Comfort food
this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2026
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You are conflating the data-stealing algorithms with "the internet". You are shown content the algorithms thinks you want to see. Other people are not necessarily seeing it (I'm not for example).
asl?
F/18/Cali
Damn, I wish it were ... it was so much better.
If it only did. Do you even know the Internet in the '90?
No ads, no spam, no AI. At least not at the beginning of the '90.
Nostalgia is a recession indicator
as far as forums go yes, things like reddit, meta, google is become super walled in and datamining. so people maybe recreating forum experiences.
You got me excited there for a minute. I thought you meant that people were making homepages and webrings and using forums and stopped using phones.
I was about to comment that "nothing is stopping you from making stuff like that today", but then I remembered that I have enough hardware and bandwidth available to host an obscene amount of lightweight (by today's standards) 90s sites and services, but I simply can't be arsed designing anything meant for others to view.
Time to find my Geocities password
Xoom was so much better than geocities and I will die on that hill
That's actually all true too. There's a webring and gopher revival. Along with a modern luddite movement sweeping college campuses.
Even the young people are nostalgic for a time when new technology was actually cool rather than mostly being a way to more effectively use everyone’s data against them.
There’s also that 30-year cycle phenomenon where things from 3 decades ago become trendy again, like how 80s stuff got more popular again in the 2010s.
I don't see nostalgia for the old internet among my techie friends. Old hardware yes, but not the old internet.
I have a 286 and enjoy the sites that have all the abandonware - we never got discs for the games that came with our first computer
One complains about unnecessary SSL as his old machines can't do SSL
That also probably drives the Fediverse's adoption as well because people are tired of getting walled in by hostile corporations.
Even the young people are nostalgic for a time when new technology was actually cool rather than mostly being a way to more effectively use everyone’s data against them.
I can confirm this as a young person fascinated by the (so far, Apple) tech from the late 2000s and early 2010s.
I thought anyone under 30 wouldn't have had experienced any of the cool tech but I guess things were pretty fun until the early 2010s.
yeah. also under 30, but my family has a bunch os old technology kicking around. I used Windows Vista on an old HP Media Center PC for a while, we have a few floppy discs lying around, along with an old Compaq Presario running Windows ME. from my experience, it wasn't so bad? currently, I'm obsessed by a Casio digital organizer from ~1969. the topic of this post has escaped me quite a while back (sorry for that), but yes, things were quite fun from back then. Is it weird/ unusual/ odd that I miss those times even though I never lived through them?
Anemoia. It's not odd. A quite common phenomenon.
huh, til. Thank you! :D
You're welcome. It’s not a scientific term, though.
People want to relive their young years because 2026 is shit so far
A lot of my genx peers are finally admitting they’re old as shit and a lot of our friends and family are dying now, so it’s definitely nostalgia driven.
I've been hanging out in a self hosted IRC network, we get like 2-5 new people per month coming in and almost all of them say similar things. Either they are returning to IRC after a 15-20 year absence because they got fed up with the current state of discord, facebook, reddit, whatever. Or, they heard about IRC from a friend or a youtube video and got interested because they got fed up with the current state of discord, facebook, reddit, whatever.
I think its a mix of nostalgia and seeking refuge from the bullshit that is the modern internet.
(If anyone is interested in the network I mentioned, check https://inthemansion.com/ the website has all the info you need and also a webchat, if you don't want commit to a IRC client just yet, or have problems setting one up, we are happy to answer to any questions.)
I'm not sure that it is.
Google Trends only goes back to 2004, but using that:
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/2d9e3d22-5fed-4b77-bd43-571765c3e47a.webp
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/8d17a79e-03af-4a30-b88f-4f25cf594970.webp
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/43b58598-7feb-435c-8f43-4a28a9adf46d.webp
They don't really appear to be surging in interest.
What sources does Google use for this? Because, if it's web crawling, of course they aren't going to show up.
It's what people are searching for.
Crypt Hauntology resulting from the loss of our ability to imagine better futures for civilization and our culture. This site is mainly millennials and gen-x so the nostalgia we fall back on is going to be 80's and 90's coded.
There's also the frequency illusion but I'm discounting it because hauntology of the 90's been slowly building for around the last 10 years
I hate to say it like this, but people are cashing in on nostalgia.
This isn't a new thing. Pretty sure this happens every decade.
The 90s internet would be great. Close to no tracking. Or wait: animated gifs, blinking fonts and web rings... Hmm. Maybe not.
Web rings would be far better than internet searching now. Give me back HotBot and Altavista (which I know are buried under Google's evil now). Hell, give me the OG Google.