Don’t want to date myself, but finding new sites and communities used to be fun.
Are there any cool sites anymore? Besides this one, of course?
Na I get what you mean. The novelty of the internet is pretty warn thin at this point. Used to be things to tinker with, but APIs worth their time are dried up because of AI. That Web2 promise of open data to build cool things with is gone.
Small projects get quickly overrun with attention that it can cripple them or they instantly become shit with ads and paywalls.
You’re not hanging out in WoW barons chat anymore because that game has jumped 100 sharks at this point. You used to get into a Wailing Caverns run for 4 hours with 5 people and end up a member of a guild with a Mumble server that you could join at any hour of the day and find someone online.
Web comics and sites would have attached PHPBB forms with their own communities. The authors are in there sometimes and its cozy and fun. But those people host gaming conventions for multi billion dollar mega corporations now and you can’t afford or don’t have the time to go to anymore. Any site opening now already has a subreddit likely run by “fans” and its a little nightmare place that gets either to little traction or the site its about doesn’t even know it exists.
You’d join an art site to post silly drawings on and consume others drawings. Get in a little drama with some furry who was just trying to be themselves online because at home they can’t. Now that furry is a highly paid independent tech contractor with a $30,000 fur suit and you both would probably vibe now, but the art site is basically dead and over run with AI nonsense.
No one is hanging out and doing weird shit on second life any more. The meta verse killed any remaining interest in virtual escapism and you realize now second life was just rife with capitalist demands and property ownership, and didn’t dare to imagen a world any differently then our own. Sure people made cool stuff but the best stuff was owned by someone else and they commissioned it from a designer, and it was all off limits to you because of private property existing in our little VR game.
You don’t put something online anymore you open a small business and run small business ads and hope your little site gets bought out so you can build a little bigger site and move up to being a medium business doing medium business ads.
Everyone has a podcast but half of them are dead feeds that haven’t been updated in over a year. If you download an episode it’ll bake in current targeted ads.
You used to check dozens of sites every day, now you close your tabs from the one website you visit regularly and instinctually open a new tab to the same site only to realize nothing has changed because its only been 5 minutes since you ran the feed dry.
You and your extended family would share photos with each other and catch up on each others lives through innocuous social feed, but those feeds cooked their brains and you don’t use those sites anymore and haven’t really talked to your extended family in a while as a result.
Everything is just incredibly siloed now, the basic niche existence was destroyed by the gigantic generalization and consolidation of those niches. Everything has a subreddit for better or for worse. Half of them are dead. Search is a wasteland of sponsored links. Discovery means less traction on the core services. Dead internet theory is at it’s highest stage yet. Nothing is new or novel. Every service is trying to be a one stop platform. All the platforms are becoming homogeneous. Its monopoly capitalism at it’s finest.
At least we have Hexbear.
The webcomics of the 2000s and early 2010s and the social circles they created were really damn interesting.
It’s such a profound disappointment.
You get yourself banned from one of those massive platforms and lose access to a shit ton of communities that don’t have an equivalent elsewhere.
Yeah that’s they other end of centralization and it blows. That’s why I really enjoy my time on Lemmy. I think people are doing it wrong with the general instances though. They should be making them around niches (politics is a niche so Hexbear and Grad are doing it right). Maybe I’m wrong. I like the idea of the ttrpg instance, or a gaming instance, or an art instance, or an instance for a podcast or a web comic, an instance for a wow guild, an instance for a region (west coast, east coast, Midwest, etc). Everyone wants to be Reddit, but the hexbear model, where admins control community creation is way more akin to the old PHPBB model.
Yeah, I do definitely like that. I mean, yes, piles of different instances means different rules everywhere and often having to have more accounts than I want to keep track of… but I did definitely pick Hexbear for my first experience with this type of website because it’s an explicitly leftist instance and the less authoritarian leftists like to scream that it’s full of tankies, and, well, that’s exactly what I’d wanted. This kind of decentralisation is… rather appealing to anarchist types both left and right, and I don’t really like them - some ancoms are perfectly fine to organise with, most you meet online are sectarian bastards not worth arguing with.
I do enjoy that no matter where I am on this site and whether the comm in question is explicitly political, I can trust no one’s gonna be angry with me for saying something too far left. So while I do like the idea of a different site for every large enough niche, I also like the idea of Hexbear or Lemmygrad or something like this as a place for all sorts of communities, political and otherwise, just, y’know, explicitly leftist. The communities where on any other site you’d have to be cautious when politics comes up, here you can just straight up call imperialism what it is and blame capitalism for the problems that capitalism causes. Which we need, when so much of the Internet, especially the Anglosphere internet, is explicitly the opposite.
And yeah, I’m so glad to have this community.
You don’t put something online anymore you open a small business and run small business
Nah. I’ve always been a shitposting fuckwad asshole. No blogs, no facebook, no twitter, just some douchebag that shows up to be snarky. Don’t get me twisted though: I love you all. Hexbear is my people.
I absolutely put things online. But given the current “political” climate, my aggressively anonymous nature is not unexpected. I have no interest in it being tracked back to me or my family, especially given that palantir exists. I’ll maintain my 80’s-style “hacker” anonymity.
Your very identity is now a weapon that will be used against you. Do with that what you will.
This makes me miss old forums and all their weird little niches.
I’m off to watch that Internet song by Bo Burnham again and feel the stinging pain of a lost internet that will never come back.
Web comics and sites would have attached PHPBB forms with their own communities. The authors are in there sometimes and its cozy and fun. But those people host gaming conventions for multi billion dollar mega corporations now and you can’t afford or don’t have the time to go to anymore.
Fellow Penny Arcade forum enjoyer?
For a very long time. I was a regular on their Ventrilo server for years. Played WoW and League for a long time with some cool dudes from that forum.
My take is that patreon and crowdfunded projects caused everyone with creative skill that used to just make shit and put it on the web for free to instead chase whatever they can get money for.
Even videogame modding has taken a turn for the worse as a result of this, with simple mods gated behind patreon or other platforms that would always have been free previously.
What used to be a maker culture of everyone doing shit and releasing shit became a grifter culture of everyone chasing various passive incomes for various projects they only initially put time and effort into that is all collected through patreon donors that have long forgotten their donation is still running.
Capital realised people were making stuff for free and it moved in to create a model where those people making stuff for free could be convinced to gate it for payments. The tinkerer culture of the internet died because of it.
Or the android store where people have the gall to make, for example, a sudoku app with fucking ads and subscriptions. You aren’t making anything new! There are 5,000 free open source implementations of sudoku on the computer, but put it on the android store and suddenly it absolutely must be monetized
I don’t completely blame creators for this now, though. Life is way more expensive than it used to be, simply to live. Not to mention there are a lot less jobs (anyone who’s been doing the job search thing on hexbear can tell you that). Food prices, rent, etc cost a lot of money and it takes a lot of time. Some people like Hakim have other real jobs, but it means they have less time to edit videos so they have to hire editors.
Capitalism has forced people to monetize their hobbies just to have either the money or time to live.
I think it really began with app stores.
The Apple and Google stores encouraged people to sell simple little pieces of software that did things like turn on your phone’s flash to use as a flashlight for 99 cents. And if someone can make a dollar for something simple like that the thinking goes, why shouldn’t you “hustle” and have a “side-gig” taking your passion projects and monetizing them for a buck or two as well. Of course it took years from the introduction of such things to the ecosystem of charging people for computer software to develop, half a decade easily but it arrived and along with it came a swarm of youtube slop and articles and the like telling people about “hacks” to make money on the side, linkedin-maniacs coming out of the woodwork to tell people they were suckers if they weren’t charging money for their tiny passion project, dangling unrealistic notions under clickbait titles like “I make $10,000/month just from my side projects”.
And that got osmotically absorbed and repeated until it became the wisdom. Along with that the industry matured. The learn2code thing came along and diluted salaries and decreased demand, suddenly you had software devs newly minted from university who weren’t getting jobs or at least not the jobs they’d been promised with the pay they wanted and so they believed these capitalist scammers when they sold them this as a way to bridge the gap between expectations and reality.
Stuff like this is why I’m not that optimistic about Linux and open source. Those flourished because there wasn’t an easy, one-click way to monetize things, because in those days software engineers pulled down decent/high 6 figure salaries and on top of that were given leave by companies to invest in themselves and make passion projects instead of working at times. That plus the early internet/computing anarcho-hacker ethos led to this flourishing of open source and free stuff and now I fear it’s on the decline for the future. Until socialism arrives at least. Once the old heads pass, you have younger generations who grew up with these things normalized, with in-app purchases normalized, with paid game loot-boxes and sparkle armor normalized, with app stores normalized, with patreons normalized.
Capitalism has taught people that everything should be monetized.
all my mods are free because i don’t want a cease and desist, but i’m not going to say what games or where i upload because opsec.
If this site goes away I am going to lose most of my connection to reality.
Agreed. Hermitude won’t be terrible but I would miss you all a lot
I’ll probably regain a lot of mine lol
there are 5 websites and most of their content is screenshots of the other 4
Ay chat check out this lib
suburbification of the internet?
I miss stumble upon. It was great for finding new shit.
That was kind of the last gasp of the old internet. It had the markings of the algo slop that came after it, but it still lead to cool websites that weren’t social media. Now everything is funneled into like 3 megaslop companies.
now we have reddit and all you find is racism
That was what I was thinking about when I made this post.
Holy shit, just found this on a reddit thread about stumble upon: https://cloudhiker.net/explore
Selected only history and this is the first thing that popped up, lmao
Why is that site even still online wtf
Websites as they existed in the 90s and 00s are no longer being created in any significant quantity. All of that creative energy still exists, but it’s being more effectively siphoned off and monetized in the various walled gardens that make up the pastiche of the Internet that currently exists.
There are in fact a lot of really, really cool places still out there, but they’ve become occluded from search engine, and you can typically only find them through direct interaction with people. So the annoying answer is that you have to just keep doing what you’re doing, and ask what’s cool.
To give a couple completely random examples of really cool sites with vibrant communities and tons of content that I’ve only just discovered in the past couple of years:
CRT Database has tons of technical information about CRT TVs, and is a resources that I’ve found essential for retro gaming.
18xx.games is a website for playing stock trading railroad board games online.
Standard Ebooks has nice electronic versions of a lot of public domain classics. This is where I go on January 1st to pick out some new public domain stuff from the 1920s to read for that year.
I think in the 90s and 00s it was easier to find this kind of stuff.
I’ll check those out! Thanks!
Standard Ebooks is really cool! I wasn’t aware of them until now. I’m going to look at their tools and see if I can’t contribute something to their collection.
Basically all community building has moved on to discord. If you wanna talk crap in chatroom at all hours of the day like IRC was still ubiquitous, that’s your best bet. If you really liked PHPbb forums I’ve got nothing for you.
I despise having to troubleshoot a niche thing and the community is only on discord. I want a forum that I can search through, not 50 trillion pages of irrelevant drama with the fix nested in a thread and a quote chain that has gone on for 3 months.
Moving away from forums into discord servers was a huge mistake. The chatroom format is such a mess for anything other than chatting.
Yeah that’s a huge issue that thankfully I’ve avoided so far. Discord fucking sucks and I hate it bring back Mumble and Ventrilo.
Maybe its just nostalgia, but I do miss old-style BBSes
this place is basically an old school phpbb board even if the format is the reddit format. the size and activeness of the community is pretty reminiscent of old phpbb forums though.
I think that’s why I like it here. I came up on Totse when I was young. Not a good place, mind you. But it was kind of niche and weird and fun. Hexbear reminds me of that, but with some direction and responsibility.
There’s less. Especially forum type stuff. I can list a few interesting sites though.
https://cs.rin.ru/ - Site for peg legged discussions about games basically.
https://www.shiey.com/videos - guy who does like urbex and stuff who made his own site because youtube kept taking his videos down. Also has a blog on there.
Substacks too. This is more of a category. A lot of independent reporters have their own substack pages where they’ll post articles.
Matrix is another one. It’s like a fediverse chat alternative. Similar to discord but structured like lemmy.
https://archiveofourown.org/ - website for community made written works. Fan fictions, or original stuff. Has a pretty good search function so you can find anything that interests you, and has some discussion methods like comments on works. Altho most of that will probably be done on secondary sites.
Another category is Linux forums. Probably one of the largest still existing types of forums. Places where people go to discuss issues with their Linux distros, and share fixes. Aswell as software development in general for Linux.
One thing i like to do too is explore the Chinese internet. Places like BilliBilli, QQ, Weibo. It’s similar, but also different to the big sites in the west, and can be fun to explore.
Also while its not done as much, and traffic to them is lower now hosting your own small site is easier than it’s ever been. So if theres a site you’d like to see you could always make it yourself. You can rent cloud hosting, or use an old pc or something. Then all you need is a few like minded people to get on there with you.
Newgrounds still exists. It’s far from its heyday but there’s still new games and animations being made over there.
to add to what other commenters have said, so many sites that used to regularly post funny or informative articles have fired most of the long-time employees and replaced them with independent contractors (if they haven’t replaced them with ai, or just gone out of business entirely).
There’s lots of free roguelikes and other ASCII graphics games that I like to play. 🤷♀️
Also, fanfiction (and amateur publishing in general)
What are the rogue likes you enjoy?
Personally Brogue is my go to free roguelike, otherwise I play the English translation of Shiren the Wanderer through a PSP emulator on my phone.
Oooo I should put Shiren the Wanderer on my Vita. Thanks for the recco!
For sure! It’s the best I’ve played in the series. I just beat the DS version of the original a couple months ago and decided to reward myself with the PSP version. It takes everything good about the original and cranks it up to 11. Enjoy ;)
My favorite traditional roguelike is definitely Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup - you can play it from your browser!
Less traditional, but actually my favourite overall, would be Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead - I say less traditional because it’s more of a crafting game with base building elements than one where your goal is to find loot (although you can play it as a loot-finding game too - it’s very flexible!). This one has to be downloaded.
And of course Dwarf Fortress isn’t a roguelike at all, but I like playing with ASCII graphics so Honorable Mention.
They all have forums too.
This guy is kind of annoying and I don’t agree with everything here, but I do think about this article a lot these days.
In the future—not the distant future, but ten years, five—people will remember the internet as a brief dumb enthusiasm, like phrenology or the dirigible. They might still use computer networks to send an email or manage their bank accounts, but those networks will not be where culture or politics happens. The idea of spending all day online will seem as ridiculous as sitting down in front of a nice fire to read the phone book.
I hope his prediction becomes true because I can’t imagine that everyone will abandon the net - rather, the net will retvrn to what it once was, nerds linking up to talk about niche bullshit while mainstream culture happens elsewhere.
well there’s neocities.org for starters
I looked through my bookmarks and some cool sites that I found are the following:
- Music:
- https://vgmdb.net/
- https://tlmc.pf-n.co/tlmc
- https://everynoise.com/engenremap.html
- https://www.whosampled.com/
- https://chiptune.app/
- Computers:
- https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Main_page
- https://learnxinyminutes.com/
- https://unsplash.com/t/wallpapers
- https://terminal.sexy/
- Random fun things:
I’m not browsing the arch wiki for fun 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭
You need to let the autism consume you.
For example, did you know you can use pulseaudio to create an audio input via Bluetooth?
Or do you want to know what Bootloader can do what?
