Probably asking for people to be educated on the difference as to what they’ve missed out from the internet back then compared to today. I think I have a good perspective since I’m one of the few out there who’ve been around the internet for three of its decades and have seen it develop into what it became.
For one thing, the internet wasn’t reliant on Cloudflare and it was fine. Try to imagine an internet, where you weren’t prompted by a stupid Cloudflare verification check that has a 50/50 chance of it failing. Captcha did exist back then but was no where near as annoying as it’s been designed to now. The only thing between you and getting into your account was a password. Nothing else. No stupid verification codes having to be sent to your phone or whatever else.
And it was fine.
Social Media was tamed. If we could only go back to where it was just Reddit, Facebook and MySpace, then things would be fine. Because that was all that we needed. Now we just have too many and it’s all saturated. Plus the versions of all of those platforms were at their best back then, no where near their broken malformed selves now.
Myspace and geocities is what I’d consider old internet. The point was that I created the site, I owned the site, I customized the site.
I had a buddy who had a geocities that was all just baseball statistics and facts about his favorite baseball player.
The amount of fun and time and love that went into a website was obvious and personal. Yes they were annoying, but not as annoying as ads are nowadays. They were funny annoying, like walking into a friend’s room with posters and music of people and bands you hated, but knew they loved.
Now, everything is a sterile looking, curated, rage baiting, ad pushing, addicting, political, propoganda money grab.
Geocities predates MySpace by nearly ten years. I’d consider Geocities, Tripod, Angelfire, Lycos, etc the “old internet”, but MySpace was already well into the web 2.0 era, alongside other web 2.0 sites like Flickr, Blogger (after the Google acquisition), etc.