When I first used the Internet, way back in the mid-90s, it wasn’t really a thing people thought about. It wasn’t a big deal, because most people didn’t even have it. If you wanted to use the Internet, if you even had a reason to do so, you had to go somewhere else to do it. The library or your school. It wasn’t until 2001 or 2002 that I finally got dial up at my house. And I know that my experiences there aren’t all that unusual. You can look up the stats if you want, but the saturation of Internet in private households didn’t take off until the mid-00s.

Since then, obviously, things have sped up a bit. We went from 56k Dial Up in 2002 to 1Gb/s speeds being normal these days, and many people have a lot more than that. On those old speeds, it might take you days to download something. We had to use download managers so that when the Internet went down (because someone had to use the telephone), you could continue when it came back. Now you can download a 100gb game in just a few minutes.

Those days of slow speeds, however, were also the days where the web felt like something that we owned as a community. Everyone was on there chatting and meeting new people, creating their own spaces online with things like Geocities, and hanging out on message boards exploring things with people from all around the world. The Internet’s technology may have been created by others, but the web itself was created by us.

That all changed because of how big the Internet became. With everyone having access to it, companies came in and had to make a dime. The more money there was to be made, the more corrupt the Internet became. It became the job of the social media companies to turn us all against each other, ramp up the outrage machine, and ensure we all stayed on doom scrolling for as long as possible. That sense of ownership we had back in the early days quickly faded as we all became cogs in the machine.

I’ve talked about how coming back to blogging has changed my life. It has also, however, given me that sense of ownership again. And it isn’t just blogging that has done it. It is seeing other people blog and create content too. Content that they own on platforms they’ve created. There’s no algorithm, hardly any advertisements, and no honey traps to keep you engaged beyond just good quality content. Hell, half the blogs out there don’t even have comments, just a link to an email address.

Becoming immersed in this small web, or IndieWeb, has been a refreshing feeling. I didn’t realize how much I’d missed the intimate nature of the Internet from those early days. The ability to actually talk to people one on one, and have actual conversations. Create a space on the web for like minded people, and just have fun. It’s impossible to do when the platform you’re on promotes individualism, and chasing as many likes as possible.

The small web has enabled a new generation of Internet users to experience what us old guys experienced back in the early days. I hope that it continues to grow, but that it does so organically and slowly. We don’t want to recreate the wider Internet, we want a Web that feels like it used to, a Web that we have more control over.

This feels like the creation of a new Internet, one that isn’t like the other. And that makes the Internet feel new again. And we have much better speeds this time. :)