#early Web 2.0

[paperw0rmz]

Haha no but like wouldn’t it be such a funny prank to like start using older social media instead of hoping onto the newest ones and trying to revive them.

Haha wouldn’t it be so funny if we all started to use Flickr again haha, you know the website/app that was built for photo sharing and just that so it doesn’t even have likes just comments and “faves” which work as a saved file haha

Wouldn’t it sooo funny if we revived Flickr wouldn’t it guys it would be so funny haha you know it still shows you chronological stuff unlike other apps wow isn’t that soooo weird haha

It’s also like soo weird that you can organize photos into little sections like Pinterest and it’s free option allows you to host thousands upon thousands of photos n stuff and if you want to pay less than the basic Netflix fee and still not have ads (unlike Netflix and other social media) you can just do that.

It’s also just like sooo #indiesleazeEmoHipsterCoquetteCore or whatever the fuck

[natsumipocket]

[malldreamprincess]

Our future could've looked like this//MUSIC RECS #7 ‧₊˚🖥️彡

[inkykeiji]

hello hello good morning!!! i am just stopping by to let u all know that fishie touya nibbled on my finger today and it was literally the cutest thing in the entire universe <333

our pretty rainbow boy <333

also!!! today’s everskies outfit under the cut!! (ﾉ´ヮ´)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧

how cute is this!? i wish i had a pair of black overalls irl :(( i only have blue ones atm 。ﾟ(ﾟﾉД｀ﾟ)ﾟ｡

anyway anyway come add me on this silly app if u wanna!! my username is inkyclari! let’s be friends!! i’m still figuring out how the whole thing works hehe but my gosh does it ever remind me of the hours my best friend n i spent dressing up digital dolls when we were lil kids!!!

[acitybythelightdivided2006]

it's been many years since they made this change but frankly i really dislike that if you click on my icon it takes you anywhere EXCEPT my custom themed url. it should take you to https://acitybythelightdivided2006.tumblr.com/ and nowhere else. i genuinely hate the default look

[bye2k]

it's a little too late now because this version's gained traction without me noticing, but please do me a solid and don't reblog this addition if you see it because c/dn-apex-predator is alt right thank you!

[queenlua]

the whole story of “how massive government spending in university and military contexts really funded Silly Valley 1.0″ is a pretty well-known tale at this point, but it’d be interesting to see a writeup contrasting that against the current investment environment (VCs and private companies that stay private as long as possible) and how that (negatively, imo) distorts what’s possible for people to explore

[my4lg1c-p1err0t]

this graphic was used in a 2013 article on nytimes.com

A mockup shows one Tumblr user's view of what Yahoo could do to Tumblr, including placing ugly banner ads all over the service.

[vivi266]

what people commonly refer to as web 2.0 is more like web 2.5 enclosure-of-the-commons but we're not getting into that

[the-timewatcher]

A disgruntled Tumblrina (gender-neutral) made a website and why you should too.

Or "reject social media, return to personal websites".

PART 1: THE PART WHERE I CONVINCE YOU TO MOVE TO PERSONAL WEBSITES

So, the Web 2.0 social media infested landscape seems to be crumbling before our very eyes. Reddit's leadership is increasingly greedy, Twitter is sinking under the weight of Elon's massive, yet increasingly fragile ego, Tumblr is slowly turning into another lifeless corpo-fest, complete with the layout, Instagram continues to be vapid and soulless and Facebook seems to be going the way of MySpace.

(feel free to check the alt text on these, btw)

In these troubling times, where everything looks the same and you're expected to be milked for every dollar you're worth, what is a disgruntled Internet surfer such as yourself to do? Move to an untested alternative that's bound to get overrun by fascists thanks to poor moderation? Stay the course on the sinking ships you're used to?

Well, what if I told you that we've solved this problem way back in the 90's and early 2000's and were merely duped by the Big Zuck into forgetting our legacy? What if there was a cure for the sanitized, dull social media hellscape?

It takes a bit of work, when compared to just using a social media site, but even if your particular use case makes switching difficult (ex. an artist looking to promote their work), it's still a good secondary option to consider.

The core appeal is the ability to customize and individualize, make a corner of cyberspace unabashedly yours,

It can also be an exciting avenue of creative expression, giving whatever you want to say a unique coat of paint,

Most website hosting services are a bit more lax about what you can do on them, due to changes in the profit structure (rather than depending on advertisers and investors, they either have a premium option to give supporters perks, have another product, or, in the case of paid services, you renting that space IS the product),

If you want your website to be more accomodating and accessible, you don't have to file tons of feedback - do it yourself,

If you'd like to connect with other webmasters and promote each other's websites, we have webrings - sets of circular links that connect websites with something in common, be it a topic, aesthetic or friend group,

You're less likely to have your stuff purged by an ill-advised change in policy (especially if you have a backup of your files somewhere),

The more people do it, the less power those massive social media corpos have over the internet,

It can be a load of fun!

If I have you convinced, keep reading into part 2. If you just wanna see what I did, skip to part 3. If neither, feel free to continue scrolling. I won't hold it against you. You'll be missing out, that's all.

PART 2: SO, YOU WANNA MAKE A WEBSITE!

Good choice, here's some resources!

sadgrl's absolute beginner's guide to Neocities - what it says on the tin!

W3Schools - a more in-depth tutorial site, a learning resource so excellent it substituted for what I was supposed to learn in technical highschool (because our teacher just told us to go on W3Schools instead of teaching us shit)

A list of free layouts for your website - whether to use as a base to learn from or to simply take for yourself,

Neocities - the posterchild for free website hosting for personal websites. Doesn't allow video or audio, but you can get around that by linking those files from elsewhere. Beginner-friendly to a fault - once you have an account just drag and drop your files in,

Gitlab (& Gitlab Pages) - a more advanced option, but it has a few advantages of its own. Gitlab is a website hoster second and a version control service first - which is programmer speak for "keeps track of changes in your code and stores a backup of it online". it helps a lot when working on multiple devices or co-writing with a friend. And secondly, you can use Gitlab Actions to automate putting your website up (even on Neocities, like I do!)

My askbox - I am not joking, if you have any questions about any of this, I'd love nothing more than to help you out!

But with most of my indie web propaganda out of the way, it's time.

PART 3: Welcome to Timewatcher OS.

Of course, because I couldn't be normal when it comes to making a website, I had to turn it into a fake operating system. Each subpage is an "app", opened in a separate embed window. It has unlockable wallpapers (no pay2win, prommy). There's bideo games on it! I even made a music player for it so I can share my incongruent music tastes!

Like I said in my Tumblr bio, if I ever go radio silent for more than a month, it means I've gotten fed up with this hellsite and moved to my own homepage permamently. And I highly advise you make an option like this for yourself too! Lastly, if any of y'all would like to start a webring, do let me know in the askbox - I'm down to manage it if I'm not alone in there.

Anyways, I hope I convinced you to make a website, or at least check out some of the cool sites you've been missing out on! Hope to see you on the Old Web!

[natsumipocket]

[szhmidty]

I realize I’m probably the odd one out here but my ideal UI is a cross between early web 2.0 and like. Analytical instrumentation software, like a LabVIEW program running a $200k potentiostat.

You may not like it, but that’s just because you’re weak. This is what high performance UI looks like:

[ungrateful-cyborg]

Social media comparison

Alright. I've tried different new/alternative platforms lately in hope to find something I really liked, and there are very promising ones. I didn't try everything, of course, but this is a kind of overview of my journey so far? Or just my thoughts on the matter.

I've tried Pillowfort, Bluesky, Mastodon (didn't last long enough to have much of an opinion, it simply didn't click), Dreamwidth and Cohost (as of today, can't post there yet).

My comparison under the cut:

► I appreciate that they're algorithm free, whether it's because they truly believe in an Internet rid of the most invasive of them or because it's too expensive to implement on a brand new platform or some other reason. Only the future can tell, but for now it's nice.

► Pillowfort: beside the post formatting that I find extremely comfortable, my favourite thing is probably communities. I feel like this is the strongest "pro" in favor of Pillowfort because this is where they truly distinguish themselves from other social media.

Communities, in a way, remind me of forums. They're however easier to take in hand since you don't have to deal with as many options and choices. In my opinion, communities on Pillowfort are a bit lacking in functionalities though. I think more tools to easily organize them would help, like a widget or something to link stuff so you can create and animate events within said communities.

(I also feel like Pillowfort would gain from not being dark blue. We have more than enough dark blue websites, and it doesn't go well with the warmth invoked by its name in my opinion, but that's a minor detail and just a matter of taste.)

► Bluesky: basically Twitter but better. No algorithm, for a start. The curated feeds are nice. They're a bit like communities on Pillowfort since they can be moderated but from a non-mod user, it's even easier to post in them: you just have to use the right keyword for your post to appear there. Well, if the mod left it open to all rather than chose to vet who can or cannot post in it. Lots of flexibility and control over your timeline overall.

I don't like the 300 characters limit, however. Never liked it with Twitter either. It's not really conductive to conversations, and the general design tends to make the website feel rather impersonal. It's really more like parallel talking than community building.

Overall I think it's a good tool to promote your (visual) art or website, etc. but not great for hosting conversations past commenting briefly what others are doing. I mean, you can make threads but it'll never be as good as Pillowfort or Tumblr for this.

► Dreamwidth: I'll start with saying that Dreamwidth isn't a social media, it's a journaling platform and I haven't used it much yet. Had in plan to post my headcanons about my muses there and stuff like that so I did spend some time trying to figure out how it works.

First, there is a lot of options to let you have complete control over who can see what. Like, a lot.

You can entirely personalize what your journal will look like. It's a bit easier than having your own website—since I reblogged a post about that yesterday—because you don't start from 0, so it might be a good option if you don't feel comfortable jumping into Notepad++ to start coding. You can just change a thing here and there, or nothing at all, or almost everything. It's pretty old school though, so for those completely unfamiliar with early/pre-web 2.0, it might not look very appealing at first. However, I'd say don't let that stop you! If anything, it's a good opportunity to learn a bit of code without pressure.

You can also create communities, which as you might have guessed is very important to me. When creating one, you can set up whether everyone can join, everyone can ask to join but has to be approved by a community admin or to limit the access to those you have personally invited. Like for your own journal, communities are completely customizable, and Dreamwidth allows adult content.

I'm not sure you can top DW communities in terms of functionalities—aside from making a forum—but it's not as intuitive as Pillowfort (though in exchange you get more customization). You're also more limited regarding image hosting (see here). That said, hosting services exist, many are free, and that's without mentioning that you can post on Twitter and the like and use the picture link in your DW posts. I don't think many will only use Dreamwidth anyway.

► Cohost: I was expecting nothing when I registered earlier today, but this is an overall good surprise: it's Tumblr, but better.

More control of what you see. More user-friendly UI. It's not fucking blue. Adult content allowed. You can change your main blog page and make it private.

The only two downsides I'd mention here would be that you can't customize your blog page appearance and you have to wait for one or two days before being able to post. Although if it means less bots, I'd rather wait.

And this ends my rather non-exhaustive tour of the social media/blogging/journaling platforms. If you catch any mistakes let me know. I didn't dive deep, this was just me sharing my thoughts.

(As far as I know, they all allow adult content and give you tools to not see it if you don't want to.)

[racefortheironthrone]

Please innumerate for us the specialized problems of the library sciences.

Let me start with the caveat that my information is based on my experiences at the National Archives more than a decade ago, and policy has definitely changed on this front as we can see from this graph of recent digitization - apparently NARA wants to get to 85% digitization by 2026. (Even still, I'd note that the records of the WPA are <0.001% digitized.)

However, back when I was doing the research that would eventually become my first book, I remember being at the National Archives II building in College Park, Maryland (Go Terps!) and getting really frustrated that all the records of the WPA were only available in their original physical form and that all the guides and indexes were also in paper only and were all from the 1970s, and I asked the archivist why the hell the National Archives hadn't been digitized already.

This is what they told me: if it's handled correctly and stored in the right environmental circumstances, paper can last a thousand years. Carbon copies can last even longer, if they don't rip. (Seriously, the bastard things are like onion skins, they'll split if you look at them funny.) Microfilm is slightly more technologically advanced than paper, but it only lasts 500 years in the right conditions.

We've only had computers en masse since the 1980s, and already there's a huge amount of records (especially from the early years) that we don't have any more, because the hard drives got re-formatted due to higher costs of storage space back in the day, or because old computers got thrown out when they were replaced by newer models and the hard drives are all rotting in landfills somewhere, or because backwards compatibility broke down and we just can't read those file types on our modern computers, or because the actual data got corrupted on the disc, or because some legacy company is asserting copyright against a video game museum, or because some political hack and/or president of the United States decided to violate the Presidential Records Act.

While we thought that the internet would cause an explosion of written records from ordinary people on the scale of the advent of mass literacy, there are vast swathes of the early internet that simply do not exist any more because the servers got switched off when Geocities et al. folded in the dot-com bubble burst or when everyone migrated to Web 2.0, and the Internet Archive tries its best (bless its heart, affectionately) but it can't be everywhere and save everything.

As a result, the archivist told me, digitization is a fraught question: what file format do we use? How do we know that file format will still be compatible and backwards-compatible in 50 years? 100? Longer? Do we keep everything locally or store it on the cloud, and how do we ensure that the storage mechanisms won't fail if there's a blackout or a virus or whatever? Do we digitize everything now, or do we wait until optical character recognition improves enough to the point where digitized records can be searched for words and phrases? Etc.

Keep in mind, I am a public policy historian who studies the 20th century U.S - I work primarily with the official records and the central archives of the richest government in the world. From a library sciences perspectives, this is kind of an ideal scenario, and it's still kind of fucked up. (Let me tell you, the rage and grief I felt when I learned that most of the General File of the Public Works Administration was thrown away by the National fucking Archives and Records Administration in the mid-1950s because they were running out of shelf space in the D.C location and didn't think these records were important...)

Now imagine what it's like at a local historical society or a small liberal arts college, or the national museum of a developing nation for that matter, who do not have the resources for the kind of grand digitization project that NARA started doing five years ago. Think of the sheer scale of historical records that sleep, unseen and untouched perhaps for decades and perhaps for ever, in little cubbyholes all across the world. Among professionals, historical records are measured in linear and cubic feet - think about that for a second, how many pages of paper there are in a foot when you stack them up, and how many hundreds and thousands and millions of feet there are across the face of the world. Think of all the millions of feet of pieces of paper that have been lost to us because of fire or rot or war or time itself.

This is why Peter Turchin is a quack. Historical records are not a standardized little database for social scientists to plug their fucking spreadsheets into; historians don't play that kind of bullshit t-ball, with all our data neatly packaged and handed to us on a silver platter. Our profession is not a social science, it's a goddamn treasure hunt through boxes that were never catalogued or categorized (or that were re-catalogued so many times no one remembers how they were put together in the first place) to find writing that no one has read since the authors died. All of us know that our work, our understanding, will always be partial and limited, because memory is infinitely fragile and the very idea of historical preservation is a mad existential defiance of entropy itself. These records are real, they are fragile - to hell with the Library of Alexandria, remember the National Museum of Brazil? - and they are all that is left to us of the dead.

[catgirlhell]

hi! about the "learn how it works before you start making assumptions" about the bluesky post and its networks; what assumptions should we be looking out for? that its not twitter and not everyone is going to be connected like on there? your description of federated networks is understandable, but the default domain it seems to have at signup is bluesky's. I feel like most people would be using this, and only people looking for a certain thing and knowingly leaving that "sphere" will know that theyre isolating to a different community.

I'm new to this too and theres very very minimal, well explained things about it online, and youre the only person I've come across who seems to know anything, so if you have more advice to share I'd appreciate it!

as much as I would like to answer this as an authority and really contribute to the nascent understanding of federated instances as an alternative to current social media platforms, the fact of the matter is that im not. i have a basic understanding of the way in which they work and how to use them, and I dont think im the best source of information. this being the case, since i did bring it up and i did get an ask, i'll try to explain the best i can.

the "fediverse" (dont mind the silly name, we know its silly) might best be explained with the similarities to email. Misskey, Mastodon, and others marketing themselves as federated instance platforms are basically like if you took your email account and stapled twitter to it: Misskey/Mastodon are not platforms themselves, so much as they are frameworks for web servers that connect to one another independently and are run by individuals. These frameworks are usually open source, have different alternative forks that offer different additional features/ui elements, and ultimately all connect to one another regardless. but they are not "platforms" like tumblr or twitter or facebook. anyone can make their own federated instance, and what that instance looks like depends on what framework they used to set it up.

Bluesky and Threads are different. Bluesky differs in that it is run on a private protocol-- it runs differently to the protocols used by the aforementioned open source alternatives and currently cannot connect with them. It's still in beta and its too early to call how it will operate. Threads, like Bluesky, is also a private protocol. At current, it merges your information with other Facebook/Meta products (facebook, instagram, etc). Supposedly, these will eventually be able to communicate with the Fediverse at large, but you should keep a great amount of suspicion with them, as both are run by billionaires. Bluesky is the project of the former head of twitter, and Threads obviously belongs to Zuckerburg and Facebook.

If you head about "x platform is homophobic/racist" in reference to the earlier federated instance frameworks, understand this very crucial thing about Mastodon/Misskey/etc:

They are not websites. They do not have established moderation policies and staff dedicated to managing who posts what.

as stated, Masto/Misskey are just server frameworks. Each federated instance using those frameworks is run by individuals on their own private web servers that they either operate themselves or rent out from a company. the largest Misskey instance, Misskey.io, is currently under fire for having homophobic moderation practices. This does not mean that every instance of Misskey is moderated with homophobia in mind, and homophobic moderation tools are not built into the code of Misskey.

As the old guard of web 2.0 crumbles, the internet is changing again. whether we fall back into the ad-friendly hellhole of yesteryear or we enter a new phase of the internet's wild west depends on platform migration patterns and whether or not people develop some pretty basic web and internet literacy that's been lost over the last 20 years as the internet corporatized and users had to learn less and less about how the websites they used work. my explanation here probably has incorrect information and holes in it, but that is because i, myself, do not fully understand the total extent to which the fediverse and federated protocols operate; i, too, am a layman.

that being said, i hope this was helpful to anyone trying to figure this stuff out. i've already carved my own space on a small, invite-only instance with friends, but i've got no plans to move shop until this place really does burn down to the ground. hope that helps. good luck!