Yes and no.

I run a Mastodon and occasionally attempt to push it out of “microblogging” and more into “Livejournal”. God I fucking miss the days when me and my friends communicated by essays along with memey junk like “this quiz says my Hogwarts house is Slytherpuff” (it was okay to do those then, JKR had never even heard of “a trans” at that point). (And really Dreamwidth is still RIGHT THERE running a fork of LJ’s old code, in a more financially sustainable fashion than LJ was, but I’m sure not doing anything to drag my friends there - I might have if the crossposter on my Wordpress blog would work with it but I could just never get that going.)

And I sure do miss the days of having one IM app on my computer. I didn’t care if my friends were on AIM or Yahoo! or GChat or whatever, it all showed up in Adium for me. Now I have Telegram and Slack and Discord and they’re all giant fucking CPU/RAM sinks running on a web browser under the hood, I’ve made life a little better by using Ripcord for those last two instead of the official clients but that sort of thing is really much less widespread than it used to be.

There’s a lot of technical change but the big thing that really feels like the old days is the fact that we have a lot of communities being run and moderated by humans again, because they want these places to talk with their friends, or places to talk with folks who share some interest. This is in sharp contrast to the past decade of everything being run by corporations, who want a bunch of hyper-addicted, ultra-engaged eyeballs that never log off and get served a ton of ads, no matter what the cost to the people attached to those eyeballs. Sitting there going down a hate-filled extremist hole and becoming absolutely miserable? Who cares, you’re making a lot of ad revenue for us!

It also reminds me of the days of dialup BBSs to an extent. Again, small communities, run for friends and interest-sharers, not for profit. Not that there weren’t people turning that into a profit, see Rusty N Edies BBS for instance. And AOL and Compuserv and their ilk. But nobody had hit upon the magic formula of “serve people outrage and ads” yet.

(also, I am old - older than the entire HTTP protocol, and everything built upon it. My fursona is only four years younger than the WWW, if I go by the date her database object was created on Furrymuck.)

Overall it definitely feels nice to see the pendulum swinging back to smaller sites, loosely networked, where you can easily have multiple identities if you like. A single identity is nice when you want to be easy to find, but your parents and co-workers really don’t need to know what you get up to on that vore chat, and nobody will be happier if they do learn!

Just the other day somebody was talking about trying to figure out how to somehow link similar communities from different lemmy instances, and I was thinking, “Isn’t this kinda reinventing web rings?”

A little bit, yeah.

Though I came into the internet as IRC was dying out, I remember AIM/MSN more than that.

Kind of reminds me of old forums, though all interconnected.

Definitely a little bit, or at least closer in it’s direction. I miss when we had sites run by specific furries for their own universes/settings and all had a central directory. Like furvect.com or transform.to for TF folks.

Yes, slightly.

The noncommercial vibes of federation reminds me slightly of the early Internet, but we’re using different tools and protocols nowadays, so it doesn’t truly FEEL like the old days to me. But that’s not a bad thing!

ActivityPub, Gemini, etc. are all fairly new, they still feel novel to me – but, fortunately, they’re not technologies that are TRYING to be groundbreaking or dominate the ‘market’ or whatever. There is no market to take over! I am looking forward to this mindset being more and more widespread.

Kinda, yeah. And newsgroups, where I actually started posting my art.

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