feature parity, especially when it comes to audio processing, across desktop/web (which is the easy part) and ios and android.
mobile devices are such a shitshow that you either have to give up on mobile support or accept that development is going to be exponentially more complex just by the fact that you want to support mobile devices and that complexity rises exponentially yet again when you want consistent audio processing regardless of device.
I built just that within a few days, gave up when I realized that I, despite my best efforts, just do not hate smartphones enough.
>you have unlimited funds and can hire at least two dedicated full time devs one each for ios and android
>if you use QT you either have to suck up the $4000/dev licensing fee or can't publish on ios due to licensing cuckery, people will throw shitfits because muh QT, you'll still need to implement your own custom audio stack for both ios and android
>if you use flutter for cross platform UI you accept development time becoming infinite for a single dev as you'd have to maintain at least five additional code bases on top of the server/desktop code base (iOS swift app + iOS audio stack implementation, android kotlin app + android audio stack implementation, flutter UI)
>buy a premade audio stack for both mobile systems, have to suck down even higher licensing costs than QT by itself, the audio stacks suck gigantic donkey dick when it comes to features any voip client will need like AEC, NSP, etc so you will still need to modify the licensed audio stack anyway which once again means different implementations for ios and android....
>rely on pwa which means audio on desktop and browsers used on a desktop will sound great, mobile will be unusable for voice chat
>go mobile first, doesn't reduce development effort for mobile but ensures desktop clients will be third rate dogshit because you will be limited by your mobile first codebase needing to work around ios and android OS audio stack limitations
or you just do what I did and give up on trying to build a discord competitor because no one will use it and sorry to say but I will not waste my time and much less my money on mobile development

I agree with a lot here, especially about decentralization. Web 2.0 really fucked up everything. Thinking XMPP is malware is just insane; Discord has a literal process logger among other things in its proprietary binary!

A while back I had a zoomer friend talk about wanting to get away from discord so I told him about irc and he accused me of trying to scam him. Apparently he looked up irc on the Microsoft store and found hexchat for $10 and asked if that was what I was talking about.
So I was like wtf you can just download it for free and sent the link to their site and he thought it was super suspicious and basically decided to stick with discord after all.
Anecdote aside a lot of these alternatives look uh, sussy/hacky to people that aren't super technically literate so it's an understandable response I guess. Frutiger aero and retro stylings in general are a lot more appealing though because they're seen as comfy and disarming while still being somewhat familiar.

These modern attempts at bringing the old web back are basically proving Mark Fisher's point about us being unable to imagine futures anymore. He applied this reasoning to music because of how futuristic Jungle and other new genres sounded in 90s but we don't have anything equivalent of that now. He basically blames neoliberalism and its effects on culture but I think he's wrong, it was directly caused by technological advancement, new synthesizers and software became easily available which created sounds you couldn't hear before. Therefore, we get new genres very easily, but after that we've not had any huge paradigm changes in audio software, it's the same with computer graphics, it can only get so realistic before we hit a wall.
However, you can actually apply his point to the web revival communities, we actually have more capable technology now than during the "old web", we have more capabilities, yet the best we can do is just dress up as this weird abomination of how the old web looked, which was the way it was because of technological limitations and the specific place in time, we shouldn't be recreating it.

>>10320
I agree that we shouldn't be recreating the tech from those times. We have open source readily available libraries now that I couldn't even begin to dream of 30 years ago and it's been never been easier, more convenient or even anonymous if you want to get domains, servers even hardware. But if you don't think that it was the death of culture that caused all of this but technology progressing I really have to ask for the reasoning behind that because I just don't see it and I can't understand how you'd get to that conclusion.

> 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.

Maybe if everyone is attacking you and deflecting the issue isn't everybody else, but your mindset and communication style.

Hey, "zoomer" here. Jesus fucking Christ, is THIS what happened to *fun* on the *internet*? Out of curiosity, which generation (as if "generations" matter) do you think started Google, Amazon, Meta (Facebook), or just "Web 2.0" in general? What "generation" started this mess, to us who had been "boiled like frogs"? I'm actually not sure why Gen-Z is getting flack here for something that started well before most of us were even sapient, and was already well-done by time the oldest of us were in middle school.

As fucking if this was an entirely self created problem and us Gen-Z chuds have been, as a hivemind, entirely abandoning FOSS (that's what it's called now, by the way). Here's the secret: YOU CAN STILL DO FOSS, contrary to the belief of whoever the hell wrote this. You can even install Gentoo or something. Gen-Z is currently one of the LARGEST forces pushing a FOSS web. I'm not sure what makes OP think that everything free and good went away, other than OP apparently leaving. See: the entire internet at large. Mastodon, Bluesky, and Signal are great examples. We are currently the backbone supporting *these* ideals exactly.

So, why doesn't everyone get on IRC and XMPP right now? For the same reason OP probably used Windows back then: because there is shit that is expected to work. Despite the autistic screaming of people who hated Windows, nobody wanted to do the shit that used to be required for anything else. It's not that it was too *hard* to have figured out, just that nobody wanted it. That's why modern shit LIKE BLUESKY is so much more widely adopted than IRC, because back when IRC was kicking, everybody already had to know what the fuck was going on or your shit didn't work.

I also didn't realize that shit like geocities, myspace, or AO-fucking-L never existed and, in reality, as according to the *apparent* experience present in this article, every laughing asshole on the planet was self-hosting HTTP from the family PC. I know it's worse now, but to act as if there was NO centralized corporate internet back then is bordering on delusion. Hey actually, want something decentralized? Want to self-host? Well good, you're doing it, I know because I'm on this site. Hell, *I* self-host.

Now, let me tell you a story: I know this guy, let's call him bob, who once hosted the shittiest, least secure IM platform, probably in existence. This was 2023-2025, using PHP. The chat service had less features than early AIM and every feature it *did* have was entirely bolted on, as well as probably costing a few brain cells to use. This was the entirely legitimate way logins were stored:
C:\logins\username.txt:
- password (Plaintext, obviously)
- sign up date (MM/DD/YYYY)
- banned ([A]ccess/[R]estricted/[B]anned)
- this.stored.their.ip (IPv4 only)
The skids hadn't noticed the platform existed for three years, where the site ammassed about 4k users. It was reportedly nuked within about five minutes of trying. Fucking Hellen Keller could have seen that coming. Sysadmins from 1997 the world over are WEEPING, and many already knew better by then. Now, why would anyone be surprised that I don't want an account in every "decentralized" site? *This* is the actual state of the internet, no more secure or privacy-conscious than ever. And no, people don't use real password managers, and nobody will ever convince them to. Not in the 1990s and not now.

Look, I know, I get it, the centralized internet sucks monolithic donkey nuts, and you really want people to use free (as in libre) shit, I do too, and so do many of us. I actually agree with OP surrounding the amount of bullshit which occurs on the "centralized" internet, and that people SHOULD use alternatives. However, this strange generational tirade about "zoomers" (Oldest Gen-Z is about thirty years old btw, not exactly children, so assuming OP meant "actual minors") having fun with older UI styles... well I think it's horseshit. It's finger-pointing at best. Redirect all this anger into something more productive, and just let us have the shiny buttons, they're cool looking. It's not mutually exclusive to like shiny buttons -AND- like the decentralized web (you also can't stop me, even for all your wailing about ye olden days).

TL;DR: The strange feverdream OP posted here never existed. We still do free (as in Libre) open-source sites (BSky, Mastodon, Signal). We're also allowed to do whatever, you aren't our collective, massive, mom.

PS: dumbasses who have skimmed the top-level history of a subject and think they were *basically* there have always existed; it's not our problem that the people here particularly offended at this flavor of dumbass. There is also always someone willing to capitalize on any 'trend', as shown in some of (but not all of) OPs screenshots; this also isn't Gen-Z in particular's issue. It's particularly telling that OP fell for it *instead* of seeing it as the advertising it is.

PPS: Oh my god! The generation after Millennials is ALSO unwilling to learn, stupid, immature, disrespectful, impatient, AND stubborn? Jesus Christ, that's ONLY been true about the next generation since the dawn of writing!

>>10624
Hey! How many teachers do you have in your classroom? :3

>>10626
6 7!!!!!