what's "the old internet" for you?

@jollysea I'd vote for the option inbetween "tildes in URLs" and "myspace", if there were one, because at least in Europe there was an interesting 'inbetween generation' of social media (aside from forums) that centered a lot more around community and a lot less around individuals, and I'd definitely count that in the same category as early forums and personal websites

@jollysea@chaos.social old internet was basically just flash games and wikipedia

@jollysea @juni
Also Hampsterdance und Moorhuhnjagd waren für mich "uraltes Internet", LJ "altes Internet" und Twitter WAR NATÜRLICH PoMo :'D

@joepie91 what would be an example for that?

@jollysea@chaos.social Tildes still can be in URLs, no? For example sourcehut uses tilde for profile URLs

@fox_dev_random yes, of course, but you can also still listen to podcasts on your ipod. the idea is that there was a time where you'd find a lot of websites were hosted on some kind of university server and you'd see a lot of tildes

@jollysea

Don't actually remember the tildes in the URL, but I do the decision if I should dare to download a 100k image of a comic page in the computer lab. Also remember that home internet access meant email and that I used an email <-> http gateway to surf the web from home.

Telephone access was metered. I'd dial in and sent a mail. Then immediatly logged out. Five minutes later I'd dial in to get the page as an email attachment.

Telephone cost per page (adjusted for inflation) ~ 40€Cent

@mborus I think it was already a bit cheaper then but one evening I forgot to log out and the next morning the post called my parents

@jollysea In the Netherlands there was Clubs.nl (the original before the failed rebrand/redesign, it was originally run by an early consumer ISP here, HetNet), and I've been told there was something similar in Czechia but I forgot the name of that one.

@jollysea rotten dot com, phpBB, Kazaa/eMule, Lord of the Weed and old messengers like ICQ (*insert new message sound here*) and MSN

@quasiabsolut I heard the ICQ new message sound when reading this

@jollysea AH-OH

@jollysea
IRC, Usenet mostly

@jollysea there were tildes in urls!? Why?

@jollysea BBSes, Usenet, Compuserve, Prodigy. My first computer was a TI-99/4A, but it never connected to anything. My first connected computer was a 486 laptop in 1995, and it's only been downhill from there

@cubeofcheese universities offered their staff (sometimes students) webspace, and because your home directory is marked with a tilde, it was also in the URL. This text has some interesting reflections on it:
https://art.teleportacia.org/observation/vernacular/tilde.html

@jollysea A little prior to tildes, but not much. I remember when nobody knew what Netcsape was because it was new, not because it was dead. Mozilla was the name of a browser, not a corporation. And your computer screamed at you when you connected it to the internet.

Now we have to do our own screaming.

@jollysea I was here for the pre-www times (gopher, telnet and walled gardens like AOL) but I didn't really ~enjoy~ the internet until the WWW came around.

EDIT: man ... I remember typing an FTP address from a book so that I could download Cello and Mosaic so I could get on WWW for the first time.

@jollysea I'm between no browser and slow loading images. The short lived gopher era.

@jollysea One of my first favourite cartoon porn sites was hosted on a tilde URL at the university of Uppsala.

Same time, IRC chats, forums, etc. Blogs soon after. Twitter was the beginning of the end, but we didn’t get it at the time. Thought only facebook was the enemy.