Some guy wrote 1,765 articles about the Ancient Web.
ONE THOUSAND SEVEN HUNDRED AND SIXTY-FIVE.
Then decided that wasn't enough and produced another 500 articles about Dead Internet Theory.
That's 2,265 articles.
And this is your autistically detailed account of the old internet that we all claim to miss so much, but probably wouldn't actually want back, because nobody reads anymore, attention spans have been reduced to the approximate duration of a sneeze, and the iPad generation is in college now.
TWO THOUSAND TWO HUNDRED AND SIXTY-FIVE ARTICLES.
About the internet.
The OLD internet.
Remember websites?
WEBSITES.
Some guy would spend six years documenting the evolution of vacuum tubes, make a website containing 300 pages of technical information, add a visitor counter, proudly display a little animated GIF of a construction worker digging a hole, and disappear into the wilderness.
That was it.
That was the business model.
There wasn't one.
Sometimes the webmaster would put a little note at the bottom saying, "Last updated March 17, 1998."
And you would visit in 2004.
Still March 17, 1998.
Visit in 2014.
Still March 17, 1998.
Visit in 2026.
THE SITE IS STILL THERE.
The author might be dead. The computer he built it on might be in a landfill. The ISP might have been acquired by six other companies. The programming language he used might have been abandoned before half of today's developers were born.
But there it sits.
An HTML table containing the definitive international history of obsolete railway signaling equipment.
Still serving its purpose.
No advertisements.
No email signup.
No algorithm.
No community guidelines written by a committee of lawyers.
Just some guy who really, REALLY liked railway signals.
The first collection documents 1,765 examples of this peculiar human behavior.
Here it is:
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Ancient Web: The Collection | Switchboard Tech Services
Browse 1,765 Ancient Web articles about surviving personal sites, fan projects, technical archives, and other distinctive corners of the early web,...
It's organized alphabetically.
Of course it is.
Because if you're going to spend an unreasonable portion of your life documenting strange websites, you might as well build an index large enough to frighten a librarian.
And these aren't necessarily dead websites. That's the remarkable part. Many of them still exist. Some still receive updates. Others are preserved in exactly the condition their creators abandoned them.
A few look like the owner went out for cigarettes in 1997 and never returned.
And there's something beautiful about that.
For example, the first World Wide Web project at CERN.
Here:
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Ancient Web: The First Website Still Explains the Web | Switchboard Tech Services
CERN preserves the historic address of the first World Wide Web page, a tiny document that explained the Web itself when browsers, servers, HTML, a...
It's basically text and links.
Somebody invented one of the most consequential technologies in human history and didn't bother adding a hero image.
There are no testimonials.
No pricing tiers.
No dark patterns.
No little animated fellow waving at you from the lower-right corner asking if you need assistance.
It just tells you what the World Wide Web is and how to use it.
Imagine trying to launch that today.
Some venture capitalist would immediately ask about the monetization strategy.
"Well, people can link documents together."
"Okay, but how do we capture their attention?"
"They can read the documents."
"Can we make them watch something first?"
"No."
"Can we harvest their data?"
"Why?"
"Can we make it addictive?"
"It's a document."
"Can we add AI?"
"Get out."
And that's where the trouble started.
The internet was originally useful.
Then somebody realized that useful things could also become profitable things.
Then somebody else realized that profitable things could become addictive things.
And eventually we arrived at a point where I can no longer read a recipe for potato salad without first being informed that the author discovered her passion for potatoes while recovering from a difficult breakup in Vermont.
I JUST WANT TO KNOW HOW MUCH MAYONNAISE.
Another article documents the IBM 1401 Restoration Project.
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Ancient Web: The IBM 1401 Restoration Site | Switchboard Tech Services
The IBM 1401 restoration website documents two working 1960s mainframes with manuals, repair notes, oral histories, schematics, photographs, softwa...
People are maintaining and restoring enormous mainframe computers from the 1960s.
Actual machines.
Real hardware.
Schematics, documentation, software, photographs, repair notes, and volunteer work.
The project even documented approximately 9,000 volunteer hours by 2007.
NINE THOUSAND HOURS.
Spent restoring machinery that most modern people would struggle to distinguish from a commercial laundry operation.
Imagine having one of these machines in your basement.
"Honey, why is the electric bill $800?"
"I'm compiling something."
"WHAT?"
"I SAID I'M COMPILING SOMETHING."
Meanwhile, I have a modern laptop that occasionally requires several hundred megabytes of memory just to display a website containing three paragraphs and a photograph of a sandwich.
Progress.
Then there are people building CPUs from scratch.
Not assembling a PC.
Not installing Linux.
Not buying a processor and congratulating themselves on constructing a computer.
BUILDING THE PROCESSOR.
The Homebrew CPU Ring documents people creating working processors using relays, TTL chips, FPGA hardware, discrete components, and other wonderfully inconvenient methods.
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Ancient Web: The Homebrew CPU Ring Still Links Computers Built From the Wrong End | Switchboard Tech Services
The Homebrew Computers Website links dozens of machines whose CPUs were built by their owners from relays, TTL logic, FPGA designs, vacuum-tube ide...
Somebody looked at the ability to purchase a processor for a few dollars and thought, "No, I would rather spend eleven months wiring up several thousand individual components."
And then put a detailed account of the project online.
Not because somebody was paying them.
Not because the algorithm liked it.
Because they wanted to.
You know what I admire about people like this?
They have absolutely no idea how to stop.
And the internet used to be FULL of them.
There's also the Museum of Plugs and Sockets.
Yes.
An actual museum.
Dedicated to electrical plugs and sockets.
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Ancient Web: The Museum of Plugs and Sockets Made Electrical Standards Collectible | Switchboard Tech Services
The online Museum of Plugs and Sockets grew from fewer than 200 examples into a detailed technical history of domestic connectors, obsolete standar...
The website began with fewer than 200 examples and expanded into a technical history of electrical connectors, manufacturers, obsolete standards, contact mechanisms, and various incompatible arrangements humanity has devised for delivering electricity into household appliances.
Some guy looked at the electrical outlet behind his refrigerator and thought, "I wonder how many different ways civilization has managed to get this wrong."
And instead of keeping that question to himself, he built a museum.
With photographs.
And historical documentation.
And technical explanations.
And obsolete connector configurations.
Imagine showing this to somebody whose primary interest is watching influencers open boxes.
"What does the website do?"
"It catalogs electrical plugs."
"Why?"
"History."
"Can you buy anything?"
"That's not the point."
"Is there a video?"
"No."
"How do you like it?"
"You don't."
"How do people follow him?"
"They can visit the website."
"How does he make money?"
HE DOESN'T HAVE TO MAKE MONEY. SOMETIMES PEOPLE JUST DO THINGS.
It's almost impossible to explain this concept anymore.
Then there's the Trojan Room coffee pot at Cambridge.
One of the famous early webcam projects.
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Ancient Web: The Coffee Pot That Became a Webcam | Switchboard Tech Services
Cambridge's Trojan Room coffee machine became one of the earliest famous webcam subjects, turning a mundane office problem into a piece of Web hist...
Its purpose was to let people check whether a coffee pot had coffee in it.
That's all.
No machine learning.
No computer vision startup.
No pitch deck.
No quarterly presentation about leveraging disruptive paradigms.
Somebody didn't want to walk to the coffee machine and discover that the pot was empty.
So they put a camera on it.
The internet was young.
Humanity was innocent.
And the technological frontier was being pushed forward by people who didn't want to make an unnecessary trip down the hallway.
We now have household appliances that require software updates.
Refrigerators that connect to Wi-Fi.
Toasters that can communicate with your telephone.
And smart devices that occasionally stop working because a company on another continent decided to discontinue a cloud service.
All because somebody once wanted to know whether the coffee was ready.
There's ToastyTech's GUI Gallery.
An enormous historical record of graphical operating systems, including systems most people have never heard of and several that probably deserve a formal apology from their manufacturers.
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Ancient Web: ToastyTech's GUI Gallery Keeps Old Operating Systems Visible | Switchboard Tech Services
The ToastyTech GUI Gallery preserves screenshots and commentary on decades of graphical interfaces including Xerox systems, Visi On, GEM, AmigaOS, ...
AmigaOS.
GEM.
OS/2.
BeOS.
QNX.
Xerox systems.
Early Macintosh interfaces.
Unix desktops.
Windows versions that occasionally appear to have been designed during an argument.
You can browse screenshots and actually SEE how operating systems evolved.
Imagine explaining this hobby to somebody whose entire computing experience consists of tapping a glass rectangle.
"Why are you looking at screenshots of Windows from 1992?"
"Because the interface design is historically significant."
"Can you make a TikTok about it?"
"No."
"Then why are you doing it?"
"Because I want to."
That last answer used to be sufficient.
There are detailed records of failed interfaces, abandoned ideas, obscure software, and experimental concepts that didn't survive the enormous corporate battles of the personal computer era.
The history of computing wasn't one straight line from DOS to Windows 11.
It was an enormous battlefield of competing ideas.
Some were brilliant.
Some were ridiculous.
And Microsoft Bob happened.
We cannot change history.
We can only document it and move forward.
Then there's a physicist who spent years applying scientific reasoning to Star Wars.
Not kidding.
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Ancient Web: A Physicist Spent Years Taking Star Wars Seriously | Switchboard Tech Services
Curtis Saxton’s Star Wars Technical Commentaries began in 1995 and applied scientific reasoning to spacecraft, planets, biology, measurements and...
Curtis Saxton started publishing Star Wars Technical Commentaries in 1995.
Spaceships.
Planetary systems.
Weapons.
Dimensions.
Biology.
Physics.
Imperial insignia.
The Death Star.
The injuries of Darth Vader.
All subjected to the sort of investigation normally reserved for aerospace engineering or a particularly suspicious insurance claim.
Somebody watched Star Wars and decided that George Lucas had not provided enough technical documentation.
And rather than complain, he began producing it himself.
FOR YEARS.
And people read it.
People contributed observations.
People discussed it.
People argued about spacecraft dimensions.
Somebody somewhere was probably sitting in a university computer lab in 1997 reading a detailed analysis of an Imperial Star Destroyer when they were supposed to be studying thermodynamics.
THAT was the internet.
There's also Ian Mapleson's Doom Help Service.
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Ancient Web: Ian Mapleson's Doom Help Service Answered Usenet Newbies | Switchboard Tech Services
Ian Mapleson's 1994 Doom Help Service brought together Usenet volunteers, game-editing documentation, help archives, modem troubleshooting, and pla...
Back in 1994, somebody organized information to help people install Doom, make levels, troubleshoot network games, edit WAD files, and solve problems on obscure computer systems.
Volunteers answered questions through Usenet.
They wrote documentation.
They distributed files.
They helped strangers.
Sometimes people couldn't even access files normally, so other methods had to be arranged.
This was a time when getting a video game to run could become a weekend-long engineering exercise.
And people documented the solutions for free.
Not for subscribers.
Not for patrons.
Not for premium members.
For whoever needed them.
Imagine that.
People used to build little libraries of solutions for problems they had personally encountered.
If your sound card wasn't working, you'd find some guy who had the same sound card.
If your modem wasn't working, you'd find some guy who had the same modem.
If your copy of Doom wouldn't run, you'd find a text file written by somebody who had spent three evenings figuring out precisely why.
It might be ugly.
It might be badly organized.
It might be full of spelling mistakes.
But it usually contained the information you needed.
Today you can spend twenty minutes searching for a technical answer and discover that seventeen different websites have published essentially the same article, each containing 1,200 words explaining the importance of updating your drivers.
And none of them tells you what the problem actually is.
Then you find a forum post from 2008.
Some guy named Mike says, "Change line 47 from 1 to 0."
It works.
Mike saves the day.
Mike hasn't logged in since 2011.
Mike is a hero.
Nobody knows where Mike is.
That's the old web.
And that's only a handful of the 1,765 articles.
There are websites documenting old calculators.
Old radios.
Old computer games.
Early web graphics.
Scientific experiments.
Amateur astronomy.
Model trains.
Forgotten programming languages.
Vintage toys.
Ancient monuments.
Lost amusement park attractions.
Obsolete electronic equipment.
Amateur engineering.
Personal diaries.
Fan communities.
And almost every other subject imaginable.
There's a site cataloging old web buttons.
There's a collection of vintage electrical equipment.
There's a database of lost airfields.
There's a historical collection of camera manuals.
There's a website cataloging Bigfoot reports.
There's even an old web project devoted to the glorious historical intersection of Britney Spears and semiconductor physics.
Yes.
That exists.
The old internet was not normal.
It was fantastic.
It was also ugly, inconvenient, slow, badly organized, frequently broken, and occasionally so offensive to good design that your monitor deserved hazard pay.
But it was PERSONAL.
And now we come to the second collection.
Because apparently writing 1,765 articles about the surviving parts of the old web wasn't enough.
Somebody decided to investigate what happened to the rest of it.
Another 500 articles.
Dead Internet Theory: The Series.
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Dead Internet Theory: The Series | Switchboard Tech Services
Explore all 500 Dead Internet Theory articles in their original ten themes, from vanished communities and web archives to bots, algorithms, spam, s...
This one is organized into ten themes.
Ghost Cities.
Digital Extinction.
Synthetic Humanity.
Algorithmic Reality.
The Human Retreat.
Spam Empires.
Manufactured Consensus.
Surveillance Economy.
The Enshittification Machine.
Predatory Web.
Five hundred articles examining how an internet populated by individuals increasingly became an internet controlled by platforms, populated by automation, optimized for engagement, and gradually disconnected from the communities that originally made it interesting.
There's an article about GeoCities.
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GeoCities: neighborhood identity and the dismantling of a homepage metropolis | Dead Internet Theory | Switchboard Tech Services
Dead Internet Theory: How GeoCities' themed neighborhoods organized the hobbyist web, why Yahoo's ownership let it take the city down in 2009, and ...
Remember GeoCities?
It had NEIGHBORHOODS.
People built personal homepages and organized them into little communities.
Their websites had backgrounds.
Animated GIFs.
Guestbooks.
Under-construction signs.
Comic Sans.
Rainbow-colored text.
And enough blinking graphics to trigger a minor neurological event.
But they were THEIR websites.
People built little homes on the internet.
Then Yahoo bought the place.
And eventually shut it down.
Imagine living in a neighborhood where everybody builds their own house.
They spend years decorating it.
They invite friends.
They create little communities.
They raise tiny digital gardens filled with animated dancing hamsters.
Then one day the landlord announces that the entire neighborhood is closing.
Everybody has to move.
Some of the houses are saved.
Some are lost.
The streets disappear.
The neighbors scatter.
And a whole little corner of human culture becomes an archival research project.
That's what happened to enormous pieces of the old internet.
Not necessarily because everybody stopped caring.
Because the infrastructure belonged to somebody else.
Another article examines MSN Groups.
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MSN Groups: community continuity across an imposed service migration | Dead Internet Theory | Switchboard Tech Services
Dead Internet Theory: How MSN Groups hosted thousands of member-run communities, what Microsoft offered them when it shut the service down in 2009,...
Remember when people used to form little online communities around specific interests?
Not enormous social networks.
Not engagement-driven public feeds.
Little groups.
Local clubs.
Gaming communities.
Hobbyists.
People sharing photographs, documents, advice, and arguments.
Then the service closed.
People were encouraged to migrate.
Then the destination service eventually closed too.
Imagine somebody telling you that the neighborhood where you've spent ten years getting to know everybody is moving to another city.
Then, four years later, that city is demolished.
Excellent.
Really wonderful way to preserve human relationships.
And the series goes further.
Bots pretending to be people.
People pretending not to be bots.
Bots replying to bots.
Synthetic comments.
Artificial engagement.
Algorithms determining what becomes visible.
Search engines increasingly favoring large platforms.
Useful information disappearing behind registrations, paywalls, or abandoned hosting accounts.
Old links that no longer work.
Personal archives that disappear when somebody dies.
Communities that vanish when a corporation decides the numbers aren't looking sufficiently attractive.
And AI-generated information circulating through the web until nobody is entirely sure where anything originally came from.
There's even an article about synthetic material finding its way into future AI training data.
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Synthetic content entering future model-training collections | Dead Internet Theory | Switchboard Tech Services
Dead Internet Theory: Generated material can be scraped into later training collections, creating feedback loops whose effects depend on how much s...
In other words, machines generating information, publishing it, and potentially having later generations of machines learn from it.
The article is careful about what the research actually establishes.
But the larger absurdity is almost irresistible.
We built machines to learn from human knowledge.
Then we filled the internet with machine-generated material.
Then we began worrying about whether the machines would eventually learn from the machines that learned from the machines.
And somewhere in the middle of all this, a human being is trying to figure out why his printer isn't working.
The situation is becoming difficult to explain.
And here's the uncomfortable part.
We did much of this to ourselves.
We complained that the old internet was slow.
So we made it faster.
We complained that websites were hard to find.
So we made search engines.
We complained that publishing was difficult.
So we built platforms.
We complained that finding interesting things required too much effort.
So we built recommendation algorithms.
We complained that reading took too long.
So we made videos.
We complained that videos took too long.
So we made shorter videos.
We complained that short videos took too long.
So we made even shorter videos.
And now apparently a thirty-second explanation of a relatively simple concept requires subtitles, background music, rapid cuts, animated graphics, and somebody pointing at floating text.
At some point we stopped building tools to help people find information and started building tools to prevent people from ever getting bored enough to look for it themselves.
And the most fascinating part is that most of us participated willingly.
We handed children iPads.
We put screens in classrooms.
We replaced books with interfaces.
We told people that everything should be quick, convenient, personalized, and entertaining.
Then we seemed surprised when sitting down and reading something for twenty minutes became an unusual activity.
The iPad generation is in college now.
And here we are, waxing nostalgic about an internet where you had to READ things.
Not watch somebody explain them.
Not listen to an artificial voice summarize them.
Not ask a chatbot for the important bits.
READ.
Words.
On a screen.
Sometimes thousands of them.
Sometimes without a single photograph.
Sometimes written by somebody who was only marginally competent at English but extraordinarily competent at understanding exactly how a 1978 computer worked.
You had to pay attention.
You had to follow links.
You had to decide where to go next.
You had to explore.
You had to tolerate the possibility that the next page might be boring.
Or confusing.
Or completely unrelated to what you originally wanted.
And sometimes that was exactly how you discovered something wonderful.
You'd start out looking for a video game cheat code.
Three hours later, you'd be reading an electrical engineering tutorial written by a retired telephone technician in Ohio.
Nobody recommended it to you.
Nobody optimized your discovery experience.
Nobody was tracking your engagement.
You just got lost.
And getting lost was HALF THE FUN.
Now we have an internet that knows what you like.
It knows what you dislike.
It knows what makes you angry.
It knows what keeps you watching.
It knows when you're bored.
It knows what you're likely to purchase.
It can recommend entertainment so efficiently that you can spend six hours consuming material without remembering a single thing you saw.
And we call that progress.
Meanwhile, some guy who spent twenty years documenting old clocks has a website with forty-eight visitors a month.
And I'd argue he's contributed more useful information to the world than an impressive percentage of the modern attention economy.
But here's the question nobody really wants to answer.
DO WE ACTUALLY WANT THE OLD INTERNET BACK?
Because I don't think most people do.
We want the feeling of the old internet back.
We want the discovery.
The individuality.
The weirdness.
The sense that there was an actual human being on the other side of the screen.
We want the freedom to explore without somebody constantly trying to sell us something.
But we don't necessarily want the inconvenience.
We don't want to spend twenty minutes searching through directories.
We don't want broken HTML.
We don't want pages that take forever to load.
We don't want hideous backgrounds.
We don't want to install three codecs to play a video.
We don't want to configure our sound cards manually.
We don't want to wait forty-five minutes to download a file.
We don't want our telephone calls interrupted because somebody is using the internet.
And, most importantly, we don't necessarily want to READ.
We want the results of reading.
Preferably immediately.
Preferably summarized.
Preferably in a convenient format.
And preferably without anything that challenges the assumptions we already have.
That's an uncomfortable contradiction.
We complain that the internet has become shallow while repeatedly choosing the shallowest possible way to use it.
We complain about algorithms while depending on them to decide what we see.
We complain that personal websites have disappeared while spending nearly all our online time inside corporate platforms.
We complain that nobody makes anything interesting anymore while ignoring the people who are still making interesting things.
And then somebody actually produces an alphabetized collection of 1,765 articles about the surviving old web.
Plus 500 more about what happened to the rest.
And what do we do?
WE ASK AN AI TO SUMMARIZE IT.
The irony is so thick you could spread it on toast.
Now, I'm not saying the old internet was some magical paradise.
It wasn't.
There were scams.
There was spam.
There were idiots.
There were terrible websites.
There were endless arguments.
There were people confidently publishing absolute nonsense.
There were animated dancing babies.
There were browser incompatibilities.
There were pop-ups.
There were toolbars.
There were twelve different versions of RealPlayer, and none of them worked correctly.
Somebody would embed a MIDI file into their homepage, and visiting it at two in the morning would wake the entire household.
You could encounter a website with yellow text on a bright purple background and legitimately wonder whether the webmaster was trying to cause physical injury.
Half the internet seemed to have been constructed by people who had recently discovered the blink tag and decided it was the greatest invention in human history.
But underneath all that nonsense was something worth preserving.
People made things.
They made them because they wanted to.
They made them without worrying about engagement metrics.
They made them without studying the algorithm.
They made them without an audience growth strategy.
They made them without a monetization funnel.
They made them without deciding whether their personal interests fit into a marketable niche.
Somebody who liked model trains could also post photographs of their cat, write an essay about the Gulf War, publish a recipe for chili, and upload a technical explanation of a radio transmitter.
All on the same website.
No brand consistency.
No content calendar.
No focus group.
No marketing department.
It was HIS WEBSITE.
And he could do whatever the hell he wanted with it.
I think that's the part we miss most.
The internet used to feel like wandering through a giant neighborhood full of very strange people.
Some houses were beautiful.
Some houses were disgusting.
Some houses had six thousand pages about Japanese animation.
Some had family photo albums.
Some had enough electrical equipment in the basement to interfere with local radio communications.
Some had people who seemed a little crazy.
Some had people who actually WERE a little crazy.
And occasionally you'd stumble into a house where somebody had accumulated more knowledge about one obscure subject than you could find in an entire public library.
That was the reward for wandering around.
You encountered people.
Not content.
PEOPLE.
And Nostr, incidentally, has an opportunity here.
Not because decentralization automatically recreates the old internet.
It doesn't.
Decentralized garbage is still garbage.
A decentralized popularity contest is still a popularity contest.
Twelve people talking to the same twelve people is still twelve people talking to the same twelve people, even if the messages are cryptographically signed and distributed across forty relays.
But the possibility of publishing independently, following obscure interests, linking directly to other people's work, and building communities outside centralized control is very much in the spirit of the old web.
Provided we don't spend all our time recreating the same engagement machinery we claim to be escaping.
Not everything needs to be monetized.
Not every post needs a zap.
Not every conversation needs to become a brand.
Not every project needs investors.
Not every website needs to scale.
Sometimes a person just wants to document electrical plugs.
And that should be enough.
The old internet isn't entirely dead.
It's still out there.
Buried between the commercial platforms, search engine sludge, broken links, abandoned domains, and an increasingly enormous mountain of automatically generated material.
There are still people maintaining little websites.
Still writing things.
Still documenting obscure hobbies.
Still preserving old software.
Still cataloging forgotten hardware.
Still researching subjects nobody else considers important.
Still publishing pages that look like they were constructed using a hammer, a screwdriver, and Netscape Navigator.
Some of those websites are terrible.
Some are brilliant.
Some are incomprehensible.
Some are more useful than entire modern applications.
And every one of them reminds us that the internet doesn't have to be a television with a comment section.
It can be a library.
A workshop.
A museum.
A notebook.
A filing cabinet.
A playground.
A place where somebody can spend six years investigating a subject that interests approximately eleven other people on the planet.
And those eleven people can find each other.
That's not a failed business.
That's a successful website.
So here we have two enormous indexes.
Ancient Web: The Collection, documenting 1,765 surviving examples of what people used to build.
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Ancient Web: The Collection | Switchboard Tech Services
Browse 1,765 Ancient Web articles about surviving personal sites, fan projects, technical archives, and other distinctive corners of the early web,...
And Dead Internet Theory: The Series, with 500 articles exploring what happened when the online world changed around them.
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Dead Internet Theory: The Series | Switchboard Tech Services
Explore all 500 Dead Internet Theory articles in their original ten themes, from vanished communities and web archives to bots, algorithms, spam, s...
2,265 articles.
An almost comically excessive amount of reading about the internet we built, the internet we lost, the internet that survived, and the internet we're currently replacing it with.
I don't expect everyone to read all of them.
Hell, I don't expect most people to read this entire post.
By now, a substantial percentage of the audience has probably wandered off to look at a photograph of a cat wearing sunglasses.
Somebody else has probably asked their chatbot to summarize this.
Another person is probably preparing a reply explaining why everything I just said is wrong.
And at least one Nostr bot is currently composing a response about how this is an exciting opportunity for decentralized innovation.
But for the few remaining people who actually enjoy wandering around strange corners of the web, these collections are worth exploring.
You don't need to read everything.
Pick a letter.
Pick a subject.
Click something unusual.
Visit the original website.
Follow a link.
Get lost.
Spend twenty minutes learning about something you didn't even know existed.
Remember what it felt like to encounter an interesting human being without an algorithm introducing you.
And maybe consider building your own website.
Not a platform.
Not an app.
Not an ecosystem.
A WEBSITE.
Put something on it.
Anything.
Write about something you understand.
Document something you love.
Collect something obscure.
Explain something complicated.
Publish something nobody asked for.
Make it useful to eleven people.
Or three.
Or just yourself.
And leave it there.
Maybe somebody will find it twenty years from now.
Maybe they'll wonder what kind of lunatic spent six years documenting electrical plugs.
Maybe they'll actually read it.
And maybe, just maybe, they'll decide to make something of their own.
That's how the old internet worked.
And there's absolutely nothing preventing us from doing it again.
Except, apparently, our attention spans.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have another 2,264 articles to read.
Assuming nobody releases a new video of a raccoon washing a grape before I get started.
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