oh hello there 1999 nice to see you again
https://ristar.itch.io/secret-little-haven
@atinyfairy OMG! This is so cool! thank you for sharing it or else I'd not have found it <3! I love those Mac OS 9 vibes and I have that same Imac g3 model!
@teaduckie yeah it looks amazing! I have lots of memories of browsing sailormoon forums in the late 90s and early 00s, and chatting with friends over IM, and playing with silly desktop toys and dollmakers and stuff........ it's 2000% my aesthetic and the writing seems pretty good too
@atinyfairy Me too, it takes me back to the time we got Internet at home (I think 1998-1999) and... I really missed those times and that kind of Internet, simpler times... Searching the Internet before Google with MSN, Altavista, Excite, downloading Sega Megadrive / Genesis roms, forums, IRC, IM (Windows/MSN messenger, ICQ, etc) discovering about Linux. Joining geocities, Lycos, those ISP cds with demos... I can go on forever :). The only thing I won't miss is the speed and the dialers.
@teaduckie the speed shaped the culture too, though! Low-color graphics with dithering, simple animated gifs to keep stuff visually interesting while pages loaded, the MIDI & MOD/IT/S3M music scene because while MP3s existed you basically had to download them overnight…
I had a 7 digit UIN on ICQ, that was what I mainly used hehe
I used MSN for roleplaying
@atinyfairy True, if you think about it, it was part of the experience. We worked with limitations but those limitations shaped us. . It also made us appreciate things more. Now you can go to Spotify and listen to all the music you want but before I had to leave my computer on overnight to download demos or even a single song. That's why a lot of people used download managers. I feel like the Internet was less commercial and more DIY. People loved to build websites and make content.
@teaduckie Everyone I know had a site, privately hosted or on geocities or tripod or whatever. It was just so easy to put up some fiction about a character or game you liked, add a counter and a guestbook and request placement in a webring or two
Download managers… I still use a download manager extension to scrape sites but nowadays we don't need the resume function (or the "spoof the server into giving you multiple download slots so you can download faster" function hehe)
@teaduckie We have bandcamp now but we don't really have like, midi or mod archive sites and communities anymore…
it feels more isolated…
and the same with fanfic. there's AO3 now, but older private archives you got a real sense of community from, like these stories and authors all had something in common that made them band together for this particular archive
idk
maple classic™ 
@atinyfairy @teaduckie there's literally a website called the mod archive?
@teaduckie @atinyfairy i mean yeah it's not a community but
the two mod communities i know are mod_shrine on irc and battle of the bits and they are TRASH
@squirrel @atinyfairy I need this in my life, thank you! <3 🦆
@teaduckie twitter is terrible, tumblr is better, pixiv is okay, but it all loses the sense of community from portfolio sites and art archives
tumblr is no replacement for keenspot or LJ
it's.... way harder to communicate with people and find community now I think. social media ironically makes it harder to have conversations.