Oh god you’re making me feel old. I can’t see the “at that time” context because lemmy.ml is screwing up backlinks for me right now, but I’m assuming it’s either when I got into the net (early 90’s) or when I was all-in on IRC (late 90’s). This wil be a bit of a cluster of answers to both :)

Back when I got into IRC, there was quite a bit. It’s hard to keep track of exactly what I started using when. Back in the early 90’s, those of us online ended up on IRC or places like Delphi Forums. I lived on Delphi and it reminded me back then of Lemmy now. Arguably, the biggest problem with back then is that either a group had some technical following, or you just didn’t see much about it. Interested in some fringe philosophy? If you just looked at numbers I swear you’d think Discordianism or the Church of Subgenious were the world’ majority religion back then.

Otherwise, there were lots of Bulletin Boards forums. Google may be advanced, but it also spiders orders of magnitude more pages than existed back then. Yahoo was surprisingly good for the smaller web. Otherwise, honestly, things felt very similar to me.

Everything was simple, though. Had to be. 56k modems were real, really did make that crazy noise, and downloading a movie was genuinely an investment of time and effort. Everyone knew somebody who would sell them something like “Everything Metallica” on CD for $5, usually to pay for pot money or whatever. Why? Because even if you had access to everything metallica online, it would take you days to download it and clean that shit up.

Ironically, I think messengers were more used/useful back then. Perhaps because there were fewer, so you could talk to all your messenger-using friends by just running 2 or 3 on your computer? I STILL remember my old IQC number, and was always proud it was only 6 digits! I never got into AOL, but I had AIM for one or two friends, Y! for one or two friends, and IQC for 20-30 friends. Most of them were people I never met or would meet (super nerd). But it was great because you’d get to KNOW the people you got to know. I had a buddy in Norway who had so little in common with me, but we hit it off so good he ended up getting me into Melodic Death Metal and one of my still-favorite bands Theatre of Tragedy. Early side of that window, about 20% of IRC rooms were something between piracy, sex chats, or RPGs. The rest was a random mishmash. Later on, I swear there were more RPG chats.

I could probably talk for weeks on it. There’s a few products that came and went that I swear should have been the “next big thing” but failed due to bad business. There was a community game engine I worked on a game for called BYOND that still runs with a couple thousand players. It would’ve ended up on a front page if the founders either had more business savvy or just open-sourced it. Then there’s Digg. Talk about a mirror image of the reddit bullshit, but Digg was smaller AND fucked up bigger than redit did. None of us were happy to go to reddit, but digg turned to shit. We knew reddit was crap (nobody ever thought their leadership was ok) when we went there, but there were no other options anyone took seriously.

That about gets us to the end of “the good old days”.