I’ve been exploring the fediverse and subbing and posting all over the damn place. Realizing lemmy can federate with kbin blew my mind. Not to mention the possibility of turning my old laptop into a personal server to host my own instance. Is this what it felt like to discover how the internet worked in the 90s?
It very much felt something like this, yeah. Discovering new things and actually being hopeful about what you could do with all the news toys.
It was also filled with this home-made, self-hosted feeling that lemmy has to an extent. I think the most defining feature for me of the internet at that time is that if you had a website, people talked to you. They sent you email. They used your crappy online interaction thingamajig. They wanted to connect with all the benevolent innocence in the world.
I think the feeling that will never be replicated is that we didn’t quite know what could be possible or where the limits for the internet lied. MMOs were a sci-fi dream and being served small, 240p videos in less than an hour blew our mind. It was more about the incredible potential for users the network and technology held than anything it could precisely do in that moment.
Then broadband hit and the rest is history.
my summation would be “then in September 1993 AOL dumped a ton of new people into USENET and everything started going to shit, and never really stopped.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL#1991–2006:_Internet_age,_Time_Warner_merger