I love the early Internet’s heritage

[Mæstro]

I grew up with the best of the 2000s Internet. I have still got my plush Aisha twenty years later. Most of my interests since early childhood have been academic; Tim and Moby were among my earliest teachers. Windows 2000 was my first OS, and I generally used XP until 2010 and again for a time in 2012 before moving to Windows 7. I could witness in real time as the Web began to decay into the brew of flat design it now is. Neither I nor it took to each other; it instantly looked ugly to me. I grew up in a remote place, where we had gone without internet at all for a time in 2009–10 and had kept dial-up until 2016; websites which assumed that one could download megabytes of script were nightmarish to use. (Even now, I prefer to watch Invidious films in 240p and anime in 360p.) When smartphones abandoned physical keyboards and the ability to use landscape mode, I rejected them as too awkward. At present, I do not even use a mobile phone at all, but have used the Kyocera DuraXV in the US and Nokia 105 in Germany to good results before. When I tried using Windows 10 for the first time, in 2016 after discovering mobile tethering, and it outright ignored the fact that my connexion was metered in running automatic updates, I returned at once to my old computer, made in late 2012 and one of the last to release with Windows 7. I am still using that computer now to write this, having installed Linux on it in 2020. I never took to SNS, and over the late 2010s, I abandoned sites like YouTube and any form of DRM. Absolutely none of my online experience is algorithmically driven; I keep browsing like the good, old days.

Much of my online attention goes to preserving what I love from my childhood. I am somewhat active on the Pale Moon forum and have identified bugs in that browser before; my tastes in UI design have brought me to hold it dear. Saved on my hard drive are hundreds of archived BrainPOP reels from the 2000s which are, to my knowledge, no longer available online even through the Internet Archive, as well as files preserved from other childhood websites just before their announced closures. I think that this community will be a good place to discover more remnants of the first half of the Web’s existence as well as to plan alternatives to assure those in my personal life who would rather I get a smartphone. Thank you for having me here!