Anyone wanna share interesting things?

[malymin]

I kind of miss how easy it was to see people talking about media, technology, history, etc that I'd never heard about before on Cohost... despite Cohost having some structural similarities to Tumblr, I just don't get that experience there.

I'm pretty bummed out by recent events (to put it mildly), and I imagine a lot of other people here are too. Anyone wanna share stuff that brings them joy, or at the very least positive stimulation? Books you're reading, hobbies you've gotten into, etc.

I had been reading Who Owns this Sentence by David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu, which is very good, but had to take a break because it was just making me depressed thinking about how we're going to get out of the enclosure of the cultural commons on top of... everything else. I've had a bit of fun with a short free fangame RPG on Itch.io, made by a user going by Atena. And I'd like to share an old middle-school favorite website, "Dog Coat Colour Genetics" by an artist named Jess, as well as the even bigger and older "MessyBeast" website run by Sarah Hartwell, which is an especially thorough as a resource on cat color genetics, but has many other interesting alleyways to explore.

Comments

[onlyknownothing]

The Internet (and especially the early Internet) is ephemeral. Entire sites just vanished back then. The whole thing about "if it's on the Internet, it's forever" is really only applicable to shit like the Streisand Effect where there is some group or cadre interested in preserving the information. Some random hobby page is entirely likely to randomly disappear and take content with it for exactly this sort of reason. The creator loses interest, or can't afford hosting, or whatever... and it's gone.

That's not a bad thing, honestly. It just causes dissonance because people are used to the Internet being some sort of permanent space outside of active efforts to scrub something - and oftentimes (as seen in that sentiment I mentioned above) it's expected that some things might still survive even that. That's only really been the case recently, however, as huge centralized social media sites have built the sort of system to preserve the things posted on them due to that content being the reason for anybody to use the thing. Back in the old web, where everybody had their own files hosted on their own sites for their own use - or were forced to use hosting services like Photobucket? Things vanished with the server or the service.

Truth is, change was kind of one of the key elements of the "Web 1.0" period. Sites popped into and out of existence all the time, and as such there was an explorational element to it all. Some site you used to use to find or do a certain thing stopped existing, so you went onto forums and talked about how cool it was and asked if anybody knew any other site that did something similar. Heck, that's what these grand website masterlist directories were for - a way to share the cool new things you found with others so they could experience them too before they disappeared. That's also part of what prompted so much of the collectivist bent to the early Internet's culture; you saved copies of things you found particularly cool, and "mirrored" them on your own site in case the original source went offline. Maybe you added some bits of your own to it. And then somebody else might mirror your own additions, and make their own alterations.

Nothing's stopping anyone from picking up where Snooper left off with Peelopaalu and continuing to update and refine the link-list. That's very much the spirit of the thing. The early web certainly felt "alive" in a very real sense, for exactly that sort of reason... but so much of that life came as a direct result of the fragile, chaotic, and constantly-reinventing nature of the thing. The reason why the Internet feels so "dead" right now is actually because there's so little "site-death" right now, generating the necessary impetus and providing the necessary space for new things to be born. Look at how many sites sprang out of Cohost's shutdown. It was sad to lose the place there, but it brought all these new and independent creative spaces into being.

[malymin]

Makes sense. I distinctly remember a lot of websites I browsed going offline as a kid because the siterunner couldn't pay for hosting anymore, or just lost interest... need to remember that that's what the ecosystem originally looked like, and that we just need to be able to get used to and adapt to it again.

[onlyknownothing]

As a crazily-apropos circumstance, Petit Tube went down since I linked you to it - I was intending to mention it on my own post about ways to escape the YouTube algorithm and found out it was gone. As mentioned, however, there are alternatives: ytstalker is basically the same thing, albeit with sliders to adjust for upload date and number of "likes."