I miss the old internet because it was a time you could meet up with old friends and connect and stay in touch with each other.
A few things changed, though. First, enshittification of services. You used to go on Facebook and just SWIM in the lives of other people. Now it's just promoted content. Second--related to the post--is rage was recruited to encourage engagement. Third, people's behavior online shifted towards tribal identification, towards rage baiting the other side, towards performativity; and I honestly don't know how much of that I can lay at the feet of Mark Zuckerberg.
I also miss the old internet because truly random things had a chance to make the rounds. Cracked.com had some of the finest writing I've ever read. Nowadays with SEO and official tie-ins (Forbes.com has a deal with Google), the only way to be seen is to spend money, and the only reason to spend money is to make money, so most everything online is now directly or indirectly an advertisement. AI only accelerated this process.
I think this is why Reddit became as huge as it did, because the weirdness still had a chance, and because people want to talk to each other. And now we have Lemmy.
We keep making and finding new islands as the waters continue to rise, but we used to roam the plains.
Internet tech companies have perfected the art of enshittifying a service. Internet services these days practically follow a playbook of, 1.) hook users, 2.) build a walled garden, 3.) exploit users. Basically the EEE of the user-driven web. Pretty much every company at this point, both old and new (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Reddit, TikTok, Discord, Twitter, Netflix) follow this exact pattern.
Modern UI design, dark patterns, deprecating services while raising prices, "install our app!", etc. We didn't have this in the days of IRC, Usenet, all that other good stuff before corporate web came around.
That would be the classical era of the internet, just after the baroque internet which in turn followed the renaissance internet.
If you go back further you'll find the internet of late antiquity, the ancient internet before that, then finally the pre-internet which we can only study through physical media since it was the era prior to the earliest known examples of the internet.
The Internet in 1995 was an amazing place. You could find so many scholarly articles and weird funny sites, but every place to chat was full of creepy old men trying to meet kids. Which we thought was hilarious until we got a bit older and realized some of our friends were trying to meet them back. You'd accidentally find all manner of horrific shit, but there was information available. It wasn't all true but it was almost all honest.
Which is wildly different from today where it feels like almost none of it's honest. Even the stuff that's true is only selectively true and trying to manipulate us into a worse place.
In the nineties fox news was strong and we were already experiencing a lot of it's style of selective truth coupled with outright lies from other places, too. On the Internet at the time it was a lot easier to avoid that stuff.
Can confirm, 39 year old here. The internet was fun from the mid 90s to mid 00s. People made content for fun, educational purposes, or to provide a service someone needs or would find useful. You "went on the internet" to chat with weird strangers and download media. It was fun. Now almost my entire life is the internet - my job, errands (banking, shopping, appointments) relaxation time (tv shows on streaming service, music and podcasts in one app). And in each of those things, bombarded with ads, privacy invaded, personal data stolen... we are way too reliant on the internet
That's not it at all. The internet used to be a multitude of small sites. A true bazaar made by individuals, visited by individuals in their web browsers.
Now it is all the 5 biggest platforms trapping users in their apps and doing their best to wall everything off.
See, when you open the front (web) page for the Gemini protocol, it looks like an actual human wrote that. When you do the same for NomadNet, it looks like (and with your computer fans sounds like) an investor cash grab. That's probably why I don't recall about the latter despite researching adjacent tech a lot before.
yeah there's a lot of stuff out there. I'm in to meshtastic/meshcore but have found them to be wanting.
I've also been playing with HaLow and Reticulum (30mbps), but the price and availability of the radios are rough.
I'm also hosting a little i2p, but more just to stay up on the tech, i2p is a lot dodgier and the available Android app appears to have tracking abilities.
This and the old internet was largely non-commercial compared to today. It was the "small" internet of passionate nerds, academics, and techies who needed an outlet for their passion. I remember being confused when I learned the ".com" was intended for commercial web sites only, because most personal websites people had were ".com"
yeah once you found a niche community you had knowledgeable people that would at least reply by the weekend, and expert advice would be free just because some guy was happy a stranger liked the same things.
While I appreciate the heavy handed strawman argument, it was entirely possible to make the old internet more accessible to those with disabilities WITHOUT making the technology worse in every single other way.
Mixed and depending on the year. Hardware was available, (braile and speech syth) but it was expensive as hell. There was a bit of a crisis when we went from dos to windows. None of the early GUI supported any of the hardware. In 95 you could use JAWS screen reader. Navigator 4 and IE5 were shit for a while until they started supporting it. Graphic images were still a problem, even after ALT tags became available, trying to get content makers to use them was a fight.
When you needed to sit at a computer, use a keyboard, and spend a bit of time to write out thoughtful content, the quality of the discussion and community on the internet was so much higher. With smartphones, they had to dumb down the UI, consolidate content and reactions into likes and emojis, and generally just had to deal with smaller, more unsubstantive and rage-baity comments.
Plus, there's just the undeniable fact that computer users are more tech-savvy than people who only know how to use a smartphone. Making the internet smartphone friendly opened the floodgates up to a sea of low-quality engagement.
Before smartphones, we would go outside, live our lives, then come home and see what happened on the internet that day. When the internet started following us around in our pockets on crippled devices that are designed for consumption and cheap-ass engagement, that's really when the internet went to shit.
I put off getting a smartphone until like 2015. I was 21 and was one of the last of my friends not to have one. My argument against it was precisely that: "I don't want to be online all day and I know that's exactly what's going to happen."
I didn't even buy my first smartphone. My sister gave it to me. It stayed in the box for six months. I so so did not fucking want it.
Smart phones ruined everything. It was fun when I was the only one, hyperbole. I had smart phones while my peers in grade school finally started getting hand me down flip phones. I was like this is great; playing Zelda on a gameboy emulator, or on the next phone that had the same specs as my first pc and playing Duke Nukem 3D. Being able to browse the internet.
Now it's devolved to a chain collar on your neck as you're expected to answer the phone all the time and even places of work require you to have a phone to use their cr'apps. Scan this QR code. Ram this up yass, oh wait. At this point I hate phones. I plan to switch to a garmin watch with phone capabilities. I mean 95% is just spam these days for me.
We could create forums that can only be logged on to using a desktop browser. Sure, some mobile users with basic tech savvy could install some spoofer that still let them access the site. But that's still mission accomplished. You're still requiring some technical competence.
Lemmy is like that to some extent. The fact that users have to pick an instance is, for a lot of people, too much overload and drives them away. But I see it as a filter. You have to have some absolute minimum baseline level of understanding and proficiency of the platform you're using. That's why the massive number of people on Facebook, etc. are oblivious to how they're being exploited by the platform, because they don't understand what it is or how it works.
I was using the Internet at a time when people took it being non-commercial completely seriously. You never saw ads because, as a community, we had decided that ads were not allowed. It was completely decentralized, so you might be running your own server, but if you put an ad on your server other people would get mad at you for it. This was pre-WWW and then a bit of the early days of the WWW.
Then there was a period where ads, commerce, shopping, etc. were possible and permitted. But, that was still the minority of things. There were thousands of web pages full of mythology and folklore for example, that people had just put up because that was something they were interested in. Running a web page cost you next to nothing, so there was no need to put ads on it. You could use Yahoo to find those sites, and I guess Yahoo was commercial by that point, but if it had ads they were small and unobtrusive.
Over time, things got more and more commercial. You saw ads more and more often. But, at least then it was ads on static content, or ads on a forum or something. It wasn't an infinite algorithmically-generated feed optimized to keep you engaged.
There was a lot to like about that super early non-commercial Internet. But, I don't think that was the peak moment though. Some ads and early for-profit services made it better. I think the thing that really wrecked it was the lack of competition. When there are 100 commercial services fighting over your attention, they can't collude, you can boycott one, etc. When there are 5, you basically have to accept whatever they give you.
It's not figuring out but just waiting until there are more non-nerds moving in that new market and then start monetizing as the market reaches critical mass for their particular niche.
No, it's because it wasn't full of bots and shitty content created solely for the purpose of generating clicks. People created content to have fun and share their passion, not because they wanted to be a professional influencer.
The thing about AIM, was "OMG this person is available to chat instantly, right here, right now!" A lot of people didn't have text messaging, or they did but it was expensive, so being able to chat remotely meant calling them on the phone, or you and the other person happened to be online at the same time.
I remember the day that the Old Internet died for me.
I saw my buddy was online on AIM, and I messaged him looking to shoot the shit. But he had just gotten a smartphone, and was logged into AIM on his smartphone, and it was not a good time for him to be shooting the shit because he was out and about doing stuff. So he was like “what do you need? I’m busy”.
Which is not something anyone had ever told me on AIM before. If you were on AIM you were by definition bored and looking to shoot the shit.
Also it was made to be fun and chill. You logged on talked to a few people end of transaction. You weren’t mined for data. They weren’t pushing ads and content based on your history. Myspace and aim just did a thing and you did that thing. Now the thing does you.
Ground Zero BBS Tri-cities Washington Sysop Nemesis checking in. I can confirm I had fidonet mail before email was a thing. Playing door games and posting on the wall for all to see. Great times.
Tbh the indieweb and fediverse have me feeling this way these days. I look forward to getting home and checking my forums and messages, just like I used to after school.
Other than that, indie web stuff can be cool, like 32bit cafe, and I think melonland? Status cafe forum is also worth a check once in a while.
Tbh it depends what I'm into at the time. Usually some hobby forum and a discourse for a bunch of friends + friends of friends who met on the phpbbs like 25 years ago lol.
Search your hobbies, there are tons that are still around and busy. Some that i like to visit are grassrootsmotorsports.com and hobby-machinest.com, but you can just search for "%hobby% forum" and you'll probably find something decent.
It's basically always going to start from a hobby or interest and then you start to build real relationships because you just like the people, and start shooting the shit about anything and everything
I have a 20 year old coworker I constantly ask probing questions about what it's like never having not had the internet. It's so weird.
I mean crushing boredom isn't a thing anymore because of it, which is cool and I can acknowledge that. But there's also something very dystopian about it and clearly it's having pretty serious negative effects on society, politics in particular. So yeah....not really sure how to feel about it.
I just went camping and put the goddamn thing in a bag for 4 days and forgot about it. Friends and I only brought the internet up once during the trip to joke that we hoped when we got back into reception we'd find out he had died. It's funny cuz I don't even need to say who.
Crushing boredom is absolutely still a thing. I guess you could move it over into mind-numbing boredom if you really wanted to get pedantic. If anything, it actually makes boredom more likely. The internet has caused a severe amount of overstimulation in most people, and so now things that they used to take enjoyment in mean nothing to them.
Also the Internet wasn't crapped up with every moron imaginable that could pick up a phone. There was a minimum barrier to entry; you needed a computer and to have at least average intelligence to figure out how to use it.
This is the right answer. Also the internet hadn't been overtaken by big companies and bots. And law makers was just starting to understand what it was, so it wasn't censored left and right. It really was a magical time.
We're still living in the Eternal September. It used to be that there was a certain etiquette to being online. Don't ask a question someone else already asked, don't pretend to be an authority on something you're not, and so on. Then September 1993 happened. Suddenly there was a much bigger new cohort of internet users who needed to assimilate to the culture. It was an endless cohort of people who didn't know how to behave. October came around more new user, November, December were the same. The change didn't happen quickly. It took decades but it started then.
some things about AIM are better. on discord, you express yourself with a monthly fee and now the member list is full of distracting animations. on AIM (and myspace), you had to learn some HTML to format the song lyrics in your bio just right.
Wow I completely forgot about this and now I'm awash in a sea of nostalgia. We used to just send each other mp3s over AIM and it was so chill. "Hey check out this song I'm listening to" "OK cool thanks" like it was no big deal. Ahhh
It was even better than sending a file, though. You could just point the settings to the folder you wanted to share and anyone on your buddies list could browse the shared folder and download what they wanted if you were online.
"Nostalgia" is not really reserved for great times, just different times. Is just reminiscing.
In addition, AIM was great at the time because it was the first "messenger". It was instant without the clunky and slow interface of email that for some reason we continue using 30 years later. It's not better in any way.
clunky and slow interface of email that for some reason we continue using 30 years later
Email is actually great, it's the original fediverse - anyone can start a server and interoperate with everyone else. With a decent client it doesn't need to be clunky either, although with 90% of people stuck in webmail I can understand why people think it sucks.
It's not great at all. It's messy and disorganized and confusing and very much not private, and people don't use it properly. No client can fix that. If it was "the original fediverse" we wouldn't need a new one.
Privacy is not a binary concept. Lots and lots of stuff is private that isn't on other platforms. Email only isn't confusing for normies because they learned how to use it.
Kinda hard to have anything private here without end to end encryption. You COULD use GPG in PMs, but then people have been encrypting their email for decades too.
And with email you don't generally have to keep up with instance politics to know where to sign up to be able to email the people you want to email. So I'd still say email is simpler to use. Maybe not simpler underneath on a technical level, but that doesn't matter to the end user.
Logging off? Perhaps. I was on dialup a lot longer than most people I know, but for me, it’s the ad-driven surveillance capitalism and ever present grift of everyone seeking to monetize their interactions that didn’t exist back then.
I could only get AOL in my town back in 1995 or so. Back then you had to pay… by the hour? The minute? Something like that. And AOL wasn’t a 24 hour service, it would shut down each night and kick everyone off.
People used to have social lives and meet and make friends and go out before apps or broadband. In the dialup days the internet was an addition to an already completed life. Facebook and iPhone was where things started to go to shit. Suddenly everyone was permanently online instead of just the cool people. And their brains all went to mush and they forgot how to relate to other people and have a life.
Very poetic but that was absolutely not what made the internet great. It was the culture and content. Everyone was just excited to make and share things with this cool tech.
Everything you did on the Internet didn't exist just to sell you something; you weren't a commodity to be manipulated and packaged with everything you looked at.
Not long ago, I stumbled upon a legal YouTuber who covered an astonishing revelation: it turns out that casual users on Facebook or Instagram can get copyright strikes for the music Meta suggests they can embed in their shorts and atory reels...!??
I was there on MySpace 20 yeara ago - it was so much easier to approach musicians, and embedding their songs on your profile page was just one of the cool features. I still keep in touch with a few artists and bands from that era and still revisit them from time to time, even though I usually tend to always seek out music that is still to new...
P.S. Maybe it's because I'm autistic, but I really feel the take in the OP just screams normie. Also, having an intense interest these days in decentralized social media and the smolweb and the rest of the indie web revival out there, I think things are not so bad, in a way. It feels better now that we know we're going against the grain with things that might have been taken for granted 20+ years ago.
The other part was you could see what people were up to and behave accordingly. Someone could be offline or busy so you'd know if you'd get a response or if you should or shouldn't talk to them.
Now if it's 1am I hesitate to message people since it might wake them up or something.
We've effectively eliminated boredom from our lives, and that sucks. Boredom is super important not just for our mental health, but in my view also for qualifying as sentient creatures.
It's worked out well so far for me without a data plan. My family is fine with call, text, or e-mail options for talking to me or sending me things like their football picks. The only time it sucks is when I lose power and have to resort to sparing use of mobile data to know when it's coming back on.
It's also filtered out a decent bit of text spam because the ones with pictures are MMS instead of SMS and the former requires mobile data.
Hmm I almost get it but I'm still kind of perplexed by this attitude because you absolutely can still set boundaries, the tools to do that are there, and I think increasingly people are choosing to do that.
It's easy enough to disconnect for a time at a personal level, but you still have the issue of friends, family, and society in general not joining you. It can be a lonely thing to disconnect by your self.
The difference is not just that you could disconnect, it's that disconnected was the default.
I have never really struggled with this, maybe because I'm older and I don't have many issues with anyone in my life, like, refusing to just text me with the understanding that I'll answer when I'm not busy.
I'm well, for me, personally, I don't install many apps anymore. I have blorp for Lemmy/piefed, but no notifications enabled, otherwise I log into websites through Mobile browsers if I'm going to use them on my phone or I use them on the desktop. Not getting push notifications makes a big difference in how intrusive I find things.
If something HAPPENS, like I get dragged into an argument on Reddit or something, or I just posted a new art work and I'm excessively worried about how it's "doing" on Bluesky for instance, I log out completely on my phone and use browser extensions that limit my browsing to short windows on specific websites or block them entirely. When I was in college, I was using a lot of this extensions to make sure I wasn't getting distracted from school work excessively.
I also have an ereader that makes it a lot easier to stay engrossed in a book than reading on my phone used to.
I'm American, so there's no pressure to use Whatsapp or anything like that. My family sends regular text messages, but I do rely on Snapchat to keep in touch with a couple of people, and have notifications from strangers disabled.
Boundaries are going to be highly individual, though. There's tools out there for just about anyone but what helps me stay connected but not TOO connected might not work for someone else. For example, someone else might find tiktok really valuable but be worried about it taking over their life (I bounced right off TT every time I used it). They should consider setting up parental controls on it. It's all going to depend on the person. Some people might need to go dumb phone only to truly relax.
For the majority of people the internet used to be a room, a place you went and accessed a device.
The device wasn’t mobile, we usually didn’t carry around the thick laptops of the time around.
At first using the device would disconnect the phone, and you couldn’t carry it around easily.
As times changed and it’s mobility shifted it became more and more commercially viable and then it was invaded by corporate interests.
Now it’s not just a room, it’s everywhere and it’s allows all sorts of powerful groups to exert influence over every single person that connects with it
lol any straight man who relies on online dating is planning to die alone lol.
Didnt tinder and other dating apps release data that actually proves that the ratio of men to women is like 5 to 1 on average for all of them? And we dont know how many straight men to straight women are in that ratio. COuld be 10 to 1 or 7 to 1 ....
Like 15 years ago when online dating first became mainstream and began to overtake other forms of meeting people I noticed that the dates that I was getting went absolutely horribly. Most of the ones I met in the real world went great, to the point that I swore of online dating and eventually met my partner that way. I find it so bizarre that people think that every single thing must be done through an app, including socializing. Sharing memes and typing emojis back and forth is not socializing.
Sharing memes and typing emojis back and forth is not socializing.
I would actually say youre correct about this . I forgot where I read this but a researcher basically said this as an argument in one of his articles . They said that online conversation does a terrible job of emulating real life conversations because in online discussion you cant read facial expressions, expressions and social cues, you dont get interupted(and sometimes you being able to read how , when and how frequently a person interrupts you can tell you A LOOOOT about what that person is thinking about you or what they think of you. Like if someone interrupts you EVERY time you two or you in a group woth them talks maybe they dont respect you as much as you think. If someone interrupts you with sexual innuendo maybe theyre trying to tell you something 'a little more') or interupt others for dramatic effect (there are some jokes out there that dont make any sense unless you interrupt the person listening to it), or if a person deliberately changes their voice for a reason that you dont know of (maybe theyre afraid of their real voice? Maybe theres something more to it...), and other things too that I cant get into since I have little experience with IRL conversating. Alnd also obviously you dont get the physical aspect of conversation when you dont do IRL conversatioms. Sometimes you just need a hug and a shoulder to cry on and them too. Humans clearly can suffer from touxh starvation.
I think they said that surprisingly it is actually negotiation-based conversation or persuasions that has taken the biggest hit for those who choose to give up IRL conversating. I cant remember exactly why though
Obviously online chatting and sharing memes has its times and its places. But I think in the modern world most people rely on these things too commonly when theyre looking to converse with or make friends.
Why cant we just create women friendly public spaces that allow women and men and people of whatever gender to safely pick, accept , or deny to date someone? If someone acts up we call authorities or we 'take care of them' ourselves.
Its very hard to send a dick pick in public right? Also I feel itll be very hard to be a stalker if the community that you and the person that you arer toxicly obsessing over both frequent have proof that youve stalked them (or even others) in the past and it is widely known there thst you frequently stalk them, right?
What is this talk, like you cannot be offline anymore? You can still put the phone down. You can turn off the message sounds, and check them in the evening, or tomorrow. Is someone forcing you on gunpoint, to constantly browse instagram, youtube, lemmy or something? But but- no. Life requires making choices, and being online constantly is a thing, you have accepted to do, if you are unhappy with it, stop doing it. If you have an addiction, you can fight against that, you do not need to just accept it.
If you have an employer who doesn't respect down time then yeah, you have the metaphorical gun of poverty pointed at your head. Boss called you at 10:30 PM to fix the slides on the Henderson presentation but you didn't answer because you were sleeping, your phone was in sleep mode and didn't ring. George did answer and started working on it all night. George will be in the room when the presentation happens, you won't be.
I hate that this is true, I wish I could disconnect from the office like my parents did but if I'm not available whenever my Boss wants me, it's the unemployment line. It sucks, I hate it. It should be different, it should be illegal but this is reality and the reality is my Boss holds most of the power in our professional relationship.
If you are on call, that does not require you to do anything else on the phone, though. You could even have just a dummy phone, so they can still call and text you - most people do not have to work 24/7 on their smart phone (or computer for that matter). Not being constantly online does not have to mean you have to return to pre-modern times.
It's not that you can't, but the social norms that filled that time have been replaced by short-form media.
If you want to put down your phone, there's nothing wrong with that. But you're just going to be sitting there with your thumb up your butt because everyone around you is going to have their nose in their phone.
That is part of the choice, too, yeah. But it is the question: are you happier constantly online and available, or would being more offline make you feel better? I think everyone should at least try for a while. If you (you in a general sense here) cannot spend a day, without checking your inbox (I guess I have to add, unrelated to work), or scrolling instagram, or the news, or youtube... you have a serious addiction. Is it worth it, to constantly take part in the addiction, just because others have it too?
Personally I am mostly available only via phone calls, if I am not sitting on computer. If it is urgent, they have to call me, otherwise it can wait until I remember to check the messages. That might take a while, but people get used to it.
Im unfortunately not your target audience, Intro verted in person to a fault, i'm relatively happy with the state of affairs. But you are absolutely right with many if not most people
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I miss the old internet because it was a time you could meet up with old friends and connect and stay in touch with each other.
A few things changed, though. First, enshittification of services. You used to go on Facebook and just SWIM in the lives of other people. Now it's just promoted content. Second--related to the post--is rage was recruited to encourage engagement. Third, people's behavior online shifted towards tribal identification, towards rage baiting the other side, towards performativity; and I honestly don't know how much of that I can lay at the feet of Mark Zuckerberg.
I also miss the old internet because truly random things had a chance to make the rounds. Cracked.com had some of the finest writing I've ever read. Nowadays with SEO and official tie-ins (Forbes.com has a deal with Google), the only way to be seen is to spend money, and the only reason to spend money is to make money, so most everything online is now directly or indirectly an advertisement. AI only accelerated this process.
I think this is why Reddit became as huge as it did, because the weirdness still had a chance, and because people want to talk to each other. And now we have Lemmy.
We keep making and finding new islands as the waters continue to rise, but we used to roam the plains.
Yeah, I want to interact with people who are making/sharing stuff for the love of the game, not trying to be influencers or sell me something.
Capitalism Enshittifies The Internet - Scammers and Influencers Version©®™ 😂🤣
That last line is a powerful analogy and exactly how it feels.
Internet tech companies have perfected the art of enshittifying a service. Internet services these days practically follow a playbook of, 1.) hook users, 2.) build a walled garden, 3.) exploit users. Basically the EEE of the user-driven web. Pretty much every company at this point, both old and new (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Reddit, TikTok, Discord, Twitter, Netflix) follow this exact pattern.
Modern UI design, dark patterns, deprecating services while raising prices, "install our app!", etc. We didn't have this in the days of IRC, Usenet, all that other good stuff before corporate web came around.
AKA, the Internet matured and became corporate like every other form of media before it.
Very nicely put
You're not describing the old Internet.
So what are they describing?
The 2000s internet.
26 years ago is pretty old, in relation to the lifespan of the internet
What's before then then?
That would be the classical era of the internet, just after the baroque internet which in turn followed the renaissance internet.
If you go back further you'll find the internet of late antiquity, the ancient internet before that, then finally the pre-internet which we can only study through physical media since it was the era prior to the earliest known examples of the internet.
What percentage of people do you think had the internet in 1995?
The Internet in 1995 was an amazing place. You could find so many scholarly articles and weird funny sites, but every place to chat was full of creepy old men trying to meet kids. Which we thought was hilarious until we got a bit older and realized some of our friends were trying to meet them back. You'd accidentally find all manner of horrific shit, but there was information available. It wasn't all true but it was almost all honest.
Which is wildly different from today where it feels like almost none of it's honest. Even the stuff that's true is only selectively true and trying to manipulate us into a worse place.
In the nineties fox news was strong and we were already experiencing a lot of it's style of selective truth coupled with outright lies from other places, too. On the Internet at the time it was a lot easier to avoid that stuff.
Not 0? This chain is confusing. I guess a lot of you are young and me pointing out a truth really bothered y'all. Sorry gen Z.
Nah, I'm nostalgic for the time when a chat was just a chat, not a signal to be analyzed, monetized, advertised, and propagandized.
Yeah, it was cool exploring the space without being monitized.
And when chat logs were just saved as text files on your PC.
Can confirm, 39 year old here. The internet was fun from the mid 90s to mid 00s. People made content for fun, educational purposes, or to provide a service someone needs or would find useful. You "went on the internet" to chat with weird strangers and download media. It was fun. Now almost my entire life is the internet - my job, errands (banking, shopping, appointments) relaxation time (tv shows on streaming service, music and podcasts in one app). And in each of those things, bombarded with ads, privacy invaded, personal data stolen... we are way too reliant on the internet
That's not it at all. The internet used to be a multitude of small sites. A true bazaar made by individuals, visited by individuals in their web browsers.
Now it is all the 5 biggest platforms trapping users in their apps and doing their best to wall everything off.
Bring on NomadNet!!!!!!
or Gemini Protocol,
They're both great retro, but sadly they're largely missing interesting content ;(
EDIT: a fake page I was looking at, probably
See, when you open the front (web) page for the Gemini protocol, it looks like an actual human wrote that. When you do the same for NomadNet, it looks like (and with your computer fans sounds like) an investor cash grab. That's probably why I don't recall about the latter despite researching adjacent tech a lot before.
https://unsigned.io/rnode_bootstrap_console/s_nn.html
nomadnet is a application that's a subnet of reticulum
reticulum provides the mesh and ssl transport, nomadnet is a hosting platform built on it. no cash involved.
i think the easiest path to trying out nomad is liam cottle's (meshtastic guy) meshchat https://github.com/liamcottle/reticulum-meshchat he added support for nomad net
Cool.
Actually, I have heard of it, here to be precise. I guess the front page threw me off so bad that my brain filtered it out like it never happened.
yeah there's a lot of stuff out there. I'm in to meshtastic/meshcore but have found them to be wanting.
I've also been playing with HaLow and Reticulum (30mbps), but the price and availability of the radios are rough.
I'm also hosting a little i2p, but more just to stay up on the tech, i2p is a lot dodgier and the available Android app appears to have tracking abilities.
This and the old internet was largely non-commercial compared to today. It was the "small" internet of passionate nerds, academics, and techies who needed an outlet for their passion. I remember being confused when I learned the ".com" was intended for commercial web sites only, because most personal websites people had were ".com"
The old internet was decidedly anti-commercial.
I remember very well people being revolted by online advertising and how it commercialized a free place.
They were right.
yeah once you found a niche community you had knowledgeable people that would at least reply by the weekend, and expert advice would be free just because some guy was happy a stranger liked the same things.
You just had to be confidently wrong enough to aggro the guy that actually knows his shit.
Maybe that strat was always around but I associate it more with the later 2.0 web
Bullshit. The technology WAS better.
Text communication took like, 28 Mb of RAM and was blazing fast, and a single chat application like Pidgin could interoperate with ALL of them.
❤️
How accessable was the old internet for visually impaired people?
While I appreciate the heavy handed strawman argument, it was entirely possible to make the old internet more accessible to those with disabilities WITHOUT making the technology worse in every single other way.
Mixed and depending on the year. Hardware was available, (braile and speech syth) but it was expensive as hell. There was a bit of a crisis when we went from dos to windows. None of the early GUI supported any of the hardware. In 95 you could use JAWS screen reader. Navigator 4 and IE5 were shit for a while until they started supporting it. Graphic images were still a problem, even after ALT tags became available, trying to get content makers to use them was a fight.
When did the internet cure blindness
Smartphones ruined the internet.
When you needed to sit at a computer, use a keyboard, and spend a bit of time to write out thoughtful content, the quality of the discussion and community on the internet was so much higher. With smartphones, they had to dumb down the UI, consolidate content and reactions into likes and emojis, and generally just had to deal with smaller, more unsubstantive and rage-baity comments.
Plus, there's just the undeniable fact that computer users are more tech-savvy than people who only know how to use a smartphone. Making the internet smartphone friendly opened the floodgates up to a sea of low-quality engagement.
Before smartphones, we would go outside, live our lives, then come home and see what happened on the internet that day. When the internet started following us around in our pockets on crippled devices that are designed for consumption and cheap-ass engagement, that's really when the internet went to shit.
I put off getting a smartphone until like 2015. I was 21 and was one of the last of my friends not to have one. My argument against it was precisely that: "I don't want to be online all day and I know that's exactly what's going to happen."
I didn't even buy my first smartphone. My sister gave it to me. It stayed in the box for six months. I so so did not fucking want it.
Work forced me into keeping a smart phone. The key fob I was using for MFA died and they were no longer replacing them so I had to use the app.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
Smart phones ruined everything. It was fun when I was the only one, hyperbole. I had smart phones while my peers in grade school finally started getting hand me down flip phones. I was like this is great; playing Zelda on a gameboy emulator, or on the next phone that had the same specs as my first pc and playing Duke Nukem 3D. Being able to browse the internet.
Now it's devolved to a chain collar on your neck as you're expected to answer the phone all the time and even places of work require you to have a phone to use their cr'apps. Scan this QR code. Ram this up yass, oh wait. At this point I hate phones. I plan to switch to a garmin watch with phone capabilities. I mean 95% is just spam these days for me.
We could create forums that can only be logged on to using a desktop browser. Sure, some mobile users with basic tech savvy could install some spoofer that still let them access the site. But that's still mission accomplished. You're still requiring some technical competence.
Lemmy is like that to some extent. The fact that users have to pick an instance is, for a lot of people, too much overload and drives them away. But I see it as a filter. You have to have some absolute minimum baseline level of understanding and proficiency of the platform you're using. That's why the massive number of people on Facebook, etc. are oblivious to how they're being exploited by the platform, because they don't understand what it is or how it works.
One of the core features of AIM was an away message. I'm not here, fuck off.
Even better was if someone sent a message and then you set yourself as away.
back when using your real name on social media was idiotic
My mom then: don't put any personal information on the internet!
My mom now: I just need to put my social security, credit card info, and full street address and I can see which Seinfeld character I'm most like!
Still is
The internet was much better before people figured out how to make money off of it.
I was using the Internet at a time when people took it being non-commercial completely seriously. You never saw ads because, as a community, we had decided that ads were not allowed. It was completely decentralized, so you might be running your own server, but if you put an ad on your server other people would get mad at you for it. This was pre-WWW and then a bit of the early days of the WWW.
Then there was a period where ads, commerce, shopping, etc. were possible and permitted. But, that was still the minority of things. There were thousands of web pages full of mythology and folklore for example, that people had just put up because that was something they were interested in. Running a web page cost you next to nothing, so there was no need to put ads on it. You could use Yahoo to find those sites, and I guess Yahoo was commercial by that point, but if it had ads they were small and unobtrusive.
Over time, things got more and more commercial. You saw ads more and more often. But, at least then it was ads on static content, or ads on a forum or something. It wasn't an infinite algorithmically-generated feed optimized to keep you engaged.
There was a lot to like about that super early non-commercial Internet. But, I don't think that was the peak moment though. Some ads and early for-profit services made it better. I think the thing that really wrecked it was the lack of competition. When there are 100 commercial services fighting over your attention, they can't collude, you can boycott one, etc. When there are 5, you basically have to accept whatever they give you.
It's not figuring out but just waiting until there are more non-nerds moving in that new market and then start monetizing as the market reaches critical mass for their particular niche.
Maybe you logged off. Quitters.
You had to log off when someone wanted to use the phone
We got a second phone line explicitly for this purpose, lol.
Or a few years later: the microwave forcibly logged you off. (microwave interfered with the WiFi).
Sometimes I get done of posting on Lemmy and I go out and take pictures.
... To post on Lemmy?
You all are cool and deserve good art! :D
No, it's because it wasn't full of bots and shitty content created solely for the purpose of generating clicks. People created content to have fun and share their passion, not because they wanted to be a professional influencer.
The thing about AIM, was "OMG this person is available to chat instantly, right here, right now!" A lot of people didn't have text messaging, or they did but it was expensive, so being able to chat remotely meant calling them on the phone, or you and the other person happened to be online at the same time.
I remember the day that the Old Internet died for me.
I saw my buddy was online on AIM, and I messaged him looking to shoot the shit. But he had just gotten a smartphone, and was logged into AIM on his smartphone, and it was not a good time for him to be shooting the shit because he was out and about doing stuff. So he was like “what do you need? I’m busy”.
Which is not something anyone had ever told me on AIM before. If you were on AIM you were by definition bored and looking to shoot the shit.
I guess we grew up too.
Ouch.
Well, then the Internet wasn't a capitalist shithole. It was only a shithole.
Also it was made to be fun and chill. You logged on talked to a few people end of transaction. You weren’t mined for data. They weren’t pushing ads and content based on your history. Myspace and aim just did a thing and you did that thing. Now the thing does you.
GenX version of the internet:
https://youtu.be/ckc6XSSh52w
Then log into a BBS.
ASCII Pr0n and 8 bit music...
Ground Zero BBS Tri-cities Washington Sysop Nemesis checking in. I can confirm I had fidonet mail before email was a thing. Playing door games and posting on the wall for all to see. Great times.
Actually, it was geocities that made the internet so much fun
Tbh the indieweb and fediverse have me feeling this way these days. I look forward to getting home and checking my forums and messages, just like I used to after school.
Do you have any recommendations for good forums?
Doomworld is great if you like doom.
Other than that, indie web stuff can be cool, like 32bit cafe, and I think melonland? Status cafe forum is also worth a check once in a while.
Tbh it depends what I'm into at the time. Usually some hobby forum and a discourse for a bunch of friends + friends of friends who met on the phpbbs like 25 years ago lol.
Search your hobbies, there are tons that are still around and busy. Some that i like to visit are grassrootsmotorsports.com and hobby-machinest.com, but you can just search for "%hobby% forum" and you'll probably find something decent.
This is it.
It's basically always going to start from a hobby or interest and then you start to build real relationships because you just like the people, and start shooting the shit about anything and everything
I have a 20 year old coworker I constantly ask probing questions about what it's like never having not had the internet. It's so weird.
I mean crushing boredom isn't a thing anymore because of it, which is cool and I can acknowledge that. But there's also something very dystopian about it and clearly it's having pretty serious negative effects on society, politics in particular. So yeah....not really sure how to feel about it.
I just went camping and put the goddamn thing in a bag for 4 days and forgot about it. Friends and I only brought the internet up once during the trip to joke that we hoped when we got back into reception we'd find out he had died. It's funny cuz I don't even need to say who.
I thought you meant the internet was a he
Hell yeah
Crushing boredom is absolutely still a thing. I guess you could move it over into mind-numbing boredom if you really wanted to get pedantic. If anything, it actually makes boredom more likely. The internet has caused a severe amount of overstimulation in most people, and so now things that they used to take enjoyment in mean nothing to them.
Excuse me, AIM and MySpace were that cool
I was more of a Yahoo Messenger and ICQ, AIM was for the adults.
I still remember my icq number from the top of my head
For me, pagers/beepers were what adults used during this period.
Also the Internet wasn't crapped up with every moron imaginable that could pick up a phone. There was a minimum barrier to entry; you needed a computer and to have at least average intelligence to figure out how to use it.
This is the right answer. Also the internet hadn't been overtaken by big companies and bots. And law makers was just starting to understand what it was, so it wasn't censored left and right. It really was a magical time.
We're still living in the Eternal September. It used to be that there was a certain etiquette to being online. Don't ask a question someone else already asked, don't pretend to be an authority on something you're not, and so on. Then September 1993 happened. Suddenly there was a much bigger new cohort of internet users who needed to assimilate to the culture. It was an endless cohort of people who didn't know how to behave. October came around more new user, November, December were the same. The change didn't happen quickly. It took decades but it started then.
some things about AIM are better. on discord, you express yourself with a monthly fee and now the member list is full of distracting animations. on AIM (and myspace), you had to learn some HTML to format the song lyrics in your bio just right.
AIM also had built in file sharing.
Wow I completely forgot about this and now I'm awash in a sea of nostalgia. We used to just send each other mp3s over AIM and it was so chill. "Hey check out this song I'm listening to" "OK cool thanks" like it was no big deal. Ahhh
It was even better than sending a file, though. You could just point the settings to the folder you wanted to share and anyone on your buddies list could browse the shared folder and download what they wanted if you were online.
You pay a monthly fee? Mine's free. You do Nitro or something?
No, I lived on the Internet it was my connection out of a small town into the wider world.
What’s making the Internet shit was capitalism monetising everything and making us a product just to use it.
everybody knows its the nostalgia for GEOCITIES AESTHETIC
-Under Construction-
ahhhhhhhh
"Nostalgia" is not really reserved for great times, just different times. Is just reminiscing.
In addition, AIM was great at the time because it was the first "messenger". It was instant without the clunky and slow interface of email that for some reason we continue using 30 years later. It's not better in any way.
Email is actually great, it's the original fediverse - anyone can start a server and interoperate with everyone else. With a decent client it doesn't need to be clunky either, although with 90% of people stuck in webmail I can understand why people think it sucks.
It's not great at all. It's messy and disorganized and confusing and very much not private, and people don't use it properly. No client can fix that. If it was "the original fediverse" we wouldn't need a new one.
So exactly the same as the fediverse we're on then?
No. Not like that at all.
Well nothing is private on lemmy. Or piefed. And it's pretty confusing for normies, more so than email. I see a lot of similarities.
Privacy is not a binary concept. Lots and lots of stuff is private that isn't on other platforms. Email only isn't confusing for normies because they learned how to use it.
Kinda hard to have anything private here without end to end encryption. You COULD use GPG in PMs, but then people have been encrypting their email for decades too.
And with email you don't generally have to keep up with instance politics to know where to sign up to be able to email the people you want to email. So I'd still say email is simpler to use. Maybe not simpler underneath on a technical level, but that doesn't matter to the end user.
Broke ass 70's tech, but whatever
They literally said in the opening sentence: "the best thing about early internet wasn't AIM or MySpace"
The post isn't about individual technology at all, but how relationship with technology changed.
Yes I literally also read the OP. I'm not sure what that has to do with my comment.
So...its about technology?
Fuck that, I'm nostalgic because there was an actual aesthetic with character. "Modern" flat UIs are boring and flat.
Logging off? Perhaps. I was on dialup a lot longer than most people I know, but for me, it’s the ad-driven surveillance capitalism and ever present grift of everyone seeking to monetize their interactions that didn’t exist back then.
I miss flash games like pogo.com and stuff
The balloon popping game or as a standalone, bloody pingu smash.
I have probably hundreds of hours on Yahtzee on pogo loool
Check out flashpoint archive.
lol I’ve been perpetually online from the beginningish.
Really, because I'm more nostalgic for having hope for the future.
Some of y'all need to go camping more.
That said the 'old' Internet had a much better signal to noise ratio before the eternal September.
I could only get AOL in my town back in 1995 or so. Back then you had to pay… by the hour? The minute? Something like that. And AOL wasn’t a 24 hour service, it would shut down each night and kick everyone off.
People used to have social lives and meet and make friends and go out before apps or broadband. In the dialup days the internet was an addition to an already completed life. Facebook and iPhone was where things started to go to shit. Suddenly everyone was permanently online instead of just the cool people. And their brains all went to mush and they forgot how to relate to other people and have a life.
Very poetic but that was absolutely not what made the internet great. It was the culture and content. Everyone was just excited to make and share things with this cool tech.
Everything you did on the Internet didn't exist just to sell you something; you weren't a commodity to be manipulated and packaged with everything you looked at.
Remember:
Products from Amazon will cost MUCH MUCH LESS because there's no "big box" overhead.
And shipping will be FREE!
I almost cried reading the explanation.
Well put. Also it was novel and less sinister.
Not long ago, I stumbled upon a legal YouTuber who covered an astonishing revelation: it turns out that casual users on Facebook or Instagram can get copyright strikes for the music Meta suggests they can embed in their shorts and atory reels...!??
I was there on MySpace 20 yeara ago - it was so much easier to approach musicians, and embedding their songs on your profile page was just one of the cool features. I still keep in touch with a few artists and bands from that era and still revisit them from time to time, even though I usually tend to always seek out music that is still to new...
P.S. Maybe it's because I'm autistic, but I really feel the take in the OP just screams normie. Also, having an intense interest these days in decentralized social media and the smolweb and the rest of the indie web revival out there, I think things are not so bad, in a way. It feels better now that we know we're going against the grain with things that might have been taken for granted 20+ years ago.
With Prodigy Internet, you get on, you get the information you need, and you go do something with it.
MSN chatrooms are where I met the first person I had a relationship with, AIM is mainly where we got to know each other.
And MySpace was what got me interested in web design, back when crafting webpages by hand was still seen as a form of art.
The other part was you could see what people were up to and behave accordingly. Someone could be offline or busy so you'd know if you'd get a response or if you should or shouldn't talk to them.
Now if it's 1am I hesitate to message people since it might wake them up or something.
We've effectively eliminated boredom from our lives, and that sucks. Boredom is super important not just for our mental health, but in my view also for qualifying as sentient creatures.
I've been considering getting rid of my mobile data for this reason and force people to call or text.
It's worked out well so far for me without a data plan. My family is fine with call, text, or e-mail options for talking to me or sending me things like their football picks. The only time it sucks is when I lose power and have to resort to sparing use of mobile data to know when it's coming back on.
It's also filtered out a decent bit of text spam because the ones with pictures are MMS instead of SMS and the former requires mobile data.
I have been experimenting recently with turning airplane mode on when I am outdoors. Although I still use a notes app and an offline .mp3 player.
I can definitely recommend, it feels much calmer, slower, and my situational awareness improved too.
If I was not banned from Facebook I would add this to groups and then argue with people about ☠️
Personally I thought the internet was better before it existed. 😁
Hmm I almost get it but I'm still kind of perplexed by this attitude because you absolutely can still set boundaries, the tools to do that are there, and I think increasingly people are choosing to do that.
It's easy enough to disconnect for a time at a personal level, but you still have the issue of friends, family, and society in general not joining you. It can be a lonely thing to disconnect by your self.
The difference is not just that you could disconnect, it's that disconnected was the default.
Sounds like a feature, not a bug.
I have never really struggled with this, maybe because I'm older and I don't have many issues with anyone in my life, like, refusing to just text me with the understanding that I'll answer when I'm not busy.
You can, but to me it feels different when you're cutting yourself off from things intentionally vs when it was just the expected default.
The difference being that back then, those boundaries were the default. Now you have to fight the platforms to establish those same boundaries.
I'll bite. Explain setting these boundaries you're talking about.
What boundary are you having trouble setting? The answer depends a lot on that.
What? You mentioned boundaries and I'm asking what those boundaries are...
I'm well, for me, personally, I don't install many apps anymore. I have blorp for Lemmy/piefed, but no notifications enabled, otherwise I log into websites through Mobile browsers if I'm going to use them on my phone or I use them on the desktop. Not getting push notifications makes a big difference in how intrusive I find things.
If something HAPPENS, like I get dragged into an argument on Reddit or something, or I just posted a new art work and I'm excessively worried about how it's "doing" on Bluesky for instance, I log out completely on my phone and use browser extensions that limit my browsing to short windows on specific websites or block them entirely. When I was in college, I was using a lot of this extensions to make sure I wasn't getting distracted from school work excessively.
I also have an ereader that makes it a lot easier to stay engrossed in a book than reading on my phone used to.
I'm American, so there's no pressure to use Whatsapp or anything like that. My family sends regular text messages, but I do rely on Snapchat to keep in touch with a couple of people, and have notifications from strangers disabled.
Boundaries are going to be highly individual, though. There's tools out there for just about anyone but what helps me stay connected but not TOO connected might not work for someone else. For example, someone else might find tiktok really valuable but be worried about it taking over their life (I bounced right off TT every time I used it). They should consider setting up parental controls on it. It's all going to depend on the person. Some people might need to go dumb phone only to truly relax.
For the majority of people the internet used to be a room, a place you went and accessed a device.
The device wasn’t mobile, we usually didn’t carry around the thick laptops of the time around.
At first using the device would disconnect the phone, and you couldn’t carry it around easily.
As times changed and it’s mobility shifted it became more and more commercially viable and then it was invaded by corporate interests.
Now it’s not just a room, it’s everywhere and it’s allows all sorts of powerful groups to exert influence over every single person that connects with it
ASL?
26/Heli/Iranian airspace
Wanna meet? Send coordinates
19/f/definitely not Tehran
30s/Yes Please/Hopefully your bedroom
Based J3NNA_88
lol any straight man who relies on online dating is planning to die alone lol.
Didnt tinder and other dating apps release data that actually proves that the ratio of men to women is like 5 to 1 on average for all of them? And we dont know how many straight men to straight women are in that ratio. COuld be 10 to 1 or 7 to 1 ....
Like 15 years ago when online dating first became mainstream and began to overtake other forms of meeting people I noticed that the dates that I was getting went absolutely horribly. Most of the ones I met in the real world went great, to the point that I swore of online dating and eventually met my partner that way. I find it so bizarre that people think that every single thing must be done through an app, including socializing. Sharing memes and typing emojis back and forth is not socializing.
/end of old man rant
I would actually say youre correct about this . I forgot where I read this but a researcher basically said this as an argument in one of his articles . They said that online conversation does a terrible job of emulating real life conversations because in online discussion you cant read facial expressions, expressions and social cues, you dont get interupted(and sometimes you being able to read how , when and how frequently a person interrupts you can tell you A LOOOOT about what that person is thinking about you or what they think of you. Like if someone interrupts you EVERY time you two or you in a group woth them talks maybe they dont respect you as much as you think. If someone interrupts you with sexual innuendo maybe theyre trying to tell you something 'a little more') or interupt others for dramatic effect (there are some jokes out there that dont make any sense unless you interrupt the person listening to it), or if a person deliberately changes their voice for a reason that you dont know of (maybe theyre afraid of their real voice? Maybe theres something more to it...), and other things too that I cant get into since I have little experience with IRL conversating. Alnd also obviously you dont get the physical aspect of conversation when you dont do IRL conversatioms. Sometimes you just need a hug and a shoulder to cry on and them too. Humans clearly can suffer from touxh starvation.
I think they said that surprisingly it is actually negotiation-based conversation or persuasions that has taken the biggest hit for those who choose to give up IRL conversating. I cant remember exactly why though
Obviously online chatting and sharing memes has its times and its places. But I think in the modern world most people rely on these things too commonly when theyre looking to converse with or make friends.
One can appreciate that Tinder somewhat allows women to have control over who they date
Of course, the inverse is stalkers and dick pics daily.
Idk. Humanity just can't win.
Why cant we just create women friendly public spaces that allow women and men and people of whatever gender to safely pick, accept , or deny to date someone? If someone acts up we call authorities or we 'take care of them' ourselves.
Its very hard to send a dick pick in public right? Also I feel itll be very hard to be a stalker if the community that you and the person that you arer toxicly obsessing over both frequent have proof that youve stalked them (or even others) in the past and it is widely known there thst you frequently stalk them, right?
Bullshit. Getright and bitchx said so.
What is this talk, like you cannot be offline anymore? You can still put the phone down. You can turn off the message sounds, and check them in the evening, or tomorrow. Is someone forcing you on gunpoint, to constantly browse instagram, youtube, lemmy or something? But but- no. Life requires making choices, and being online constantly is a thing, you have accepted to do, if you are unhappy with it, stop doing it. If you have an addiction, you can fight against that, you do not need to just accept it.
If you have an employer who doesn't respect down time then yeah, you have the metaphorical gun of poverty pointed at your head. Boss called you at 10:30 PM to fix the slides on the Henderson presentation but you didn't answer because you were sleeping, your phone was in sleep mode and didn't ring. George did answer and started working on it all night. George will be in the room when the presentation happens, you won't be.
I hate that this is true, I wish I could disconnect from the office like my parents did but if I'm not available whenever my Boss wants me, it's the unemployment line. It sucks, I hate it. It should be different, it should be illegal but this is reality and the reality is my Boss holds most of the power in our professional relationship.
If you are on call, that does not require you to do anything else on the phone, though. You could even have just a dummy phone, so they can still call and text you - most people do not have to work 24/7 on their smart phone (or computer for that matter). Not being constantly online does not have to mean you have to return to pre-modern times.
It's not that you can't, but the social norms that filled that time have been replaced by short-form media.
If you want to put down your phone, there's nothing wrong with that. But you're just going to be sitting there with your thumb up your butt because everyone around you is going to have their nose in their phone.
That is part of the choice, too, yeah. But it is the question: are you happier constantly online and available, or would being more offline make you feel better? I think everyone should at least try for a while. If you (you in a general sense here) cannot spend a day, without checking your inbox (I guess I have to add, unrelated to work), or scrolling instagram, or the news, or youtube... you have a serious addiction. Is it worth it, to constantly take part in the addiction, just because others have it too?
Personally I am mostly available only via phone calls, if I am not sitting on computer. If it is urgent, they have to call me, otherwise it can wait until I remember to check the messages. That might take a while, but people get used to it.
Im unfortunately not your target audience, Intro verted in person to a fault, i'm relatively happy with the state of affairs. But you are absolutely right with many if not most people