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A one-person oral history of Geocities HTML Chat
I'll post more on her Metaverse thoughts in a bit. But I'm fascinated by this oral history of Geocities HTML Chat, which I don't remember, despite having a Geocities page for years (in the TimesSquare community, I think?).
One day I'd like to write a history of the teen domain scene, or the part of it to which I was exposed. andi writes that HTML Chat was the first community she imprinted on. For me that was BBSs, but the teen domain scene remains the most influential and importantcommunity I was a part of. And there's nothing about it online. It lived and died before Google took off. If you know what to search, you can find a reference or two on Reddit. A PhD thesis over in Australia. And people who could talk for hours if the right people asked them the right questions.
The level of creativity and control andi describes as she writes about being able to embed arbitrary HTML is staggering. And that's what I had when we were all slinging HTML on our sites from 98-01, or whatever the range was. Before LiveJournal. Before Moveable Type. Before the awful word "blog" achieved any popularity, before standards and sanitization and best practices hammered everything down into a kind of homogenous sameness. It wasn't andi's shared, collaborative space, in the sense of a chatbox. But we visited and bookmarked each other's sites. We wrote about our loves and wants and plans. We wrote coded entries for each other. We emailed friends and crushes, wrote in each other's guestbooks. The community was self-made and collaborative and deeply personal. If you ask me privately I can list dozens of names that were important to me. mary and emma, alix and emilie. sara and meredith. jess and adri. heather, corey, cassie and sair.
The more design-minded of us made beautiful images in Paint Shop Pro and flexed design muscles the rest of us lacked. We put together overwrought sites, we put together minimal sites, we stole JavaScript and HTML, we used graphics unattributed. We put up our favourite links. We posted our terrible poems. We wrote down our lives on the regular and it felt like those years might never end. We didn't have any money but we'd stay up all night, tinkering with our sites and talking to each other. We planned road trips, or planned to visit. For some of us, those plans actually happened. For most of us, that never came to pass.
For my part I only met up with one person. It was awful and joyous and wrenching and wonderful. I wish I'd never done it. I regret none of it.
In the last season of The Office (US), there's a quote from Andy Bernard, where he says, "I wish there were a way to know you were in the good old days before you actually left them." And that's how I feel now about our loose collection of sites and friends, about what I realize we had, years later. As I focused on my studies, journalling became less important. Once I signed up for LiveJournal, I stopped writing within a site over which I had total ownership and control. As MySpace and then Facebook took over people's daily internet habits, we wrote less, we posted more. And all this slowly rewired our expectations, so that we saw the online world not as a community or a place where we could make a home, but instead as the empty, formless medium that held the content on our phones.
It was a powerful shift. We haven't recovered. I don't know if we will. I write here and on the small web and elsewhere hoping to get back to an approximation of what I used to have. I don't know if it's the changing habits I mentioned above. I don't know if all the people I knew had kids, got mortgages, lost the energy to do much else than get up, go to work, and eat Lean Cuisine in front of Disney+. But somewhere along the way we stopped caring about the details of how we spend our lives online. We stopped forming deep connections with strangers halfway around the world, choosing instead to click the notifications icon, watching our followers grow and interacting with none of them.
I've only emailed one person from those days, someone who left her vanity domain up as a signpost. We didn't know each other. But she said on her site to say hi if any of what she described was familiar, so I did. I wrote an email expecting no response. I got one a few days later. We exchanged a couple more emails, and then silence.