/retro/ - 199X

1990's and 2000's Nostalgia

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Wild West Fellow Time Traveler 10/31/2019 (Thu) 12:09:42 No.168
I want to go back. When browsing the Web felt like going on an adventure.

What substitutes for "Wild West" these days? All I can think of are Tor, Zeronet, and the vast array of imageboards. Discord can feel pretty wild too sometimes, that is if you can find the right servers.

Post what you know, please.
Explore the old web, that is usually delisted or pushed to the back pages of popular search engines, to give more hits to newer and more commercialized sites.
>>168
telnet into a random BBS.
>>168
Tor/.onion as you said. In the same vein, .i2p (ideally through i2pd to avoid javashit)
FreeNet, as long as you make sure to exclusively run it on an encrypted drive. The downside is that you automatically seed random pieces of content from their network, not whole files but encrypted parts of files. The Upside is that every single page of them feels retro.

IPFS too, a bit. In the sense that the content on it is static, like most parts of most old sites used to be.

Zeronet doesn't really feel oldschool to me, mainly because it lives off javascript.
Honestly, I'm hoping for a new wild west opening up as P2P networks grow just slightly more refined and we can flee the censorship of the commercialized husk of what we once loved.
>>168
Unlisted links
>>168
I feel you.
>>168
Browsing through random sites on https://neocities.org/browse feels pretty similar to the Wild West days.
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The darknets are boring. 97% of it is dead links, info smuggling to countries with internet censorship, CP and drug merchants, and boomers bitching about politics. This is more of a fucking game than a website or anything, but if you want to get that mysterious wild web feeling you could give Worlds.com a try. It's basically a virtual world with the navigation of darknets with it's WorldMarks, as there is no central hub where to share worlds so you have to seek out and ask other players for those. You could think of the worlds themselves as websites, in a 3D room form. And due to both limitations of the world creation tool(s) and overall 90's atmosphere of the game, a lot of them have that eerie old internet aesthetic. I guess Second Life falls into this as well, if you don't mind the crippling autism As for actual websites, what >>169, >>170 and >>219 said. Maybe gopher as well.
>>168 Spend less time on the Internet, more time reading/watching/playing/creating things. Definitely helped me let go of the past.
>>168 There's this one search engine called Wiby that is based around user-submitted classic websites. https://wiby.me/
The local wireless community was like that in my city but then it died too. Decentralized stuff will probably be it increasingly, as touchscreen kids have grown up on nothing but Twitch and Youtube.
>>368 Other way for me, i tried watching and create stuff based on my tastes, which are biased towards the board's era subject, and made me lorn for those things again.
>>372 I know how you feel. Keep going at it and the feeling will wear off after a while, like a year or so... You can only indulge in nostalgia for so long before your brain gets bored and you lose the rose-colored glasses. Let your yearning for the past be a drive to recreate it somewhat, at least in the digital sense. Like writing geocities-styled websites and sharing existing ones, creating pixel art and 3D art, composing MIDI/MOD files, programming vidya...etc.
>>377 Yes, i guess you are right, been doing it for 6 months or so. Will post about it when i have refined it enough for presentation.

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