Short reminisce on the old web

I grew up in the advent of the world wide web. As a teenager I spent more time online than any of my friends. The real world just wasn't as accessible and you had to deal with grown ups who had the odd obsession with controlling everything around them. The internet was a weird and magical place full of pirates and demons. I would get online after everyone had gone to be and spend hours browsing the web, trying to find a games I wanted to play or communities that seemed interesting.

So much of my interested stemmed from things I was able to find online. When I stumbled upon a pirated version of Adobe Photoshop I started making all kinds of things—all of them lost to time. I remember doing one of my art projects for school using transparent paper which I had printed on using text layouts I designed in Photoshop. There was a CD I burnt of home recordings where the album cover and CD sticker were made in a "cracked" version of Photoshop.

I felt like I could find anything online. And then somewhere between then and now, things have shifted. ISPs have cracked down on copyright laws which has killed off or buried a vast majority of the content I was consuming in high school. Geocities, which was a source of a lot of links to other things, has shut down. While there is a replacement (https://neocities.org/), I feel like people are hesitant to even consider putting things online using someone else's service/servers.

Anyway, this whole gemini protocol thing feels similar to the old internet in a way that is maybe more healthy.

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Published 2024-05-21