💾 Archived View for tilde.club › ~winter › gemlog › 2023 › 8-22.gmi captured on 2024-05-26 at 14:53:22. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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It's hard to explain, but there was a time when the entire internet felt so exciting and incredibly full of possibility. I first got online in 1995, and found the web pretty empty. There were search engines, but they sucked; there were link directories, and these were better. These at least let you get started, and from there, create a set of bookmarks, something to come back to and from which to work your way outward. Hell, at the time, you could even buy paper books that were just giant lists of websites, organized by rough categories. I never bought one, but they must've sold. And implicit is an even crazier idea: at the time, the number of interesting websites could fit in a book the size of the Yellow Pages.
Books, books, books. I learned how to write HTML out of a "For Dummies" book. My first computer used to regularly access the internet was woefully out of date, current in the mid 80s. My first modem was a battered old Supra. My fist web browser was lynx, which I got to use by accessing the local community dial-up internet. This was a thing! It was basic and it was a little insufficient and it was wonderful. lynx, pine, tin, my earth, wind, and sky. There was no telnet, but I found ways around this; there was no FTP, but I found ways around this. That said, my setup was largely centered around web, email, and Usenet. I spent ages working on my website. I couldn't verify the colours on my monochrome screen. I had to wait until the next time I was at the school library, watching them load in IE on one of the bank of 386s.
I had some webspace at the community internet, and built a page there; I had friends who built sites at this new community called GeoCities, so I started making a new website there, too. Eventually I got a part-time job and could afford dialup internet access of my own. They offered webspace as well, so, yeah; I made website after website, and while they weren't particularly good, they were all mine. A little about me (not that anyone really cared), a lot about the things I was into at the time: computer games and emulators and of course links to other cool sites. There was an understanding at the time that if you found a cool site, you didn't just bookmark it, you linked it. Someone else might find it cool, too. So you helped them out, the way they'd do for you.
As the late 90s passed, other programs got added to my daily routine: WinAmp for music (a seismic shift); and ICQ for chat, the big one, letting you talk not just with friends, but with strangers too. Sometime in early 1999, a girl from southern Ontario and another from the eastern edge of New Mexico found me on there, struck up a conversation. We talked for hours, and then for years. One of them I ended up talking with for almost a decade; the other I'm chatting with as I write this, our lives diverging, our friendship constant.
And from this friendship I found my way into a journal scene, pre-LiveJournal; we all had our websites, with our journals, and sometimes photography, and sometimes writing (mostly poetry); it was in some ways insufferably artsy or pretentious but honestly, it was beautiful. We read each others' sites, and wrote in guestbooks, and sent emails to each other, and chatted on ICQ, then AIM. The number of names I remember from this period probably exceeds the number I can recall from the social media age, and there were so few of us, comparatively.
As we did this, we all tried to move off the basic hosting providers: your GeoCities, your Angelfire and Tripod, the presence of these hosts seen as something of a black mark against our artistic purity. Or something. But lots of people, whether tortured would-be ~artistes~ or not, used these well into the 00s. I had friends who had personal sites there, and kept them up meticulously. Yeah, it wasn't fancy. Yeah, there were those stupid banner ads injected over top. But those free hosting domains had an incredible collection of personal sites. Before we made profiles, we made websites. We revealed far more about ourselves by what we wrote than in the little quips we now post. We weren't, for the most part, self-policing. We weren't thinking, "is this on-brand?", "is this gonna get engagement?" To even think those things would have been to be a corporate shill, a plant, a hack.
There was no hustle because there was no money to be made. In fact, that's what made it great.
GeoCities sold to Yahoo, then folded in 2009. But Tripod and Angelfire still exist, still serve their sites, and in the case of the former, don't even serve ads anymore.
It feels strange to me that these pillars of the early web still exist, a quarter century later, that all those old sites remain. You wouldn't really know it, because Google doesn't show you personal websites in general, not anymore. Its results have become a morass of SEO-encrusted, search-gaming nonsense. You know the sort: "Plumbers in Des Moines in 2023. Many people are asking about the best plumbers in Des Moines in 2023. In Des Moines..."
There are still sites there. They're just not listed, or listed so low as to essentially not exist. At Angelfire, at Tripod, and increasingly at Neocities. This last one is fascinating: when Kyle Drake launched it in 2013, it offered 10 megs of file storage. This is by and large larger than what we got back in the day, and my own Neocities usage for my simple site is currently around 300k. Recently, Neocities' limits got jacked up: 1 gig free, 50 gigs if you're a paid supporter.
For me these seem like impossible figures. But if you're an artist (as many Neocities users seem to be), or hosting applications, or whatever, you could end up using a lot more space. Even then, the interesting part isn't, "how are you even going to use that?", but what that represents. The freedom to make a site, to not worry about sizing limits. Self-expression on the increasingly corporate web. Olia Lialina refers to the making of personal websites as a radical act. It may not have felt like it then, but can anyone argue that isn't the case now?
Seeing what people have been making at Neocities has been wonderful, with my only real complaint that a lot of the sites hew to a very deliberate aesthetic that wasn't even representative of what a lot of sites were doing at the time. Yeah, there were ugly, garish, colourful sites; but there were also a lot of beautiful sites. Before CSS, we figured out good colour schemes, put them directly in the HTML. My Neocities site has a similar feel to what I was making 25 years ago. The colour scheme is different, but it's still easy to read, pleasing to look at.
But lately I've been finding, or, re-finding, more and more artifacts on Tripod and Angelfire:
The first one I've known about for ages, the URL burned in my brain the way childhood phone numbers similarly are. I remember checking it regularly, the second site similarly, it being the source of truth for gaming session summaries and rules for our fantasy and sci-fi homebrews.
But the third one I only came across yesterday, finding it by searching for a very specific name, one that sounds part real, part nonsense. And finding a journal, an old-style journal, with just coloured text on black. Garish? Simple. The referenced page itself unlisted in the main journal index, a page orphaned either unintentionally or for a reason.
And reading it brought me back, not just to that era, not just to that person, but to the sensation of having a real and unfiltered window into a stranger's life. Because I used to read like that and write like that, before social media devoured the world. Just text and a train of thought. Each entry starting with a blank editor. Following the thread. Something like this.
And all thanks to the once-maligned hosting of Tripod and Angelfire. Back in the day they were faintly embarrassing; now I'm just happy they're still around. We never thought about archival, that our sites might actually be important, or wanted, decades down the line. But we also didn't foresee what the web would become. So, I take it all back. I'm glad they're still here.