00X04

This is a response to PencilVoid's Short Districts Retrospective.

I don't think the "old internet" ever really died. It's more of a blanket term. Internet, pre Web 2.0. Even that is a bit of a dodgy definition. When I think of the old Internet, I think of endless  s, lackluster styling, endless GIFs, and perpetual construction. Obviously, Geocities also comes to mind. I can see why there is a desire to go back to this era. Twitter is under administration by a depressingly short-sighted billionare and cryptocurrency just exists. Let me branch off for a moment, because I'm not a fan of having to plan my writing ahead.

When people have a desire to go back to the old internet I don't think they realize that that isn't necessarily possible. There will always be a desire to go back to the days when everything was great and fine, the olden days, but that's impossible to reach. Humans naturally want to advance. Old things get left behind. People who want to give new life into those old things are left behind. I don't have an analogy to this, but my point is that I think chasing the old internet is rather fruitless. In this modern era we are always going to have our actions tainted by that which is new. You don't really have to account for Internet Explorer 6 users anymore. Three.js is a fucking thing, and it lets you just make 3d stuff on the web. That would have been completely absurd ten years ago. Flexbox exists, and so does css-grid. In an effort to try to "go back" we're using all the new things that often feel like the antithesis of the "old Internet".

This is not a bad thing. We are in the modern era. "Going back" does not necessarily have to be a completely restrictive process. A couple of years ago, I was a part of this community called Kommunet. It was small. Just me and my friends and maybe 50 people I didn't know. The whole thing was this DNS server, if I recall. You'd hook it up to your machine and you'd be able to visit websites there; like its own reimagining of the Internet back in 2006. I, myself, had my own website there. It still exists— you can find its WWW counterpart at https://theki.noncities.com/. On Kommunet it had its own domain. Kommunet had its own forums website, its own (if I recall) video sharing site, it had a lot of shit. But the problem is that we were starting from scratch. There were no search engines here. People started to make websites specifically dedicated to listing out other sites on Kommunet that they found. Had this been a completely isolated community that had no Discord server where every member spoke about their website, this might have evolved in a completely different way. But, for the time being, there was no true way to explore cyberspace. If you were on a website, there were hardly any outlinks. Everyone was new to the concept.

Kommunet is dead. Its owner went inactive and stopped updating the DNS records and ultimately shut it down some time last year. But it was a fun experience. I primarily spent my time on the forums. It was relatively active and it might still be on the Internet, but I don't know what its IP address was that its DNS address pointed to, so I can't find it. But while Kommunet existed, it was enjoyable. Everyone was on Internet Explorer, I was on Internet Explorer (later Firefox), and it taught me that making websites for older browsers is a living hell.

I made an advertisement system, named it "NOW!". You'd send me an e-mail of an advertisement image and I'd put it in record somewhere and it would exist in its own ad that people could put on their websites— think BannerLink Ads. The code behind it fucking sucked partially because I refused to touch PHP and instead opted for pure JavaScript. The suffering working with Internet Explorer brought me cannot be compared, and I'm glad that I don't have to live through that anymore. But that's probably because I never got used to it. Had I actually been living in 2006, I wouldn't have been bothered. I would have gotten used to having to make my shit compatible with Internet Explorer 6 because there wouldn't have been any Chrome or Firefox version one-hundred to fall back on knowing that no matter what asinine nonsense I hacked up in HTML/CSS/JS they would still render it and parse it properly.

At that point everything was new. caniuse.com didn't exist in 2006 but it exists now. In 2006 you had shit like the <marquee> element or the <blink> element. Browsers didn't know what the fuck standards were. It was the Wild West. Now it isn't, now everything is streamlined. Neocities is almost a social media of its own. Geocities never let websites talk to each other in this way.

In an era where search engines are how people find stuff it's difficult to imagine that webrings could still possibly hold a purpose. As people we're inclined to move on. I can not stand to imagine what a Web 4.0 would possibly look like, or if it will ever even truly exist, but at some point everyone is going to be looking at Web 2.0 with rosey-tinted glasses. Nothing lasts forever and this extends to everything. Websites attempting to emulate the old web are inevitably going to be niche. A billionare isn't going to reach out his hand and say, "hey, let me make Geocities 2 for you". No. That's now how any of this works, and no one would accept that because we live in an era where Bandcamp got bought out twice by two separate companies and is going on a downward spiral because the dudes managing it wanted money or something. Things were new in 2006. No one was begging for your personal data or for your advertising preferences. The Web was personal. It's fine to look back on it, but I think that trying to truly capture its essence on as large of a scale as it was back then is ultimately fruitless. Maybe that's not what we want. I'd imagine that it isn't.

Neocities is a website host and it doesn't try to be anything. Its very clearly a nod to Geocities in that all the websites are connected, but there are no districts. No neighborhoods. That's up to the people residing there to come up with. I can't reason as to why Districts died, either. But it did. And it might be so, that running in circles, attempting to unify every website like how it used to be rather than via the modern method, categorizing everyone as they line up to be considered, isn't possible. We're not going to have another Geocities like how we want it. People can gather to create something and to view life through a different perspective, through something of their own, but these structures of passion and ingenuity will inevitably fall apart. And after that, people move on. That's why we're here. Geocities fell, and we moved on. Some wanted to stay in that era, but most found new ways to express themselves on the Internet. I cannot speak for myself here. This is speculation.

ClongCraft is a Minecraft server built on its own constructed language. You join the server with your mic on and you converse with the people playing. You won't know anything about the language at first. You can't speak English or any language other than what you are being taught. You have to learn the language in the language itself. It sounds circular, but it works. There are multiple languages in this server, from what I can tell, and they all have their own distinctive evolution and form. They have their own group of speakers and their own rules on grammar and such. Their own names. Taapota, Wanawialta.

I can't speak on what happens in the server because I've never joined it. I probably won't for a while as I don't have the time to dedicate to something like that (ADHD). But it's an infinitely interesting concept, to me, because it starts from scratch. From what I can tell, there wasn't years of planning on how the first language would start out. The server was started and a language was formed. Dialects were created. Some variations of language were created and some died. The entire landscape evolved. It's as close to natural language evolution as I can imagine.

Neither I nor you are ever going to be able to experience natural language evolution the way everyone did during the Great Vowel Shift. We are both born too late to experience and influence the growth of a natural language. But imitating that is still possible. It's not a real language, per se, and no one outside of here is going to speak it, but what matters is that it is still a language that can be spoken, and pronounced, and maybe written as well. Languages can be born on a microscopic scale. We are using what is available to us to introduce this kind of language learning and its evolution and its history and all the things that have come out of it, like we're genuinely making a real language from the beginning.

Kommunet didn't have its own Google, or Yahoo!, or anything. In the beginning there were no webrings and there was no Geocities. Kommunet was a flawed recreation of the old Internet, but it at least demonstrated what it was like to begin from the very... beginning. To try to unify the Internet in a time where it was new to us, and we wanted to make connections and to realize the full potential of what was being offered to us. We're all living in a world long past the invention of the Internet but it's not wrong to attempt to replicate it. There is something inherently beautiful about retrospection. It is not a truly fruitless ordeal. It is often enlightening at the least. But it works when you acknowledge the fragility of human creation.

Maybe I'm delusional. Maybe I'm speaking loads of poppycock attempting to string my thoughts together into something coherent. And it's difficult to conclude something like this in a way that doesn't sound cocky. But I think the old Internet, in its truest form, isn't really ever going to come back. We can work off of our own desires to replicate it but we will always fall back to our modern way of thinking. You can start a new language by yourself, but it's difficult. Often times you just need to start from the beginning of things. Form your own path. It's maddening out there. We are a small part of the Internet, and our attempts to bring back the old, decentralized way of doing things might be futile in the long run. But as long as you and I acknowledge that, I don't think it's wrong to try.