Growing Up on the Internet

My formative years were in the mid-1990s. I remember my family's first Windows computer and us first connecting to the internet and World Wide Web. I remember the dial-up sounds, AOL, and a shared phone line causing many disconnections. I look back at those times with rose colored glasses. It was an amazing time, first seeing what the internet could do.

First Sites

When first introduced to to the web, I didn't really know where to go, or what sites to visit. It felt like I was placed in the middle of an open world with an almost infinite number of paths to take, and no direction on where to go. It was both daunting and exciting. I can't remember exactly the first site I went to, but I remember my brother and I at the time were collecting and playing the Star Wars Customizable Card Game by Decipher. I remember browsing Decipher's website looking at the different cards available. I think part of it was imagining me being able to get one of the more rare, powerful cards to use in my decks.

The AOL Era

Originally we had CompuServe as our internet provider. I'm not entirely sure why, but we switched to AOL. I think the only good thing that came out of that was AOL Instant Messenger. It was nice to be able to chat with friends. It was also my first introduction to email. IMs and email felt magical in a way I can't fully explain. To be able to write some text in a form, press send, and boom, someone else however far away would get it, felt crazy in a good way. We take it for granted now, but for 12 year old me, it felt revolutionary to me.

Slow Dialup

Growing up, our internet was limited to around 28.8 kbps. We had a 56.6 modem, but our phone line was crummy and our connection speed would top out around 33.6 on a good day. Verizon or whoever our phone provider was would only guarantee voice communications. So long as you could talk on the phone without issue, they wouldn't re-run the line without you footing the bill.

The slow speeds were annoying, but such was the early internet. I remember the first time I tried to game on the connection. I tried playing Star Wars: Jedi Knight multiplayer. Talk about a lesson in "not going to happen". I remember constantly dying randomly having no idea why. I also remember hitting an opponent so many times with my blaster and wondering how the hell he was still alive. Only to then see them magically far off in the map. My connection was too slow and I was lagging like crazy. I gave up ever playing multiplayer after that.

The Geocities Era

This is where I first started playing around with web development. I remember wanting to build my own website. The sites I built were stupid, contained far too many animated GIFs and images I pilfered from around the web. I also naively didn't fully understand how to get my own domain and was wondering why all I could get were sites that had to include geocities.com.

It did help spark that curiosity though.

College & My First Taste of High Speed Internet

In 2002, I went off to college. That got me access to high speed internet for the first time in my life. No longer would websites take forever to load, now they'd pop up in no time. Downloading larger files? Easy and fast, no longer waiting an hour and hoping the phone line doesn't disconnect. There was no longer any worry about going over a monthly allotment of online hours, I could browse the internet and see what was out there to my heart's content.

MySpace & The Facebook

MySpace was my first foray into social media. I remember playing around with my profile's HTML and styling, but I don't really remember much else about it.

Facebook on the other hand I remember getting on back at the beginning when it was still thefacebook.com. I was still in college and thought it was a neat place to keep up with friends from college and people I knew from back home.

Post-College and My Own Site

After college, I finally got my own domain, darkernemesis.com. I ran a blog off there until maybe around 2013. It started out as a home-cooked PHP / MySQL site with my own CMS. I eventually switched to WordPress, losing posts every time I migrated somewhere. I didn't particularly care, it was fun to build and play around with.

The Demise of Facebook and Twitter

After the 2016 election of Donald Trump, I took a step back from Facebook, eventually deleting my account. And then given Meta/Facebook's privacy nightmares, I deleted Instagram too. I have no account on any service Meta owns, and I will do everything I can to keep it that way.

Elon's purchase of Twitter also got me off Twitter. I kept my account, locked and private for a little while holding out hope that maybe things wouldn't be bad or that Elon would just quickly sell it or something. That obviously didn't happen and I eventually just deleted my account completely.

The Rise of Federated Social Media & Back to Blogs

Blogs never went away and I had continued to use RSS even after Google killed off Reader. I switched to Feedly, tried others, and have landed on Feedbin. But since the fall of Twitter, I've doubled down on finding more personal sites and blogs of interesting people to add to my feeds.

The demise of Twitter has so far seemed to cause more people to either start their own personal sites, double down on them, or just simply brought them back into the lime light. I love it.

It's also caused the rise of federated social media, most notably Mastodon and Bluesky among others. I'm probably a little more active on Mastodon, but have accounts on both and use both. With Mastodon, it's nice to know that I can just move instances if things go south with my current one (hachyderm.io). Bluesky will eventually have the same.

And that's wheere I am today. I've been spending a lot more time writing for my site and adding more content for it. There's still smoke on the horizon, but it's nice seeing some rays of sunshine from all the personal sites and platforms that are hopefully a little more resistant to the walled gardens we had over the last 10-15 years.