💾 Archived View for tilde.club › ~winter › gemlog › 2024 › 12-02.gmi captured on 2024-12-17 at 11:09:30. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Over on Business Insider (not a place I ordinarily frequent), there's a thoughtful and heartfelt article by Aimee Pearcey about the death of the child-centric platforms she grew up on. Writing, "Nowadays, at 28, I stick to just a few, far less joyful websites," Pearcey details the colourful and faintly anarchic places she grew up in: Club Penguin, NeoPets, and other sites of the early 2000s designed with kids in mind.
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I am reminded of the fact that my childhood was entirely free of being online. Whether this is good or bad, I'm not sure. But social media didn't exist during the worst period of my life, and it's not hyperbole to suggest that if it did, I might not still be here.
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I do also remember a time in my life without a computer, though this is increasingly dim. We got a refurbished 8086 (that cost thousands of 1980s dollars) in the mid 80s, so my mother could typeset her PhD thesis. As soon as my dad showed me how to use DOS, how to load games off disks, it was over.
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I came online at 13, but via text. The modem's squeal. BBSs. Everything intensely local, the community of one's local community. Around the same time I discovered the internet, using a friend's older brother's university shell account to play online, text-based games: Dark Castle, Aardwolf, ButterMUD, FurryMUCK. None of these were platforms; the most ambitious was barely even a business.
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I came online at 13 and shortly after it came alive on my screen. Scraping together a few hundred bucks from delivering the local newspaper month after month, I stopped by the local computer shop, bought a secondhand 486 with 4 megs of RAM. A few months later, a 33.6 modem. This seems wildly underpowered today, and was also wildly underpowered at the time. It ran Windows 3.1. I could run IE and Opera, thought not Netscape. It was just barely good enough.
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Websites took tens of seconds to load, and loaded slowly. It sucked. It was great.
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I made webpages and they were terrible. 8x3 filenames, LIKETHIS.HTM, always uppercase, because 3.1 was DOS under the hood. My sites had black backgrounds and tiled backgrounds and all the aesthetics you'd expect out of a teenager. I made pages about my interests. I made pages about my life. I put my real (first) name on everything. I never claimed to be smart.
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But other people did this as well. I learned more about people by what they wrote, and wrote, and wrote, than I ever did through the pithiness and careful curation of a social media presence. I checked lists of bookmarks weekly. Every time I opened my email I was hopeful.
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I feel like I got the briefest glimpse of the best era of the internet, the one in which corporate interests still had their thumbs up their asses. Search engines were awful. But they still surfaced real pages made by real people. In the absence of platforms, you went looking, yourself, for interesting people. Yeah, everything after the first page was ignored. Same as it ever was. But when you didn't have AI sludge and SEO garbage oozing out of every entry, you didn't have to go far to find something good.
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Sometimes you found your people: I remember finding the website of a girl about my age, who was preparing to study flute somewhere in the Carolinas. We chatted for a while, left guestbook messages to each other. I've often wondered if her life turned out the way she was planning. All I have is a single name.
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Sometimes you found your people: oh there was the one with the hazel eyes I met (and later fell for) through one forum in particular, as the personal web was going through its agonizingly slow death, as we were on the cusp of that age where the formerly infinite horizons we imagined were found to be not just finite, but shrinking.
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And sometimes they found you: the guy I mudded with who I met for supper once, and never talked to irl again; or the guy who lived in my city who was a whiz at math, and the piano, and this whole online thing, who I talked with over email and IRC and mailing lists and Facebook for years; the girl with the angular face who lived near Toronto, who found me on ICQ random chat; and her friend, also present in the chat, who lived in a trailer at the edge of the south-western desert, thousands of kilometres away.
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It feels decades ago and yet we're still living in it. In the last few years I've met a technologist from Portland, a literary worker from Toronto, a math teacher from Virginia. Or the funny woman, around my age, with the incredible, curly red hair. Everyone's still out there, but the platforms barely connect us. Rather than asking us to get to know people, they ask us to scroll and read their posts. They claim it's the same. It's easy to believe. Only those of us who've been around long enough know better.
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One of my Mastodon (and formerly Twitter) mutuals posted about how Mastodon feels like the old internet. I don't think he's wrong - the lack of brands, the lack of advertising, the kinda janky feel. But I also don't think he's fully right. Web 1.0 was personal, Web 2.0 was platforms, and Mastodon still requires me to put everything into 500 chars or less. Everything is still post-shaped. Mastodon, while good, still belongs firmly to the web that came after. The web of content, instead of pages.
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Gemini is not feasible on a larger scale: too technical, too confusing (y no web??), not to mention the issue of "what happens if the protocol opened up to everyone on Earth?" But to me it's the closest thing in terms of feel to the best era of the web. Not being able to fiddle with the presentation in some ways makes things easier. I just open my text editor, and write.
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I won't mourn Club Penguin, or Neopets, just as I won't mourn MySpace or Xanga: their existence was fleeting, their community was fleeting. We've been learning for a quarter century now that there is no community on the corporate web, no durability except that we work towards ourselves. A platform without people is void of community. We were told that everything we put online would be there forever. This, it turns out, was all kinds of wrong.
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I've maintained a personal website for the last six or seven years. Everything written by hand: not a hamburger menu in sight. This feels both necessary and futile. Cycling into the wind.
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Well, okay, several websites. Personal, project, and web journal. This feels even more futile. Who maintains three websites, by hand, in 2024? But you've got to be willing to make what you want to see.
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I've maintained a gemini capsule for the last two years. Everything written in vi. Juggled back and forth between rawtext.club and tilde.club and my own machine and a private GitHub repo. This is incredibly janky but has also felt more right than the past two decades of Posting.
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I don't know what the solution is, but it ain't Facebook. It isn't Threads, it isn't the smoking wreck of Twitter, and it pains me to say it, but it ain't Bluesky, either. I know there must be others who feel the same way. I keep hoping they might decide to actually, you know, do something about it.
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I am once again asking others to do something more than post "lmao" on Twitter, cheap jokes on Reddit. For better or for worse: your life is exactly what you make it.
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At the heart of it, I guess I'm asking people to make things again, to care; to grab at the wonder, or otherwise slip away.