The Internet was…Weird. it was way more anonymous and way less centralized. You didn’t just check Reddit or Lemmy or YouTube, you had a favorites bar. You would go down the list and check 4 different flash websites, 3 forums, and some news/entertainment article sites.

And friends would constantly tell you new sites you had to check out. And webcomics. You would find a webcomic and read it from the start, then add it to your weekly update list.

It was also peak gross Internet. You would always be wary of links friends would send. Goatse and lemon party were guaranteed to be hiding in one.

Everyone had their favorite flash game site. Simple, one player games that you did just for fun. No achievements or social element besides sharing the link with a friend.

When you played a PC game online, you didn’t just hit a button and get put into a game somewhere; you had to look at all the servers and pick one. You could then come back to that same server whenever you wanted to play and hang out with the same people.

Also the server wasn’t ran by or owned by the game creators, but by the players themselves who would host servers or at least rent them from server hosting services.

Oh and content wasn’t sold piecemeal to nickel and dime the fuck out of you.

Man, I’ve been using the internet since 1994. Back then I started with CompuServe. Think like AOL but more beige. It had an instant messaging system and email and a portal with various pages on different topics. But you could also use a browser, like Mosaic or Netscape, to browse the internet. I used Alta Vista and Excite and Yahoo as search engines. There were also personal website that people wrote in basic HTML and hosted on Geocities and communities on specific topics would create webrings to link these sites together. We also used apps like Gopher and Usenet Newsgroups.

And before that it was BBS, bulletin board services, which were computers managed by strangers and you would just call them with your phone line modem using a terminal software and their system would pick up and establish a connection if it was available. You could access messages, emails, upload or download files, and some have you access to the internet if you were lucky.

Google could actually find you things.

The first page of searches was almost never brimming with corporate shit, but very Web 1.0 looking niche websites.

Browser based games were all the rage.

Oh God, flash animations. Albino Blacksheep. Our sense of humor was… primitive.

Fuck, webcomics too. They were big back then. And mostly shit, lmao.

Everyone had a blog. Not like modern cookie-cutter blogs, but slapdash HTML pages with unintuitive layouts and garish backgrounds and graphics. 9/10 times that’s where super obscure information was. Midi files - god, do kids even know what midi files are anymore?

There were a million fansites for every fandom. No centralization.

There was a much stronger sense of the internet being a unique place, apart from meatspace. Maybe it was just the aftermath of the dotcom bubble busting, but everything was very… open. Communal. People just… freely sharing themselves and their work.

Broadband internet was a game changer. I spent a lot of time on fark.com and various other message boards. Chatted with friends over AOL instant messages and IRC.

There was a certain video format for Realplayer that seemed to be the extremely popular for a while and it still…. (Buffering)…. Sucked…. (Buffering)…. Ass

There were lots of little niche forums where you could find a lot of different perspectives. I remember as a kid going to nuklearpower.com, the home of the 8-Bit theater webcomic, and I found a thread in the forums about religion and it was kind of my first real exposure to ideas about it outside of what I’d been raised to believe.

Most early memes were lolcats or epic fails, and I remember going through pages and pages on cheezburger.com with my friends. There were also “demotivational posters,” like this was the height of comedy.

4chan existed and was pretty bad even then but it was more common for somewhat normal people to go there, they loved their slurs and gross out humor but it wasn’t full nazi, it was edgy teens. In general slurs and homophobia were a lot more common, but a lot of the edgy, “you can’t tell me what to do” energy was directed at the religious right, the “moral guardians” who wanted to take away your violent video games. The left was very weak and didn’t have the sort of cultural presence it has today, instead you had a lot of energy directed towards libertarianism, with Ron Paul being the anti-war, pro-weed candidate, and you had liberals with ACLU type values. Things weren’t cut as neatly along party lines back then.

Fewer people were on the internet back then. Lots of young people used it but not as many boomers. There weren’t as many big pillars like Facebook/Twitter/Reddit, there were more subcultures and you never quite knew what you’d find (for better or worse). Algorithms were a lot less polished and you didn’t have as much SEO, Youtube looked and felt radically different.

The indie game Secret Little Haven captures some of the feel of that time period of the internet, from the perspective of a transfem, it gets heavy but it’s good.