My pick would be, dealing with the ‘wild west’ atmosphere. That being, before cyber bullying laws existed, you had bunches of people getting off scot-free with telling you to off yourself or call you a list of derogatory terms.
Pop up ads. You’d be on a webpage and suddenly you’d be in a completely different browser window and had to x out of that one. And the next one. And the next one. And so on.
“Pop-up blocking” was originally found only in minority web browsers like iCab and Opera. Netscape didn’t want to include it at first, because Netscape was dedicated to the commercialization of the web.
Which is ironic because Firefox (Netscape’s descendent) is the better one and Opera is chromium based, which is developed by Google, an ad-supported company that isn’t so keen on continuing to allow browsers to block them.
Opera didn’t use chromium back then.
Chrome was kind of late to the web browsers market.
Opera was initially released on 10 April 1995, making it one of the oldest desktop web browsers still actively developed. It was commercial software for its first ten years and had its own proprietary layout engine, Presto. In 2013, it switched from the Presto engine to Chromium.
Google Chrome blocks pop-ups too. Google does not allow its own ads to be shown in pop-ups; this is a term of service of the AdSense product.
Not everybody used to be on it. There was a stigma to socializing online. “Don’t give out your address, full name, or credit card info online!!” Shit I don’t want to have to give it to a person these days. Online dating, not my thing, but I love that it’s bringing people together. It’s not as strange to quit your job and move across the country to get married to your internet boyfriend as it used to be.
Most people on the internet are normal people because most people are on the internet.
There also used to be a huge stigma with being infamous online. Like, you were seen as an actual loser if your only claim to fame was online and not anything worthwhile in real life. That’s such an interesting turn of events where by the mid to late 2000s, people were getting crazy popular online and actually earning revenue for it through YouTube and it has built up since with the likes of Twitch, OnlyFans .etc
The looks I got trying out online dating back in the day! The dates I got back then were… interesting. Dating sites were one aspect of the internet that needed a mainstream following.
I miss when google still proclaimed to not be evil, and I didn’t need every damn ad and tracker blocker imaginable on Firefox just to kick around.
Online dating? What a weirdo! You should have put some personal ad talking about how you enjoy long walks on the beach in your local newspaper or called one of those party lines where you chat with random people to meet a partner like the normies! /s
Kinda funny to look back on it now and see how opinions have changed so drastically.
But are “most people” on Fedi?
As an autistic person, all of the normal people are weird (to me).
I wonder if Fedi still has that perceived barrier to entry (even thought it’s not that hard) so the normies aren’t here here, and that it’s not “the popular thing that everyone does by default” yet so the people are here because they want to be.
I think Fedi feels kind of like the wild west early days, in a nice way.
That wasn’t the question. The question was about how the internet is different, not the fediverse.
needing to disconnect so your parents could make a phone call.
This. Downloading a bunch of songs on Napster on dial up at a max of 3.5 kb/s download speed, each song taking 15-20 minutes on average to finish downloading, and right around 97% on the one you really want it’s “GET THE FUCK OFF THAT DAMNED INTERFUCK NOW GODDAMNIT I GOTTA CALL MILDRED!”
2 1/2 hours later you get to go back and restart downloading Limp_Bizkit_-_nookie_4kbps_mp3.exe like you originally intended.
Remember the time before we had HTML5 or worse, Flash?
Flash is bad enough. But what about Shockwave? Java? Or Java 1.4 (that was a big update IIRC). A whole slew of different ActiveX plugins to download/install/debug each time you wanted to visit a different webpage?
Javascript back then was so primitive you couldn’t even do XMLHttpRequests, so that necessitated the use of rich plugins to deliver a better browsing experience. But it was incredibly non-standard and non-consolidated.
First Gmail and then Google Maps were amazing. In a world where webpages looked like ass and any interesting technology required a plugin, those two apps were mind-blowing.
When someone in my lab told me about Gmail, I thought it would be a janky mess. How could a web page be good? But it was. It was great. It felt almost like a native app.
Then Google Maps came around. After MapQuest, I was expecting goofy tiles and weird hot spots to click on. Nope. They hit it out of the park again. Zooming in and out was… fluid.
Those were good days.
XMLHttpRequest had to be invented before GMail could exist.
But yeah, Gmail was the first online webapp that I personally used that extensively used XMLHttpRequest (aka: Javascript’s function for “automatically fetch more data from the server”)
Before that point, you wore out your F5 key waiting for new emails. Gmail comes out and “magic”, the new data just arrives because Javascript is hitting the F5 key in the background for you.
You’ll pry “Slime Volleyball” away from my cold, dead, fingers. Also Minecraft, which I believe was as Java applet first. Also Robocode.
So many good Java things in that old web…
Today, Flash can be played using a browser extension, written in Rust, that translates the Flash code into WebAssembly (Wasm). This can also be embedded in a web site; this is used by e.g. https://homestarrunner.com to play old toons & games.
You’re making me remember codecs.
Remember when DivX finally unified us upon MPEG2 and that codec just worked? Forget Youtube videos, I’m talking just making videos in general usable on the internet.
Kids these days don’t even know what they’ve missed. Non-standard video formats. Ugggh. With everyone smoothly using mp4 or AV1 these days, life is so much better.
Remember when downloads could not be paused/resumed. Back in the day if your download was interrupted, you’d have to restart the download. Then apps like Downloadzilla and other programs let you download large files and resume as needed which was critical for large downloads that took hours/days to complete.
When I used to pirate music back in the late '90s/early '00s with dial-up, I’d setup like 3-4 songs to download and then leave them running overnight with our 28.8Kbps dial-up internet. If anyone called in on the phone during that time, it’d kick the computer off the internet and I’d have to start the downloads over again. Browsing porn (or just images in general) was interesting too as you would literally see images load top down, line by line. Video was essentially out of the question back then and the best we got was like 2 second looping gifs.
Lol yeah I was lucky enough to get a dedicated phone line for dialup.
Although even at max download speeds, I think the fastest I ever saw on dialup was around 4.5kbps because our phone signal was so low quality haha.
Damn I’m getting nostalgic for the old internet, pre 2008 when the average person wasn’t online. The internet had it’s trolls, but it was a far more civil place compared to the modern era of vitriol and hate prevalent in many online communities.
Remember the IRC and downloading files using automated chat rooms with simple queues to request files from hosts. It’s crazy to know they’re still in existence and still pretty active.
Browser downloads still have this issue, at least partially. If it fails itself it’s fucked, but if you pause it manually it’s fine.
Only really applicable in large (200MB+) files and bad internet, but definitely a thing that can still happen and make you start the download from scratch
True, but at least you can pause a download. That wasn’t possible twenty years ago with any software that I can think of… aside from maybe usenet newsgroups where a single file is split into millions of text documents and then uploaded to services ultra compressed and then recompiled into the file after downloading. That tech has been floating around since the 90’s but it’s still very niche and very few people even knew what a newsgroup was back then.
