It had flaws aplenty, but anyone could pick up a “…for dummies” book and cadge together a website. Plenty of free website generators and hosts, too. All those personal pages, family pages, “Hello World!” pages, personal hobbies and small businesses…. Then of course the newsgroups, freeware apps and tools from generous people filling in the gaps in available software…yeah. It was completely unpolished, wild, and unpredictable…but it was awesome, available, and far more egalitarian.
I do miss it, the zeitgeist anyway. Sure. Modern speeds and frontends are nice, but everyday people are priced out and corralled, monetized and stalked. We’ve become the coppertops of The Matrix; exploited, mined, and willingly, in some cases, enslaved.
It is easier than it’s ever been to host your own website. You could have what most personal websites were like in the 00s without ever once coming out of the free tier in Azure. Domains are still gonna cost you, but actual hosting is pennies.
Yes, I don’t disagree that it’s not hard, especially with all the free templates available. Today, however, the odds of anyone ever randomly finding your personal self-hosted website are essentially zero. You don’t have any SEO, no adspace to earn higher search engine priority, nothing. Someone would have to specifically search for you/your site to find you. That’s unlike the early web where your site might randomly show up in a search for whatever hobby/business/interest that you might have included in site text or “about” in the HTML.
Actually, it was probably kind of a boon for us nerds, because cool people would come to us and ask us to make their webpages for them. Now Zuck etc. does it for them…
No, there weren’t. But that wasn’t a problem because they could be avoided, or they were curiosities. Not like today, where social media keeps shoving them in front of you at every opportunity.
Absolutely miss that old internet.
It had flaws aplenty, but anyone could pick up a “…for dummies” book and cadge together a website. Plenty of free website generators and hosts, too. All those personal pages, family pages, “Hello World!” pages, personal hobbies and small businesses…. Then of course the newsgroups, freeware apps and tools from generous people filling in the gaps in available software…yeah. It was completely unpolished, wild, and unpredictable…but it was awesome, available, and far more egalitarian.
I do miss it, the zeitgeist anyway. Sure. Modern speeds and frontends are nice, but everyday people are priced out and corralled, monetized and stalked. We’ve become the coppertops of The Matrix; exploited, mined, and willingly, in some cases, enslaved.
It is easier than it’s ever been to host your own website. You could have what most personal websites were like in the 00s without ever once coming out of the free tier in Azure. Domains are still gonna cost you, but actual hosting is pennies.
Yes, I don’t disagree that it’s not hard, especially with all the free templates available. Today, however, the odds of anyone ever randomly finding your personal self-hosted website are essentially zero. You don’t have any SEO, no adspace to earn higher search engine priority, nothing. Someone would have to specifically search for you/your site to find you. That’s unlike the early web where your site might randomly show up in a search for whatever hobby/business/interest that you might have included in site text or “about” in the HTML.
Actually, it was probably kind of a boon for us nerds, because cool people would come to us and ask us to make their webpages for them. Now Zuck etc. does it for them…
There’s more computing power than ever but seemingly fewer services than ever.
And it’s not like there was any shortage of dummies that actually did, either!
No, there weren’t. But that wasn’t a problem because they could be avoided, or they were curiosities. Not like today, where social media keeps shoving them in front of you at every opportunity.