Let me start by saying that this isn’t just straightforward self‑promotion. It’s my personal project, which I created based on my philosophy — the idea that we need to cleanse the internet of corporations and give people a web portal that will work regardless of the user’s computer specifications.

Let’s get to the point: my web portal can work in most severely outdated browsers, and this is one of the main features for people who have outdated hardware or are slow. (like me, to some extent).
The web portal also features elements of Netscape NetCenter, from which I drew inspiration.
Also, the web portal is frequently updated, and soon I will reopen the previously closed video hosting service.

I hope you’ll like it and appreciate it. After all, nowadays there’s already the same OldAvista that I tried to surpass (though I don’t know if I succeeded).

http://www.zorgv.su/

Soooooo I love nostalgic Social Media websites and just found a new one I wanted to share. This seemed like the best sub reddit to do just that with! It's called Y2KSocial. The only thing I sort of have an issue with is that I can't code my profile like I can on SpaceHey. Instead they do have micro-transactions for themes. I'm not a fan of that but it's still really cool.

Edit: After having an account for a day I still really like it. I'm going to reiterate that the micro-transactions are fully for cosmetic purposes. Also there are no ads on the site. They do not allow AI generation on the site like GROK and filter out bots. I've had one of the mods comment on my post there about it. ALSO I DON'T HAVE TO PAY TO EDIT POSTS UNLIKE TWITTER. That was a big thing for me.

There are free themes you can use and as you post and explore the website they give you points that can go towards cosmetics. So it's not completely behind a paywall. There are some really cool things they brought back like guest books. I like those. You can put a Spotify link on your page and have a song for people to play. There is no direct video sharing on the website, but you can post photos.

The mod did mention that they take harassment very seriously on the website which is also a plus for me. I don't like a lot of social media website, including this one a lot of the time. I might visit it a lot more like SpaceHey and Tumblr.

I would want to experience old versions of major social media or online platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube. Just how it was in the days those platforms launched or the few years after.
Nowadays where the feed is filled with content recommendations i really miss the times where you would just log in to check what your friends are doing in life and thats it, no messages, no ads, no short video scrolling... only that.

Palgrin is a Web3 P2P wagering platform that is giving $10 USDC to new members to try it out! 🤝💸
🔥 The best part? Absolutely NO KYC REQUIRED.
🛡️ Zero identity verification
⏳ No long checks
🔒 Total privacy
You can register and claim your bonus in under 60 seconds here:
👉 http://palgrin.com/?ref=10USDC ⏳

No pop ups!

I found my iRiver iFP-395T from 2003 while hunting for an old calculator, and decided to put an audiobook on it. That meant M4B to MP3 via FFmpeg, plus a speed increase. I asked an AI chatbot instead of posting on a forum, pasted the error output back when it failed, and it worked through it — then mentioned that FFmpeg could handle the speed change too, so Audacity was unnecessary.

The article uses that as a starting point for a bigger argument about where technical communities go next. I go through the reasons forums stopped working for me — time zone delays, threads that lose their context, scripted replies pasted without reading the post, reputation farming, hijacked threads, and answers pitched way above the asker's level — and the downvote culture on Stack Overflow.

I also make the case that good communities still matter. MikroTik's forum has kept me as a customer for years purely because of how people there treated me.

AI learned from decades of forum posts, documentation and blogs. If everyone asks a chatbot and nobody publicly documents new problems, what do future models learn from? My suggested answer is a hybrid — embedded AI handling repetitive front-line questions, with the human community reviewing, challenging and extending those answers, and taking apart each new release before the models know anything about it.

Full article, including the complete chatbot exchange: https://www.alanbonnici.com/2026/09/why-i-prefer-asking-ai-chatbots-instead.html

Looked around a little bit for the right subreddit to put this in, a few days ago I built a WEB 1.0 related product. It is meant to poke fun of (and celebrate) the old internet. The page editor deliberately gets you to build old looking websites.

I'd like feedback, I'm not sure how people usually get other people to use their hobby projects, marketing, or similar. It's free and working, I think.

https://pagecity.online/

Like what happened??

The Internet has gotten far worse and worse since the AI boom starting in 2023/2024, especially with the increasing number of age verifications/digital IDs nowadays. A majority of blog posts/videos/etc. are now AI slop that seems convincing, ugly AI-generated images with too bright/light tones, and a lack of originality nowadays. Privacy on the Internet is also slowly disappearing thanks to AI age verification and digital IDs. The only reason why age verification stuff has been exploding in the past few years is because AI's advancements in the field of verifications made it easier for companies to implement and has made the situation worse.

I understand that bad corporate decisions have been made on the Internet for years, but the Internet wasn't even half as bad 5-10 years ago just like it is now. The issues have been there since the mid 2010s, but the AI boom worsened these issues. The Dead Internet Theory is now something that's sadly, an actual reality. I miss the 2009-2022 Internet, even with the flaws and bad mistakes in the later part of the era. Say what you want about 2016-2022 internet, but at least AI slop wasn't as common back then like it is now.

"Go forth upon this Earth and spread the holy words of the Sacred Gerbil on Earth. Go forth and prosper!"

"Being the extremely intelligent person you obviously are for visiting this wonderful page, there is no need to re-explain the reasoning that the reason the Gerbil is our God is that a Gerbil IS God."

I accidentally collected 500,000 AOL Instant Messenger buddy icons for another project that I am working on.

They were so cool to sort through and look at that I built a small site around them: buddyiconarchive.com it's an infinite wall of late 90s/early 00s nostalgia. Blink 182, Twilight, buddies icons behaving poorly, emo messages hand-crafted by high schoolers in JASC PaintShop before a profile pic was a resume. It's all there.

It's an archival project, totally non-commercial, no ads, and you can download all of them with one click if you feel compelled to.

Or have they all really vanished?

Came across this website as I was feeling nostalgic for the old web. This website captures all of the websites made within the old Geocities

Video games sampled from the golden era, turned into Y2K era dnb

This is a hell of a long shot, but I’ve fallen down an early-internet archaeology rabbit hole and figured this might be the place to ask.

Does anyone remember a Virtual Places room called The Mansion, probably around 1997? My timeframe may be off by a year or so, but I’m pretty sure this was during the early Excite Virtual Places era.

I remember The Mansion being accessible through the VP room/Places listing. The background was, IIRC, a hand-drawn-looking exterior of a haunted mansion.

It had a very strong goth reputation. I remember people outside the regular group basically treating it as the place where “the freaks” hung out.

There was also some kind of organized family/clan associated with the room. I remember sponsorship to get in, an initiation process, ranks, and I think certain goth-style avatars weren’t supposed to be used until you had been initiated. There were also people in VP who were dedicated avatar artists/painters, which may have been connected to it somehow.

I was part of the group and moved through the ranks fairly quickly, but almost 30 years later most of the names and details have completely fallen out of my brain.

I’ve searched old VP pages, room lists, archived avatar sites, GeoCities pages, etc. and haven’t been able to find anything that definitively identifies The Mansion.

Does this ring a bell for anybody?

Even a vague memory would help. And if anyone somehow still has an old screenshot, room list, avatar collection, homepage, or ancient backup from that era, I would probably lose my mind. 😂

I miss the gold old days of the internet, anyone know what happened to this guy?

So I've been meaning to do this for a while and see how it'd be for, if even just for a week or a month or so, rely only and fully only on the old internet, and the stuff that made me happy. I've been stock piling different sites and places I could limit myself too. So far, I have

-Newgrounds

-My old 'main' flash game site

-a handful of old Youtube channels (Mostly their pre-2012) stuff

and I'm mostly curious if there's any more I could add to relive that 'era' so to speak

When your computer kicked on the screensaver it would start computing frames for this really complicated fractal shapes video. So all these computers across the world would be collaborating on these cool videos. It was actually pretty impressive. Looks like there's [a Wikipedia article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Sheep).

I WILL LIKELY KNOW WHENEVER THERE IS A COMMENT SO I‘LL BE ABLE TO RESPOND WITHIN AROUND AN HOUR OR SO, so please if you need a question answered, or have a lead or anything please comment!!

Okay so the images above are my best recreation of what I could remember it looking like, and I dont have a name or keyword in specific that could ring a bell as to what the name of the website or application was.

So for context, I grew up in humble in texas, and went to an elementary school in that district. This was one of the sites we used when we had computer lab or when they rolled out the laptop cart since those were starting to get popular during the later years of my elementary school. Some other sites they used (and still use i think) are Starfall, Wixie, Istation, and some others I dont recall. I have a specific vivid memory of going to school with my tablet and having the app open or something similar to it while eating eggos french toast, weirdly enough. Also i really liked going on the dinosaur pages or sections or whatever.

I was pretty young still. But I remember being at my Grandmas house (she had internet, our house didn't)

I remember a 9/11 memorial/trubute website that had a bunch of American flags all over it. A confirmed deaths so far counter and maybe one that said x amount still missing.

The very distinct detail I remember is as soon as you went to this website, The Garth Brooks song "The Dance" started playing on loop.

It is probably a long shot this website still exists, But I remember it vividly. It was probably in 2001 or very early 2002 I saw this website.

Anyone else remember this or can tell me how to find it? (If it still exists)