Digital Cargo Cult: How Zoomers Ruined Old Internet Nostalgia
>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!
Replies:
>>4513
[DE]
[TOR]
>start using gopher
Yeah ok bud
[NL]
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!
Replies:
>>4516
[NL]
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
[PL]
[TOR]
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
[SE]
[TOR]
1505846276375.gif
[US-NY]
[TOR]
yeah its pretty bad, but in a way i guess it shows that people are more than willing to go back to more pre web 3.0 ways of expression and algorithms that created those cultures and aesthetics, you would not belive how many people love watching little 2chan inspired OCs dance around to edm music, its really charming, i think its best to take advantage of this and try to recruit more from comment sections on obscure youtube videos that require a level of internet literacy to understand, do your part.
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.
[ES]
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.
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.
[US-NY]
[TOR]
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.
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.
[US-NY]