About John

Digital media troughout my life

In the mid-nineties, when I was about six years old, my father set up an old DOS machine for me in my bedroom. I remember one of the first games I played on my own PC being Indiana Jones and the Last Crussade, and many others followed—I'll probably create a whole separate page for my favourite games. (My all-time favourites are Siege of Avalon, Gothic, and Morrowind!)

In about 2004, with the help of a more tech-savvy friend (read: he did all the hard work), I created and moderated a fantasy themed role-playing forum for my friends and schoolmates. (Oh wow, I just found it on the Internet Archive ... now I want to make a new forum.) Around that time I also joined vampirefreaks.com, a social network for Gothics where I learned what little I know about html. I chatted on ICQ and IMVU and other more obscure platforms, and was active in several forums and other online communities.

Around 2010, Vampirefreaks was replaced by facebook, which in turn was superseded by instagram. My friend group moved from my forum to skype, which was then replaced by discord. And the angsty teenager who thought he'd never find love and peace, over the following decade turned into a jolly middle-aged husband and father.

But even though I'm in a much happier place now than I was back then, I often find myself wallowing in nostalgia for those early 2000s. They were uncertain (and emotionally unstable) times, but with that uncertainty also came excitement and ... promise? No clear path ahead, limited responsibilities, a lot of time to explore and discover who I was and who I wanted to be ... and at least the theoretical possibility to become whoever I wanted.

Where was I going with this? Ah, yes, nostalgia. Some time last year, after listening to a lot of music from my youth, I suddenly started to long for the internet of the early 2000s, the exciting digital wildernes that begged to be explored and shaped by us. So I researched and found out there are other people like me! Old people deliberately trying to revive, repopulate, reestablish the internet of the past, but also young people, just being creative and brilliant and shaping the web in their image, as we did. To all of you: Thank you for making the world a more exciting place!