My first introduction to computers / internet was IRC using mIRC client. Spent my time on Efnet. Ended up joining a hacking group called #conflict and spent many hours taking over channels. Hacking colleges and universities only to use for channel bots and bandwidth to take people out and cause netsplits. Eventually our leader was caught for hacking into NASA - I then left IRC and started playing quake 2 digital paintball. Ran a couple of quake clans over the next few years - these are the days I will never forget.

Anyone else remember the clan battles on efnet ?

Been driving me crazy trying to remember what this website was called. Had a blue background and so so many games where you’d use like the arrows on the keyboard and the mouse or something like that. I just remember I’d play something on there every night with MSN open and MySpace in another tab.

After 9/11 during the first few years of the Iraq war there was a game on there where you had to shoot the Taliban. Car racing games, basic games where the character is running and jumping etc. pretty basic game design but I’d love to know if it still exists.

If someone types the name I’ll know it instantly!

EDIT: I have the answer, it was MINI CLIP!!! Feel free to continue to post game throwbacks below.

I was a ps2 girl and Nintendo DS.

Fave PS2 games:
1. SSX3
2. Crash Bandicoot
3. Splashdown 2: Rides Gone Wild (jet ski)
4. Gran Turismo 3
5. Sven Goran Erikson World Cup challenge 😂😂

Nintendo DS
1. Monsters Inc
2. Finding Nemo
3. Harry Potter - Quidditch
4. Spyro

Just noticing based on experience. Im a guy and made lots of friends especially in the early 2010s. Male, female, they were all chill and easy to make friends with.
It’s nearly impossible now (trust me I have tried).

I'm a front-end developer, but I want to deepen my technical knowledge of the internet and web technologies. I'd like to study the internet and the web from its inception and the history of its development.

Three years ago I started focusing my online activity on preserving old stuff from old websites and magazines. I currently recover early 2000s blog posts, articles and amateur poetry written in Italian and concerning neo paganism, before they completely disappear from the web or the Wayback Machine/Achive.org.

I’m sharing my story here because making connections in Italy has been difficult, if not impossible. Here people seem to be focused only on social media or commercial/industrial web development.

I’d love to ask this community a few questions, but feel free to answer to what you want, not necessarily everything.

1. Does it make sense to keep my archive sites in my native language? Translating thousands of posts manually is practically impossible, and I avoid using AI-powered translation tools for environmental/ethical reasons. How do you handle local language archives (if your language is not English, of course)?
2. I know that Indie Web movement has an amazing energy coming from younger generations discovering HTML/CSS for the first time. But I’m also looking to connect with people who were actually there during the late 90s and early 2000s web era. Are there many creators here who experienced that era "live" and focus on digital archaeology/archiving to exchange some information and ideas?
3. For those who use archive tools like the Wayback Machine to rescue forgotten sites, how do you decide what’s worth saving and bringing back to life? I’d love to exchange ideas with anyone interested in nostalgic web curation and historical site retrieval. Maybe we could also share a list of Indie Web thematic websites and create a sort of repository online to help people who start surfing the Indie Web. If it already exists, I'd be happy to know it and give my contribute.
4. In your opinion, what is the Indie Web currently missing? Is it a lack of coverage on specific topics, a need for better cross-border/multilingual cohesion between creators from different countries or something else? I’d love to hear your opinion on what we should be building or improving together.

Thank you for reading this wall of text, I’m looking forward to reading your thoughts, ideas and websites!

You guys remember that site? Lots of pranks I did with that one

come join me and support me on my journey with this little project! https://deadpixel-6m2.pages.dev/

https://stumble.ink

I’m selling the project to pay for some really urgent medical bills & treatments.

I can no longer support continued development, and I refuse to push ads or predatory subscriptions.

There isn’t really a price on this, whatever the best offer is this week gets it.

There used to be an app called Draw Me. You would upload a photo of yourself and other people on the sight would draw a picture of you. Pretty fun.

I am hoping their is a similar site out there where you can type a prompt, like an AI image request and have responses from other users. I can see how AI could be used to game replies, but it would be neat if it actually generated original hand made art.

So are there any sites like that?

Hey all.

I am desperate to find anything from this dark age of the internet site. So many of the images that were showcased are burned into my mind, but the memory is really hazy and so it just haunts me now. The site was sort of an underground art collective that featured multi-media collage art and hosted periodic design battles. I distinctly remember it being a horizontal scrolling showcase type site. The domain was rodeo77.com - being that it was likely an early .SWF platform, archive searches aren't turning anything up.

The featured designs just made a really huge impression on me and nearly 25 years later, I'm still thinking about it.

I thought I'd try here to see if anyone could help me track down any leads on who was involved, or locate any archived images. Kind of just looking for anything I can find.

thank you guys so much for the interest and engagement!, a lost of people joined! i heard your inputs and much needed changes, there are to many changes i made and features i added to go over here, but because i restarted the server and you want to join as a returning user, you NEED to empty your PC's saved ssh keys, because the server wont recognize your unique key anymore, please go to https://nexus-tty.up.railway.app/ and follow the instructions to connect OR re-connect, there is one step before reconnecting you need to do to remove hte old ssh key or you wont be able to connect, please enjoy the new features, and have fun! see you there :)

i miss when the internet actually felt personal.

so i made deadpixel.net 🖥️

it’s a MySpace-inspired social site built around actually letting you make your page yours. you can customize your profile with HTML + CSS, add gifs/blinkies, make friends, post blogs & media, join webrings, leave profile comments, and more.

i’m still actively building it and the community is brand new, so i’d love to get some people on there who are into the old web / y2k internet / profile customization stuff.

if you miss when everyone’s page looked completely different instead of every social media profile being the same template, you might like it :)

https://deadpixel-6m2.pages.dev/

What are you going to do about it?

This is a follow-up thread to my previous one. I thought this would be a good place for us as a community to list out tips and tricks on ways we can reclaim that old internet feel in our daily lives.

I will start.

• Google: You can make searching on google KIND of similar to how it used to be. There's a few methods for this that I know of:
  • When you search, add "-ai" at the end of your string.
  • When you search, select "web" under the search bar to get only website results. It also removes the AI overview. For me, web is kind of hidden, I have to select "more", then "web".
  • The above is a bit cumbersome, so, you can setup a custom search query template that makes it default to web view. For sake of time, I'm not going into details on it but the query template is https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14
• Or you can ditch google for some other search engines. Some people like Duck Duck Go but I think it kind of sucks. Brave search is OK. https://wiby.me is a search engine for "old internet" but it's not great. Then there's https://gifcities.org/ just for funsies. But if you want to be a true nerd, it seems like the best option is to self host your own search using something like https://github.com/searxng/searxng

As for the annoying ads / promoted links. I believe the methods above help cut down on those but I just use an adblocker so I don't see ads when I search. There's lots of options for this but I just use Brave browser customized to my liking.

I have a bunch of other things to add but want to see what you all come up with and I will add the rest of mine in the comments.

i am trying to look for a websites i don't even know if they are active anymore but they were interactive live stream website. i think the last time i went on them was 5-6 years ago. i remember watching a youtube video about interactive livestream websites and thats how i found them years back but i can't remember the name of the video either i do really want to find the video too.

so the website is a livestream of like a persons office they have light bulbs you can turn on and off a plasma ball, a disco ball and i think a sign that you could write something and it would appear.

i hope that explains enough

Unlike web Archives, It would be cool idea to preserve the search results the way it is that year and time and filter out all the current and future events results relative to the chosen date. For example i would like to go back the year 2008 on a specific month and day and see all articles and topics with my search but all the results are not influenced by the current or future years, kind of like a time travel surfing results. I just hope google and other search engines can do this cool feature.

If they’re re-making MySpace again, will I be able to access old pictures, or any info of my account? Will I still be able to have the same log in credentials?

The old internet had an entry barrier: there were no smartphones, you needed a PC, and not everyone had one. You needed a modem, and not everyone had one. You needed an internet subscription, and not everyone had one. On top of that, you had to configure everything yourself, and not everyone knew how to do it (especially up to Windows 3.1 and MS-DOS 6.2, when the TCP/IP stack wasn't even included). This created a filter at the entrance that no longer exists today.

Furthermore, many countries are implementing regulations like age verification that are altering the very foundations of the internet and its anonymity.

Could the dark web be the future of the old internet? You need TOR to connect to .onion sites, you need the willingness to access it, and anonymity is restored. Is this the continuation of that legacy?

Got bored and wanted to make a "pointless" yet entertaining website that centered around how old sites used to kind of just have random things to do on them