a thing i have found younger researchers of the late 90s internet don't really appreciate is the number of ephemeral websites made by literal children.
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@spacehobo @rose_alibi stop describing me, it’s creeping me out. You didn’t get the area code right but everything else was spot on.
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a thing i have found younger researchers of the late 90s internet don't really appreciate is the number of ephemeral websites made by literal children. i was 12/13/14 making websites on freehosts for fun and i knew easily a dozen other people my age doing the same. the person who hosted the forum i was part of in high school started it at 15 on a server under his bed. there was no concept of age verification. if you had an internet connection and lax parental supervision you were good to go.
(this post is not about the utterly inane age verification laws nor is it about porn. it is about the very often ignored contributions of young people to culture.)
@rose_alibi my friends and I made an Angelfire page about our little league baseball team with absolutely zero parental approval, assistance, or knowledge. It was glorious.
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@spacehobo @rose_alibi stop describing me, it’s creeping me out. You didn’t get the area code right but everything else was spot on.
@linux_mclinuxface @spacehobo @rose_alibi you got the country code wrong, but that's me.
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a thing i have found younger researchers of the late 90s internet don't really appreciate is the number of ephemeral websites made by literal children. i was 12/13/14 making websites on freehosts for fun and i knew easily a dozen other people my age doing the same. the person who hosted the forum i was part of in high school started it at 15 on a server under his bed. there was no concept of age verification. if you had an internet connection and lax parental supervision you were good to go.
(this post is not about the utterly inane age verification laws nor is it about porn. it is about the very often ignored contributions of young people to culture.)
@rose_alibi +9001%
With "Age Verification" we'd neither see Reddit nor Markdown, cuz Aaron Swartz started these in his teens!
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a thing i have found younger researchers of the late 90s internet don't really appreciate is the number of ephemeral websites made by literal children. i was 12/13/14 making websites on freehosts for fun and i knew easily a dozen other people my age doing the same. the person who hosted the forum i was part of in high school started it at 15 on a server under his bed. there was no concept of age verification. if you had an internet connection and lax parental supervision you were good to go.
(this post is not about the utterly inane age verification laws nor is it about porn. it is about the very often ignored contributions of young people to culture.)
@rose_alibi true true…
I grew up in the Internet!
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even researchers my own age who were either not prolifically online or who had better supervised childhoods seem to not comprehend this part of the history. i rarely see mention of the ways children used the web that aren't about sites aimed at and made for children. we were not all using those sites...
@rose_alibi I had a Geocities and tripod page. Almost everyone in my class had this. Almost everyone tried customizing it. The bare minimum was finding cool glitter GIFs to put on there.
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@rose_alibi I had a Geocities and tripod page. Almost everyone in my class had this. Almost everyone tried customizing it. The bare minimum was finding cool glitter GIFs to put on there.
@rose_alibi in 2002, we went on the final School Trip before graduating ("Studienfahrt"), we had a custom website set up for that for photo sharing and it included a forum (as you do) and a shoutbox (as you do).
I graduated in 2003, and we had a website in place for that, too. I ran that for 20 more years until I discontinued the domain in 2023. It had a shoutbox, profiles, forums (of course), polls. It was handwritten PHP4, but all classes before and after ours had a website.
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@rose_alibi in 2002, we went on the final School Trip before graduating ("Studienfahrt"), we had a custom website set up for that for photo sharing and it included a forum (as you do) and a shoutbox (as you do).
I graduated in 2003, and we had a website in place for that, too. I ran that for 20 more years until I discontinued the domain in 2023. It had a shoutbox, profiles, forums (of course), polls. It was handwritten PHP4, but all classes before and after ours had a website.
@rose_alibi in the study programme I took up, EVERY class had their own domain (usually a fun spin on the study program's name) and they were all running something like phpBB themselves.
This died, when facebook communities basically solved that need in a one-size-fits-all way. It never came back. It was later supplanted by Discord guilds/servers and then WhatsApp groupchats. I think for a while Skype was also in there somewhere.
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Here's a website started by a teenager in the 90's that's still around, because no one has bothered to delete it. His parents didn't mind, though.
@Anne_Delong @rose_alibi this is amazing! Thanks for sharing
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a thing i have found younger researchers of the late 90s internet don't really appreciate is the number of ephemeral websites made by literal children. i was 12/13/14 making websites on freehosts for fun and i knew easily a dozen other people my age doing the same. the person who hosted the forum i was part of in high school started it at 15 on a server under his bed. there was no concept of age verification. if you had an internet connection and lax parental supervision you were good to go.
(this post is not about the utterly inane age verification laws nor is it about porn. it is about the very often ignored contributions of young people to culture.)
@rose_alibi same
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@rose_alibi lissaexplains.com. Where a lot of us went to learn how to code once we made it past the WYSIWYG editors.
@moxie @rose_alibi in germany, it's traditional to learn this with SelfHTML https://wiki.selfhtml.org/wiki/HTML - EVERYONE used to use it, and it's still a solid way to get started (if you speak german).
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a thing i have found younger researchers of the late 90s internet don't really appreciate is the number of ephemeral websites made by literal children. i was 12/13/14 making websites on freehosts for fun and i knew easily a dozen other people my age doing the same. the person who hosted the forum i was part of in high school started it at 15 on a server under his bed. there was no concept of age verification. if you had an internet connection and lax parental supervision you were good to go.
(this post is not about the utterly inane age verification laws nor is it about porn. it is about the very often ignored contributions of young people to culture.)
@rose_alibi this is probably overlooked, yeah, though i do wonder about the scope of it. i uploaded my first website when i was 11 and was hosting a web forum for online friends when i was 15/16. but i was very much the outlier in having an online existence compared to my peers. i have often had the sense that the level of ambient online friendships and general *pervasiveness* of online social interactions for tweens and teens that is largely known today didn’t really take off until the mid-00s.
so i tend to think that running web forums and the like was the exception rather than the rule, at least into the early 00s. kids might put up static geocities and angelfire and tripod sites since they were easy. but it was much harder to get access to resources to let you run dynamic ones (though there were plenty of services that would host forums/guestbooks/etc. on your behalf!)
after all, domain names still cost $99 a year as late as 1999! -
a thing i have found younger researchers of the late 90s internet don't really appreciate is the number of ephemeral websites made by literal children. i was 12/13/14 making websites on freehosts for fun and i knew easily a dozen other people my age doing the same. the person who hosted the forum i was part of in high school started it at 15 on a server under his bed. there was no concept of age verification. if you had an internet connection and lax parental supervision you were good to go.
(this post is not about the utterly inane age verification laws nor is it about porn. it is about the very often ignored contributions of young people to culture.)
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@rose_alibi I had a Geocities and tripod page. Almost everyone in my class had this. Almost everyone tried customizing it. The bare minimum was finding cool glitter GIFs to put on there.
@claudius @rose_alibi I owe so much of my childhood love of the web to GeoCities, Tripod, Angelfire, and the folks who ran the .tk domain registry.
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a thing i have found younger researchers of the late 90s internet don't really appreciate is the number of ephemeral websites made by literal children. i was 12/13/14 making websites on freehosts for fun and i knew easily a dozen other people my age doing the same. the person who hosted the forum i was part of in high school started it at 15 on a server under his bed. there was no concept of age verification. if you had an internet connection and lax parental supervision you were good to go.
(this post is not about the utterly inane age verification laws nor is it about porn. it is about the very often ignored contributions of young people to culture.)
@rose_alibi @Pepijn has a number of insane stories on this topic.
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a thing i have found younger researchers of the late 90s internet don't really appreciate is the number of ephemeral websites made by literal children. i was 12/13/14 making websites on freehosts for fun and i knew easily a dozen other people my age doing the same. the person who hosted the forum i was part of in high school started it at 15 on a server under his bed. there was no concept of age verification. if you had an internet connection and lax parental supervision you were good to go.
(this post is not about the utterly inane age verification laws nor is it about porn. it is about the very often ignored contributions of young people to culture.)
@rose_alibi I started using BBS in 89, and "the Internet" in 92-93ish. I went "online online" at home in the summer of 1994 (via a 33.6kbit/s permanent connection ...).
I was born in 78.
Never in my life have I used a "kid site" or even a teen one (unless the LGBT teen chat on IRC counts
).It's wild to me this period is now a research target. Wasn't that just yesterday‽
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a thing i have found younger researchers of the late 90s internet don't really appreciate is the number of ephemeral websites made by literal children. i was 12/13/14 making websites on freehosts for fun and i knew easily a dozen other people my age doing the same. the person who hosted the forum i was part of in high school started it at 15 on a server under his bed. there was no concept of age verification. if you had an internet connection and lax parental supervision you were good to go.
(this post is not about the utterly inane age verification laws nor is it about porn. it is about the very often ignored contributions of young people to culture.)
@rose_alibi Every branch of history is like this. Children get written out. The evidence that they might have left gets destroyed because it's "insignificant". We know more about livestock for much of history, than we do about human children, because livestock were so much more important to adult affairs.
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@rose_alibi @Pepijn has a number of insane stories on this topic.
Maybe not super insane but this one comes to mind https://mastodon.online/@Pepijn/115963117610569220
It does make you wonder how many of these teens kinda kept the data but as adults are human enough to keep it private.
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a thing i have found younger researchers of the late 90s internet don't really appreciate is the number of ephemeral websites made by literal children. i was 12/13/14 making websites on freehosts for fun and i knew easily a dozen other people my age doing the same. the person who hosted the forum i was part of in high school started it at 15 on a server under his bed. there was no concept of age verification. if you had an internet connection and lax parental supervision you were good to go.
(this post is not about the utterly inane age verification laws nor is it about porn. it is about the very often ignored contributions of young people to culture.)
@rose_alibi@post.lurk.org I was 16/17 when I learnt to write code. I made mods for an online game.
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a thing i have found younger researchers of the late 90s internet don't really appreciate is the number of ephemeral websites made by literal children. i was 12/13/14 making websites on freehosts for fun and i knew easily a dozen other people my age doing the same. the person who hosted the forum i was part of in high school started it at 15 on a server under his bed. there was no concept of age verification. if you had an internet connection and lax parental supervision you were good to go.
(this post is not about the utterly inane age verification laws nor is it about porn. it is about the very often ignored contributions of young people to culture.)
http://rotteneggs.com was my go to forum. I remember reading a bunch of urban exploration posts there and posting a shit tutorial about how to make a bow.
Then I remember the forum drama when the person who owned it stopped moderating and some group split off to another one but by that point I was no longer really that active
