2000, when we were all chatting through AIM and Napster had just hit the mainstream. Unlimited, above-board piracy.
ICQ was the shit.
The Blackberry era was my favorite. You could do all the important stuff and even check sports scores or breaking news or whatever. You couldn’t really doomscroll because no one had done that yet. Even Facebook — which was just for college students at that point and was legit useful. You could find people in a class you were taking and lived in your dorm and get notes from them if you missed class. And you could just download any song you wanted on Kazaa or whatever. No one’s boss emailed them outside of work hours and expected a response.
Probably 2003ish? I don’t know what year it all went to shit. But the Internet seemed like a world of possibilities then.
I’d have also advocated to heavily restrict tlds. Like .org only for real, recognized non-profit organizations.
Back to the days when there were only a few TLDs… like .net .org .com. I’d then campaign for a law that disallowed any income-seeking behavior … adverts, tracking, cookies, porn, scams, promotion, surveillance … everywhere EXCEPT .com. Break that law, you lose your business and your servers, the CEO does serious time in jail, and noone working for that company is allowed back on the net anywhere until forever.
The late 90s or maybe the early 00s Probably pre-Google (so pre-1998) but maybe in their earliest days. Definitely pre YouTube and pre Facebook (so pre-2004). It’s been pretty much all downhill since then.
2 September 2003
I never got to experience the BBS systems or things like Usenet. Would love to go live in that era!
Usenet still a thing, just not the same as before. Just saying.
You binary kids are killing usenet!
BBS always makes me think of Barney the Dinosaur. I don’t even remember what the Barney thing was, but it was there.
I’m hoping that !meshtastic@mander.xyz will need to a rebirth of that sort lol
For me personally it was from 2010-2016. It might have just been that I was younger and didn’t care as much what was going on in the world but I still felt like the world was improving. Technology felt like it was making the world better without being overly bombarded with algorithms and ads. A lot of early streaming services were still very affordable and actually good. Online multiplayer games were a great time to play without every game feeling like you need to play full time to keep up with the meta. Sure Russia invaded crimea in that time, and the U.S. was bombing children in the Middle East but compared to today it felt like the world was mostly at peace.
That’s where I’d go too. It was really the calm before the storm.
Exactly. And if we could stop the storm… Wouldn’t that be great?
Yes it would. Looking back I think the time machine wouldn’t buy us more than those few years, though. The things that made it accessible, fun and (sometimes artificially, unnaturally) useful were the exact same things that made it easy to repurpose into the monstrosity it gradually became.
The Wild West period was scattered and had shitty accessibility. Companies like Google inevitably arrived to make the process of browsing smoother, but as of 2010 hadn’t started being evil yet. The alternate timeline that doesn’t suck probably would have involved email growing directly into a version of ActivityPub in the 90’s, and website dominance being bypassed entirely. (Although ISP struggles would have taken on a whole new dimension)
I was just thinking of YTMND today, and I’d like to go back to that internet.
