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.
-
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.
-
@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.
-
@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.
-
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
-
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
-
@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).
-
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.)
-
@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.
-
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.
-
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‽
-
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.
-
@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.
-
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.
-
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
-
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 At 14 or 15 I was on a voice chat website for blind people talking with mainly blind adults from quite a few countries. I didn't know any other blind people where I lived, and it felt like I was the only one.
-
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 IIRC I had two Geocities cites: the first was a game fanpage (which used frames!) and the second was to be my personal site. I'm pretty sure the first isn't in Reocities and I've forgotten the URL of the second, and I've had a few data loss incidents over the years, so those sites may be entirely lost. (I still don't have a *personal* site.)
I vaguely remember other people's sites too, maybe linked from Yahoo? One had someone's fanfiction about the game (which seems to no longer be online), which I *think* is what inspired me to start writing my own. Also partially(?) lost to those data loss incidents.
Another story from that time period: I was looking for an email host (I can't remember why the free hosts were insufficient) and someone just ... offered to create me an account on their company server. It seems a little surprising for the time, but I *really* can't imagine it happening today. (The account eventually disappeared a few years later without a word. )
-
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 knew young blind people who were coding and moderating IRC servers back in the day, it was mad, but they did it. and we respected the rules too. if a 15 year old kid who'd published their rules of IRC said you'd bust them, that was it. you respected that.
-
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 was 16 when I got connected in the 1980s. I ran much of the UUCP network in my area. In the 1990s, when I was in my 20s, I ran the first web servers in the city. I certainly offered space to anyone (for free), and I would never have thought to ask or care about anyone's age.
-
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 "it is about the very ofter ignored contributions of young people to culture"
I love you for that one. Damn me if I ain't on the front seat of telling eveyone I know every few days that "young people" has the word "people" in it and it entails everything of what any other "people" are and do.
