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If I had the cash to spare a laptop running Linux would be a pretty nice addition. Maybe one of those old netbooks with a mouse nub if any of them managed to avoid ending up in a landfill.

Honestly, I first installed linux on a machine in like 2006 or 2007 or something. It just doesn’t do what I need for my main machine and I don’t need to run two computers with synergy for more monitors anymore. I have a dual-boot, but I literally never use the thing because it doesn’t run Voicemeeter or VB Cables and JACK isn’t really a substitute.

It would be nice if Linux ran everything I need, but I’m not about to change my entire workflow and sacrifice useful programs to save a little overhead on my operating system.

Nah I’m good.

What do you meeaaan? Stoats are fucking adorable!

Java applets were definitely in heavy use in webpages. They just kind of sucked. It was absolutely prolific, though.

And don’t forget Quicktime!

There was also a period from like the 00s through the mid 10s where search was much better than it is today. The AI generated slop in results that we see now just wasn’t a thing at all.

Be a decent person!

It was neat. There were a lot of new sort of experimental things going on in the 90s and most of them weren’t huge. There were a lot of websites that were independent or owned by small companies that featured their own little communities with chat rooms and forums. Two of my early favorites were Palace and Cybertown/Colony City.

Palace was this 2d avatar chat with different rooms you could hang out in. Each room would be a single screen and people would make an avatar from a 3x3 grid of images called props linked together. You could wear 9 props at a time, and could edit them with this really janky and super basic editor that was part of the program. You could either get props from other people or you could make your own by importing images, but there was this weird 255 color palette so you’d end up with all these greys and pinks for any pixels with incompatible colors that you’d need to fix or your avatar would look bad. There were also scripts in this language called iptscrae, which had backward notation. So like, rather than 5 + 5, you’d do “5” “5” +.

There were a bunch of different servers and you could run your own, though the official South Park server was the biggest. You’d have all these different styles of avatars that became popular and people would edit them to add variety and customize them. The rooms themselves were basically just a bunch of people hanging around, placing their avatars where they want on a background and chatting. When you typed something there would be a speech bubble that would pop up over your avatar like a comic. The scripts made it great for roleplay, because you could make die rolling scripts with little custom messages. I ended up getting really into White Wolf, playing on some small personal servers with friends.

Cybertown or Colony City was a 3d VRML (virtual reality modelling language) chat. Basically you’d have these sometimes reasonably large but very basic 3d spaces you could hang out in with other people with a chat client strapped to the bottom of the page. You could use one of the standard avatars provided by the site, or you could use a custom avatar that you modeled or got from someone else. It was, again, largely just people hanging out. There were a bunch of different areas that were just linked 3d instances, and you could get your own room.

These were all before anything like MMOs or much in the way of online multiplayer that’d come a few years later, so they were some of the first places you could hang out in an actual visually represented virtual space with other people. It was neat.

One of my favorite places to hang out, though, was just a simple little D&D java chat called Kenderchat. It was set in Dragonlance and consisted of 4 rooms: a tavern, the outside of the tavern, an arena, and a cave system. It was just text D&D roleplay, and it was awesome. I spent a huge amount of my time in high school just playing different characters here, and as a medium it honestly couldn’t have been simpler.

Most chats on the internet in the early days were more like Kenderchat than they were like the Palace. Even Cybertown also had some just regular text chats. Socializing on the internet was largely between these and the slightly more corporatized but still very loosely controlled chat clients like ICQ, AIM, and YIM. ICQ even had a rudimentary voice chat client, though it wasn’t super reliable and the audio quality wasn’t great. Of course there was also IRC, which was a little more complex but also completely independent. Anyone could and still can run their own IRCD.

The funny thing is, AOL was trying to do something like modern social media, but it was largely seen as sort of the kiddie pool of the internet. It was contained, centrally controlled, and only available to AOL subscribers.

There were also a lot of independent websites where people would just post their thoughts, their art, or goofy things they came across. I remember spending a lot of time reading Hostess comics on Seanbaby’s website.

Things got a little more sophisticated in the early 00s, and you had sites like Newgrounds becoming super popular and the rise of online gaming and voice chat clients like Teamspeak. We also had shoutcast, so you could put out your own radio station that people could listen to using Winamp. All of this stuff was based on privately hosted servers that anyone could put up. There were still a lot of independent websites, chats, and forums.

The thing is, this stuff didn’t like go away exactly. There are still loads of IRC chats out there, though most of them aren’t as busy as they might once have been. There are still independent websites and weird quirky little communities with an independent vibe, you just have to find them. That’s sort of always been the case. The difference now is that most people are on the modern equivalent of a half dozen or so AOLs and aren’t really sure how to go beyond that.

Today the thing I see as the closest equivalent to these communities tend to be things like discord servers and independent game servers, though the fediverse is also pretty close. The difference with the fediverse is that they’re networked together, so it does sort of feel like a big social media network, and discord has kind of a similar vibe. There are absolutely still smaller communities out there, though, and if you go looking I’m sure you can find some independent communities centered around your interests.

I will say, roleplaying communities seem to me to do a better job of connecting people these days than other general interest-based communities. Maybe that’s just down to me and my interests, but they are by nature focused on community and connections between people. No big company cares enough about such a niche audience to really try to capitalize on them, and they seem to be a good way of making lasting and genuine connections.

Basically, if you want to get a feel for the old independent internet, stop using big sites like Facebook and X, and maybe even focus a little less of your time on networked fediverse sites. Find forums with communities that speak to you, or some smallish discord servers, and dig in. Get to know the people so they aren’t just names next to posts. If you find a community where everybody knows each other, you’ll have a taste for how things used to be. You won’t really find a single community with millions of people that feels like that, because the smaller size is what makes it feel more intimate in the first place.

I literally use Piefed every single day and am enthusiastic about the growth of the Fediverse. If it can’t even take internal criticism from regular users with a vested interest it isn’t ready for outside interest.

Most of them have Patreon for that, which actually produces income.

What’s the incentive? All they would be doing is pushing views away from platforms where having viewers actually benefits them, either through metrics or income or both.

Honestly the best way to get that going might be to have a company and offer sponsorship deals with the requirement that creators also post to Peertube. But that would require companies having a reason to want people on Peertube.

Yeah, agreed. The one thing the platforms you see that aren’t YouTube that creators actually use have in common is financial incentive. Nebula is the best example here. Creators get a cut and have more creative freedom, so they actually use it and try to direct their audience to it for bonus content, which seems to actually work. Patreon is similar for a lot of creators, letting them put out additional content with fewer restrictions and letting them get more income from their viewers.

Some people also seem to have some success with independent platforms. If you look at like a Dropout or Viva Plus, these are both putting stuff out on YouTube and then drawing users in with subscriptions, and that seems to be a sound model.

But Peertube produces zero dollars for creators, which means they have no incentive to push users there. In fact, they’re incentivized to avoid doing so because there are other platforms that will actually pay them if they can direct traffic there. Peertube lacks both the money-making side of things and the exposure side of things, so there’s no real reason to use it.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to see something independent like Peertube take off, but the model doesn’t really work.

I mean, the way to use Lemmy/Piefed is to have multiple accounts. You don’t need to “migrate” anything, just start using it.

I do see this tendency from people coming from reddit to kind of fetishize the “status” of their accounts and try to preserve everything they’ve ever said as if anyone cares, but that seems both unhealthy and unrealistic. Nobody is digging through your posts from 6 months ago for content, and no one will care that you haven’t reposted all your passing thoughts to a new instance.

If you look at the users who are active across multiple accounts, they’re recognizable without worrying about what instance they’re on. Like I have no idea what instances Stamets or cm0002 or whatever are using at the moment or how many of their posts exist where and I don’t really care. I read my current feed, comment a little, post once in a while, and it seems like that’s what most people do.

Do you walk around with a tape recorder meticulously archiving every spoken conversation you have in real life? Would such a thing make your interactions more significant? Just keep that shit in your brain and the collective memory of interactions with others and get on with your life.

Peertube isn’t really a viable alternative. There isn’t a substantial enough audience for creators and there isn’t really enough content for an audience. I guess if you’re one of the 100 people watching transport evolved that’s cool but it isn’t really a meaningful alternative. I suppose it could be supplementary, but why would creators want to drive their traffic to a site that doesn’t actually matter for their visibility? I imagine the same probably applies to loops.

Also, like, with video you kind of want a reliable host that you know isn’t going anywhere.

The rest are okay as long as you’re not super worried about how many people are seeing what you post. Lemmy and Piefed are great for content aggregation and discussion, but they seem to be the only ones that at this point actually do anything that might be helpful.

I’ve tried Mastodon and while it’s way better than Twitter it isn’t exactly providing a way to reach a substantial audience. Personal websites are probably a better bet for ease of access.

You forgot having to be flexible enough to not have any particular workflow that works for you personally. Linux is great if you don’t need to use anything that doesn’t have a comparable equivalent.

That’s why I block bait and people who post it.

Also because steampunk is fiction based primarily on aesthetics with explanation as an afterthought.

He mentions in an interview that he was frustrated to not have been offered to take part in it.

Oh wow, I didn’t realize MTV kept him out of it. That’s kind of brazen to make a spin-off with a character and not let the creator be involved. Good show, though.

Honestly Mike Judge’s worst show. Watch Daria. Also Common Side Effects. King of the Hill isn’t bad either.

It’s less the choice paralysis than the insufferable superiority complex. Options are great. Wading through a sea of people who think they’re better than everyone is not.

Things that make people not want to use Linux.