I was surprised to find a great example of a site like this recently, "How to Care for Jumping Spiders": https://kozmicdreams.com/spidercare.htm , which is part of someone's broader personal home page with random bits of art, photography, and a guestbook(!). The geocities-esque design bowled me over with nostalgia... the header is an image map!!

Those pages still exist, except instead of being hosted on geocities.com/area51/bobslabs it's on instagram.com/bobslabs

Not that much of a difference really IMO

Quite different. Old homepages were more "building" less "sharing". Beyond the coding, there was planning and categorising. You put thought into the interface and structure.

Seems like a small thing but its the difference between being a hobby mechanic or just owning a car. Or buying a desktop vs building one. You end up with the same thing, but "feels" like a very different endevour.

I think that’s a beautiful way of describing the differences.

These days the web is all Ikea flat pack. It does it’s job and in many cases it works really well for the price. But the individuality has gone since people aren’t just hacking together something based on their own tastes and limited carpentry/web development skills.

This is rose colored glasses IMO. The vast majority of pages were just no standardization ... <img> <br> <br> <img> ...

placed images.

If you want all that hobby mechanic stuff you can do all the same now with firebase or pages or whatever just like you were with frontpage or dreamweaver back then.

That's true, but that small amount of effort is still about 1000x more than is required to use Instagram.

And it was really the discovery of such web pages back then that was the thrill. It really did feel like exploring an alien planet or following a treasure map of link exchanges. Each click was an investment of a couple minutes at the rate pages loaded, so you really couldn't explore every link. And browsers didn't have tabs -- you were looking at one page at a time and maybe bookmarking it for later.

The editorial and stylistic independence is what I miss.

Absolutely: there is more stuff on the internet than there was then.

But! How much of that stuff is creatively controlled by actual end users? I'd say < 10%.

The large platforms are right out - restyling Facebook?! The build-a-site platforms all look somewhat similar because form follows tooling defaults. And because of the professionalization of web technologies, laypeople are locked out from just making their own page (or at least don't believe they can).

While true, it also puts up a hurdle - most people wouldn't bother learning how to build a website because of how difficult it looks.

But now putting pictures of your labrador on the internet is accessible to everyone. In practice, there's thousands of times more labrador pictures on the internet now. However, it's lowered the value and uniqueness of said labrador pictures.

Nah, it feels very different because Instagram et al has gamified the whole thing. Bob's labrador page is its own space, separate in a way from the rest of the internet. Bobslabs on Instagram is implicitly competing with celebrities and 'influencers' whether Bob likes it or notand that changes the feel.

It was very different. It was different in construction, discoverability, intent, and consumption. This isn’t nostalgia. I’m not particularly nostalgic about that time for other reasons and I was neither a kid nor a teen.

Nothing I do on Instagram can possibly make it as personal as my personal sites were. That’s not how I interact with Instagram at all and it couldn’t be even if I tried really hard. And even if I managed it, it’s not how it is offered by Instagram and not how it would be consumed.

That said, I don’t think that web is dead. It’s just a lot less discoverable and there’s a lot more noise. One of my favorite “old web” sites: https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/ I’m not even sure it’s actually old. It just is more like the old web.

Notice the first comment (towards the bottom of the page): “Low on modern-web-BS...” There’s a qualitative difference.

The shoelace site is wild, but it got me thinking. Detractors might say that Wikipedia would fill the void for this type of information.

...but I don't think that's true. Ian's shoelace site information would instead be edited ad-nauseum by a consortium of shoelace enthusiasts. It doesn't allow for personal opinion or in some cases specific things that aren't well known that can't have their history sourced properly (citation needed?)

I mean I get it. I still call it nostalgia because as you point out, it's still completely possible to do it's just a smaller overall percentage of what is on the web. I run a niche site that gets ~20k MAU:

http://airforcefitnesscalculator.com/

I consider it the ultimate in no-modern-web BS. The only "modern" thing I use is GA, which even then, honestly I'm looking at replacing it with one of those 90s counters.

Nostalgia factor is very real, but I don't think it captures just how novel the internet was. Communicating en masse across the world had never happened in human history. And it made you feel like an explorer of an alien planet, at least until one too many "under construction" pages of the night.

So yes, Space Jam site itself was less about wowing, but gave a feeling of interacting with its creators on a more intimate level than other movie marketing. They were using the same tools that any one of us could do ourselves, unlike the millions spent on the movie. The Space Jam site looked much like dozens or hundreds of others from hobby coders or engineers in their free time.

And for me it's more melancholy than fun now, because it reminds me of that feeling of unbounded optimism that the early internet had.

To my knowledge, they typical ISP of the 1990s provided free web hosting. (At least it was in my neck of the woods.) It may not have been much, but it was enough to put up a personal website that was not plastered with advertising.

The necessity to write your own HTML (or use tools like Dreamweaver and Frontpage) and the anything goes design mentality may have resulted in some atrocious sites, but it also made the web feel more personal. While there may be some ability to tweak the design while using a CMS, it is much more constrained and sites feel much less personal.

Yep. I took a high school computer science class back in 1995. My end of year project was a website about my MUDing adventures and I put it up on the free web hosting from our ISP. I wish I still had it. I remember thinking it was pretty terrible even back then.

The difference is that the only way you're allowed to be creative are in the ways defined by the corporation that hosts your content.

Some would call that emancipation: you’re freed to create if you never were going to be able to learn how to publish your own web page.

I don't really find this argument convincing because it was plenty easy to publish your own webpage. I did it at 9/10 years old and I don't want to believe that your average adult has less capability than a child.

I think we're doing a disservice by infantilizing people.

> disservice by infantilizing people.

People around the world are more educated than ever in humankind history [0][1] , including ability to code

Possibilities are still out there, it's not like people are forbidden from building their own web stack from scratch - you can still buy vps, bare metal, R-Pi and static IP or dyndns - and just code whatever you want.

Of course, Internet is not what is was in 1996, doing trivial things like publishing cat/dog videos and photos is easy - as it should be. Amount of the content is enormous and one can find amazing, incredible, briliant things - maybe not necessarily on the top of FB/IG feed, but it is still out there.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/literacy#historical-change-in-lit... [1] https://ourworldindata.org/global-education

I am no more infantilizing people than pointing out that most people can’t change the oil in their car. It’s a speciality where most pay a service fee to get it done for them. And they go about their lives just fine.

Publishing a webpage with 1990s tooling is roughly in the same category of complexity.

It is far easier to pay Wix, or even better, to use one of the myriad photo sharing sites like Instagram, Flickr, Or Facebook. Which is why they’re so successful, and why the internet is a far more widely used and useful platform today than it was 20 years ago. It’s a disservice and carries no virtue to insist on unnecessary complexity for those that really could care less about computers or how networks work.