It's not
this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2026
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You got me excited there for a minute. I thought you meant that people were making homepages and webrings and using forums and stopped using phones.
Time to find my Geocities password
Xoom was so much better than geocities and I will die on that hill
I was about to comment that "nothing is stopping you from making stuff like that today", but then I remembered that I have enough hardware and bandwidth available to host an obscene amount of lightweight (by today's standards) 90s sites and services, but I simply can't be arsed designing anything meant for others to view.
That's actually all true too. There's a webring and gopher revival. Along with a modern luddite movement sweeping college campuses.
You are conflating the data-stealing algorithms with "the internet". You are shown content the algorithms thinks you want to see. Other people are not necessarily seeing it (I'm not for example).
If it only did. Do you even know the Internet in the '90?
No ads, no spam, no AI. At least not at the beginning of the '90.
All of those existed during the 90s, unfortunately. Look up Usenet spam (1993) and for AI, the expert systems hype from the 80s.
I've been on USENET back then (I wrote software for it), and it was nothing like the Internet of today. The amount of spam was neglectable, and perpetraters were quickly taken care of. Spam started to be a problem with Sanford Wallace (may he fry in the deepest hell!), and that was an email issue.
And the "expert systems" from back then were not even close to modern LLMs. They used rather sparse resources (even the big ones), they were "hand-made", single problem oriented, and did not even try to look intelligent in any way. And nobody shoved them down your throat at every corner. A typical "expert system" of the time was an OCR system or a statistical analysis software for optimization purposes.
I think you missed both my points.
- Spam certainly existed in the 90s. I'm baffled that you're denying it -- you were there!
- AI hype cycles are nothing new. Today it's LLMs. Past cycles have included deep learning, image recognition, expert systems, neural networks, etc. going all the way back to the 50s and 60s.
You're wearing nostalgia goggles.
I don't deny those problems existed. But in comparison to today's situation on the net, they were basically irrelevant.
Even the young people are nostalgic for a time when new technology was actually cool rather than mostly being a way to more effectively use everyone’s data against them.
There’s also that 30-year cycle phenomenon where things from 3 decades ago become trendy again, like how 80s stuff got more popular again in the 2010s.
That also probably drives the Fediverse's adoption as well because people are tired of getting walled in by hostile corporations.
Even the young people are nostalgic for a time when new technology was actually cool rather than mostly being a way to more effectively use everyone’s data against them.
I can confirm this as a young person fascinated by the (so far, Apple) tech from the late 2000s and early 2010s.
I thought anyone under 30 wouldn't have had experienced any of the cool tech but I guess things were pretty fun until the early 2010s.
yeah. also under 30, but my family has a bunch os old technology kicking around. I used Windows Vista on an old HP Media Center PC for a while, we have a few floppy discs lying around, along with an old Compaq Presario running Windows ME. from my experience, it wasn't so bad? currently, I'm obsessed by a Casio digital organizer from ~1969. the topic of this post has escaped me quite a while back (sorry for that), but yes, things were quite fun from back then. Is it weird/ unusual/ odd that I miss those times even though I never lived through them?
Anemoia. It's not odd. A quite common phenomenon.
huh, til. Thank you! :D
You're welcome. It’s not a scientific term, though.
I don't see nostalgia for the old internet among my techie friends. Old hardware yes, but not the old internet.
I have a 286 and enjoy the sites that have all the abandonware - we never got discs for the games that came with our first computer
One complains about unnecessary SSL as his old machines can't do SSL
The asthetic is coming back, the protocol is not. Were still going to be using all the modern tools to ensure a secure and encrypted connection, but visiting shit that looks like the OG SpaceJam website.
Nostalgia is a recession indicator
Damn, I wish it were ... it was so much better.
People want to relive their young years because 2026 is shit so far
Comfort food
i think that is your algorithm.
check the dates when the things were uploaded. if it is algorithm: likely not recent.
I'm not sure that it is.
Google Trends only goes back to 2004, but using that:
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/2d9e3d22-5fed-4b77-bd43-571765c3e47a.webp
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/8d17a79e-03af-4a30-b88f-4f25cf594970.webp
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/43b58598-7feb-435c-8f43-4a28a9adf46d.webp
They don't really appear to be surging in interest.
What sources does Google use for this? Because, if it's web crawling, of course they aren't going to show up.
It's what people are searching for.
The 90s internet would be great. Close to no tracking. Or wait: animated gifs, blinking fonts and web rings... Hmm. Maybe not.
Don't forget "designed for Netscape" and "Designed for Internet Explorer" banners on most of the pages
Web rings would be far better than internet searching now. Give me back HotBot and Altavista (which I know are buried under Google's evil now). Hell, give me the OG Google.
I hate to say it like this, but people are cashing in on nostalgia.
This isn't a new thing. Pretty sure this happens every decade.
as far as forums go yes, things like reddit, meta, google is become super walled in and datamining. so people maybe recreating forum experiences.
asl?
F/18/Cali
Haha.
The golden days of the internet when it was blossoming.
I miss MySpace. The low key drama of putting your top 8 friends on your profile lol.
I miss Yahoo Messenger, with all the chatrooms. Those were pretty steamy at times.
American Sign Language? XD
Crypt Hauntology resulting from the loss of our ability to imagine better futures for civilization and our culture. This site is mainly millennials and gen-x so the nostalgia we fall back on is going to be 80's and 90's coded.
There's also the frequency illusion but I'm discounting it because hauntology of the 90's been slowly building for around the last 10 years