Gopher , Gemini a few other protocols exist use them

We can. Individual sites still exists. Simpler pages still exist. In some way, wikipedia is a large project that's mostly "old school" (despite many attempts to change that). Old communication tools still work, mail can still be done with ease by small or even individual providers. Forums are still a thing in some communities. RSS to get informations about many sites in one place still exists and never stopped existing (it's surprising how many recent websites still implement it). Some people still use IRC and newsgroups on a daily basis.

I'd even argue that google search, the old, simple, easy one, still exist. Look up udm14, set this in your browser, and your done. And contrary to the apparently largely accepted trend, this one still gives great results.

Firefox, despite recent attempts (that will probably keep coming) can still be trimmed to be a basic browser for the most part. Large surface to open an HTML page, bookmarks, tabs on top (fancy), and nothing else in the way. I don't know how long this will persist, but it's still possible.

There are many things that are still around, the presence of huge behemoths in the front row doesn't change that. The only difference is that using the web in this manner requires a bit of involvement and a bit of work. When it was the only way to do things, people got involved and spent effort to do so. Nowadays, with large services providing one click stop to seemingly everything, most people won't put up the effort to look somewhere else. And they don't care about the consequences of this centralization on privacy, bias, censorship, etc.

But a lot of the old web is still available. Heck, even old reddit is still around (although the content itself is still reddit).

And it is a simpler life. Taking back control of our digital activities requires some minor involvement, but not being crushed by the endless content and notification machine is real nice in this overstressed world.

Because people don't want it compared to the current Internet.

There is nothing stopping people from creating the Internet of old.

Except we do, in so many ways. I think one simple example is RSS.

Like fuck all the proprietary junk and versioning, and just have a bare bones HTML ASCII extranet designed to be simple and without any bugs to patch? Obviously a naive question.

There are many ways to get that. There is the Gemini protocol, of which is plaintext, and there is also I2P, of which is a dark net (gee!) that feels somewhat like the old internet (at least, that's what some oldies in the forums say). A way to browse through there without installing a client would be via looking at here.

https://justfuckingusehtml.com/

Developers are dumb and/or burned out by leadership and can't be arsed to use the right tool for the right job. New blog? React.j. Ecommerce? React.js. Wiki? React.js. A fucking landing page reading "Coming Soon!"? Believe it or not, React.js. And unless provided by whatever metaframework they're using this week, forget about appropriately-sized images and videos. You will render a 2000x3000 pixel PNG of the letter A on your 720p smartphone, and you will like it.

I run a website where my community and I all contribute to a free shared database that houses settings for machines we can use. I don't know how I'd really do that without managing every single submission manually. I think that like all things there's a way to use js responsibly.

Market demand. A "boring" static website isn't going to attract VC funding and management approval.

I have one browser profile with js disabled and have been slowly migrating to it. It's soooo fast. Barring any issues with the website, each click-and-render is waaay faster than any SPA, back button is instantaneous.

The why: because a lot of people have been conned into "needing" sites that can fry the client's CPU, to the point where the con became the norm.

Another why: it's easier to woo bosses/higher ups/clients when you show them pretty visuals. Doesn't matter that the visuals are a fucking atrocity of spaghetti code, now they DEMAND pretty everything everywhere, fuck being practical or lightweight

https://marginalia-search.com/

“The need for discovery

Nothing you do to try to make the web a better place matters if nobody can find what you did. There are a lot of precious websites out there that deserve an audience, but instead are languishing in obscurity.

This makes alternative discovery mechanisms an urgent priority of the free and independent web, both document search as well as blog and RSS-feed discovery.”

⚜︎ arscyni.cc: modernity ∝ nature.

I've been around since the early 1980s on BBSs. I think what OP is describing is gopher:// links which were common in the early 1990s. I recall getting news and music tablature that way, but like others said it was boring and there wasn't much else.

To me, 1996 to 2005 was the peak of the Internet experience, especially in the early 2000s when content was increasing. Big business was still oblivious about it, and little forums were able to truly thrive on their own without being on a billion dollar platform.

Web 2.0 was when it all went to shit. I remember the look when it was happening... every website went to white webpages, tons of white space, big-ass sans serif fonts, rounded buttons, and very little actual content, just minimalist screens everywhere. Every website was doing it. I knew at the time that this was symbolic of the vacuousness of the coming Internet.

I've been saying the same thing. I think you should check out Gopher and neocities.

You can get a blacklist of all the sites you hate off gitthub and put it in ublock. They have a massive ai and Javascript list I think.

I agree. Early 2000s was peak internet before corporate enshit. But you dont need to live in their world. You need webrings and rss.

For all y'all talking about the old private internet, it's having a bit of a renaissance. Neocities is on of the big ones, but lots of people are straight up selfhosting them too. It's not like you actually need anything more than a phone to run a static website for the tens of visitors you might get each month.

Here's an example of one. Check the post dates. And the webrings. And the Glitter. And the, well, you get the point.

Because people who make websites want to get paid for them, payment is based on showing ads, ad companies want to maximize tracking via javascript, and if the only javascript is for ad bullshit it's easy to block it so they force the content to load via javascript too.

It's systemically fucked up in a way that goes beyond just the technology itself.

It wasn't better. Static pages are just boring, you read it one time and then that's it. Not enough people can write plain HTML so it would matter.

The internet today with Lemmy, Mastodon, etc. is way closer to what Tim Berners-Lee imagined that everyone would be a publisher, not only consumer.

Neocities encourages static 90's style webpages.

Uhm, Gemini web?

https://512kb.club/

The 512KB Club is a collection of performance-focused web pages from across the Internet. To qualify your website must satisfy both of the following requirements:

1. It must be an actual site that contains a reasonable amount of information, not just a couple of links on a page (more info here).
2. Your total UNCOMPRESSED web resources must not exceed 512KB.

https://geminiprotocol.net/ (The site's certificate has expired. I really hope they fix it.)

Gemini is a group of technologies similar to the ones that lie behind your familiar web browser. Using Gemini, you can explore an online collection of written documents which can link to other written documents. The main difference is that Gemini approaches this task with a strong philosophy of "keep it simple" and "less is enough".

Gemini might be of interest to you if you:

• Are sick and tired of nagging newsletter subscription pop-ups, obnoxious adverts, autoplaying videos that chase you as you scroll and other misfeatures of the modern web

You can. What makes you think you can't?

The thing is that there's no demand, not least because there's no direct interaction between users. People yell bloody murder if a game doesn't have some sort of multiplayer component and static content is single player internet.

https://justfuckingusehtml.com/

I would just like to add my favorite way to surf the old web is to go to https://wiby.me/ and click "surprise me..." and then either keep doing that or scour their link sections for more similar sites.

You can open websites in lynx.

Everything2.com

feels like the old 'net.

Tons of content.

I miss webrings. Especially for mods.
Nexus is great, but i remember when darkone started it with Morrowind mods.

We can have static HTML websites, but that basically limits you to sharing static information (which, by the way, still have "bugs" in the form of typos). There's already lots of great resources for that. Wikipedia, personal blogs, books (physical and electronic). That's not usually what we're on the internet for though. We're here for interactivity. We want to connect with other people (e.g. Lemmy), and we want tools to help us with various problems we have (e.g. any portable software that just needs a browser to run). Avoiding JS would hinder that goal. If you just want to read, go to your local library, take out a book, and start reading. Or get an e-reader and download some e-books.

You also point out the problem of online privacy. While JS does empower the tracking, it also does way more than that. The solution shouldn't be to throw out the baby with the bath water.

lemmy isn't a static vintage web, and that's a good thing, i guess.

because capitalism

Fine with that. My favourite blog was like that.