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Nineties kids had a good reason to be excited about the internet's promise of disintermediation: the gatekeepers who controlled our access to culture, politics, and opportunity were crooked as hell, and besides, they *sucked*.

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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2024/11/07/usu

1/

" Lots of these were either deeply objectionable or really stupid, or both, but there was also so much cool stuff on the old, good internet."
I recall those days. Useful sites with easy-to-find information abounded. Search engines had like a hundred boolean operator choices for highly targeted search results. There were many wingnuts--and you know what? Many of those wingnuts were amicable and entertaining. The horde of modern wingnuts are brittle, fragile, highly toxic, vindictive, vicious, vengeful, and vile. Even the slightest interaction with them is at a minimum dangerous for your emotional well-being. Meanwhile the measured and well-thought speech is shadow banned or blocked by the wingnuts who now seem to run the show on behalf of their crony capitalist benefactors--while claiming to fight against 'capitalism' or 'fascism' or whatever 'ism' label is needful to gift wrap their aggression. And the dominant search engines ensure users can only find wingnut-run playground sandboxes--and they charge premium for a paper-thin bucket and wobbly plastic shovel.

@lamp @pluralistic Every time I have to look something up about bike repair and Sheldon's website is outliving him, it gives me hope. Like visiting an ancient monastic library.

@stevenray @lamp @pluralistic Thrills me to no end that 1) it still exists, and 2) it's being maintained

@madopal @lamp @pluralistic I'd die if you told it was maintained via Windows 95 on a Pentium with 16 megs of RAM. 😂

@madopal @lamp @pluralistic such an amazing resource. Built a bicycle from parts with information mainly from this site in 2010.

@madopal @lamp @pluralistic

The new trend for small sites, hobbyists, portfolios, and similar is “site generators” where all the HTML is prepared on the user’s machine and uploaded to a server. It harder than site builders, but doesn’t require databases like Wordpress.

I use #hugo but there’s others like Jekyll and readthedocs. It’s a great system for documentation or fun, opinionated mini sites.

Sorry for the rant if you’re a dev for Hugo or similar. Just enthusiastic for a new thing.

@MacBalance @madopal @lamp @pluralistic

Welcome to the Club ! Enjoy #hugo frictionless publlishing... at a blink of an eye

@pluralistic@mamot.fr

It would likely be a YouTube ad mentioning how bicycle knowledge will improve your stamina and get you a whole harem of millionaire lovers from your improved mojo, while saving the world from Armageddon and giving you Jesus points for the afterlife, for only $29.95 while supplies last.