cozy 90s BBS forums, obscure blogs, etc.
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It’s not obscure, but, for me, Wikipedia is the ultimate example of the old internet that still persists today.
Free to use, no account required, ad free, non-corporate, multilingual, heavily biased toward text, simple and utilitarian design. Hyperlinks concatenate relevant pieces of information, which serve as the means to navigate the site. The code is very simple (seriously, view the page source of a wikipiedia article). It’s based on the human desire to learn and share knowledge with others, and has remained resilient to corruption by commercial interests that pervert that desire for monetary gain. It’s a beautiful thing.
How is it that 2 days after this posted no one has said “Craigslist.”
people often say they can find this kind of thing via my employer, Mojeek: https://www.mojeek.com/
wow nobody mentioned https://www.lingscars.com/
4-ch.net (not to be confused with 4chan) is a 90s BBS that is still online and occasionally active. It’s neat to see posts from the 90s still on the front page.
https://celeryman.alexmeub.com/
(Not really mobile friendly, which holds true to the old school Internet)
Some examples that I remember are:
- The Berkshire Hathaway’s website (https://berkshirehathaway.com/)
- The UNIX website (https://unix.org/version4/)
- Xorg Project website (https://www.x.org/wiki/)
- Marginalia Web Search (https://search.marginalia.nu/)
- W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) pages containing Standards (e.g.: https://www.w3.org/TR/controller-document/)
- Pd (Puredata) Project Website (https://puredata.info/)
Sites that have old forums. There aren’t many anymore, but ones I’ve seen that have been very helpful of late include car sites, a timeshare forum, and the Fantasy Grounds forum (my virtual tabletop of choice).
I’m sure there are others out there, but it’s definitely more rare than it used to be. Is Something Awful still around?
Lookup brutalist websites or the gemini protocol.
textfiles.com still looks like the 90s. It has stories, jokes, essays, and generally interesting stuff.
I was there, Gandalf, when we named hosts after your horse and didn’t pronounce the “dot” in “.com”
