The old web is fascinating. I remember the olden days when e-mail and free web hosting were measured in megabytes rather than gigabytes1. I remember how my family didn’t have an Internet connection of our own. The way I would update my website back then was by making changes to the website on the family computer and saving them to a floppy disk. I would then take them to the nearest library. Sometimes, my parents would give me a ride to the library, but other times, I walked. Yes, in Houston summer heat, I would walk an hour to the library and walk an hour back. Bear in mind, I was eleven at that time.
Websites back then were so small. When Geocities launched, the limit for free users was 2MB. In 2005, that limit was 15MB. Comparatively speaking, all three of my websites on NearlyFreeSpeech.net are currently taking up 1545.96 MiB. I’d have to spread them across roughly 1,100 floppies to get them all uploaded now. Ooof. Mercifully, AOL was also spamming people’s physical mailboxes with free disks across America. For a brief period, some of those disks were floppies that could be made writable once again.
But that’s why you could fit the entire Geocities archive on a 1TB hard drive and download it via Bittorrent.2 That’s why the Archive Team’s rescue of Geocities was even possible. It took months and hundreds of volunteers’ machines, but the finished dataset was startlingly small – because every page in it was tiny. Millions of homesteads, and the whole thing fit on a hard drive. Even thinking about the math, that is still incredible. Back then, my IDE was Notepad on Windows 95. Hell, even writing that now makes me feel particularly spoiled: how dare I hold up my jump to Linux on not finding the right IDE when I wrote HTML on fucking Notepad! Notepad!
But all of that is not why the old web is fascinating.
Okay, so why is the Old Web fascinating?
For me, it is certainly beyond the pixellated (oftentimes unintentional) 90s aesthetic. Don’t get me wrong, that appeals to me too, but for me, it’s more about values. The observation by Tentcities is that the old web was more about self-expression than commerce. In fact, the first (and possibly only) commercial-focused domain name on the list of most linked domain names was amazon.com. Amazon was at #6, beat out by links to the NIH’s PubMed, Wikipedia, Monografias (a Spanish academic repository), and Angelfire. The most-linked domain name in the Geocities archive was other pages on Geocities itself.
The joy of creativity
The old web was a web where any nutjob could create a website on Geocities, Angelfire, Tripod, or any number of free web hosts. And the only limits were those of your imagination, the storage space, and how good your <table> game was. Web design in that era was both tedious and fun. It promised a joy of creativity that doesn’t require me to think about AI slop or hate speech or anything like that. I didn’t hear about Homestar Runner from an algorithm, I heard about it at school from someone else.
Browsing was an option too
But there’s also a different attitude towards the Internet back then. The Internet wasn’t just searchable, it was browsable too. There were search engines, sure, like Lycos and AltaVista and Yahoo and yes, eventually Google. But there were also directories like Yahoo Directory (which Yahoo also killed) and Dmoz. There were printed books full of lists of websites that you could type the (often-times long) addresses into and go to. This was a time before filter bubbles and algorithms directing us to more of the same.
It felt more optional
But also, the old web demanded less of our attention. We could choose to give it more, and I was one of those who did, but it was a web before push notifications. Where it wasn’t unreasonable to wait days, hell even weeks, before getting a response to correspondence. Yes, even in the days of e-mail.
So, what can we do?
The tragedy of the Old Web is to see it as a museum rather than a living tradition we can exercise now.
There are some people who love the aesthetic of the Old Web and I don’t begrudge them that. Hell, Veronica Explains designed the front-facing version of the Stop Bits’ website in HTML that could be loaded in Netscape 3.0 and the code she uses to generate it is 11ty. It’s certainly a more novel approach than hand coding a crap ton of HTML files individually. Cybersoda has gone whole hog on the old web aesthetic, using <div> tags instead of <table>s3.
If you want more inspiration, people are even reviving web rings. Web rings were a way to connect related websites. We can study how Geocities sites were connected to each other through these web rings. We can also build new ones ourselves. Examples of this include the Author Ring. Neocities is the place hosting a lot of static old web-style sites. Put yourself on it.
A museum and a living tradition
It need not be either/or. There is value in looking at the old web. I’m not shitting on archives like Oocities, nor am I shitting on retrospectives on the Geocities era. But, we can create new things based on the same ideas. The same aesthetic. We can publish independently again. The old web may be the Web we lost, but we can take it back.
I’d like to invite you to a web that is more about connection and self-expression than just selling you crap.
One final coda
Originally, this was supposed to be one post called “On WordPress”. I am still working on it but I’ve learned something… namely, if I am writing a post and I’m at the point where I’m that deep in subheadings, it’s time to seriously re-consider whether this can only be one post. Maybe I’ll write a post on that one day.
Fucking Notepad!
- No, terabytes were not even part of the conversation [↩]
- Okay, it’s likely not the entire archive of Geocities. There are undoubtedly parts of Geocities that didn’t survive the archive. I know my own Geocities site was a casualty. [↩]
- No, this is not me being elitist, designing using
<table>s was legitimately a bitch and that’s one of those things I do not miss about the old web. I wouldn’t do it now either. [↩]