>>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.

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.

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!!!!!