The internet in it’s heyday, when it was a genuinely thrilling place to find information, and quite a lot of weirdness, and before it was swamped by corporate interests.
I remember starting out with gopher and a paper print out of ‘The big dummies guide to the internet’ which was a directory of almost every gopher and ftp site (pre web) along with a description of what you’d find there. Then the web came along and things got really good for a while. Once big corporations got involved it all went down hill.
Do you use this? I’ve been thinking that there has to an underground “internet” that mimics the old web. I was thinking that it would be BBS or something. I haven’t gone down any rabbit hole yet because lemmy has been scratching the itch alright.
No I used Gemini for a bit which is a newer protocol trying to deliver that old school way of internet
I would limit it to the “web” in it’s heyday. The internet as a whole is more wild than ever. And there’s a chance that the fediverse could be just as thrilling in 10 years as the web was 20 years ago (and could be swamped by corporate interests).
I don’t think the internet is getting less thrilling and weird, if anything it’s downright scary at this point, it’s just really easy to enter a walled garden, never leave, and never find the interesting stuff.
If you like gopher, you’re gonna love Gemini: https://github.com/kr1sp1n/awesome-gemini
