Pen's Blog

Web Manifesto

MON X, 20XX

I never experienced the old internet. When I was on the internet, forums had been dead for a while. Nobody had personal websites anymore. So you may wonder, why be nostalgic, or rather, anemoic, for this time.

I joined a discord server, a couple years ago. It was a minecraft server for a big subreddit, so obviously, it wasn't that similar to the old internet. But eventually, a miraculous thing happened. As time worn on, more and more people became inactive, and there are at most around 15 users on at the same time. We don't even really play minecraft that much anymore. It's just like, a friend group. Growing up on the decaying shards of the old internet, I would constantly hear about online friends, but I could never make them. How could I, when the internet is no longer meant for users. But now that I have friends online, it's such a pure, wholesome, amazing experience. And yet, it's terrible.

It's terrible that this is what the internet is now. That to get online friends that could be gotten so easily in decades past in this way. Instead of just finding people with similar interests and chatting with them, I had to go through some bizarre process of waiting for a discord server to die in order to make friends with the people left behind, with no guarantee at all that there would be any people left behind to befriend. And so I sit, one of the younger web revivalists, yearning for a return to something I have been given a facsimile of. I have been given stevia, and knowledge of sugar, knowing that my parents are keeping it from me. (parents are corporations in this analogy).