The infancy of YouTube and Twitch. Everyone made content for fun, pretty much no one was nude or in a hot tub, monetization didn't censor everything.

It was nice 🙂👍

For me, it was the 90s, before the entire landscape got consumed by giant corporations. I know it wasn't all roses back then, but it felt like you could find anything online, and it opened up a whole new world.

Remember when almost every new web site had a guestbook and would sometimes let you sign up for an email address using their domain? I had a [username]@britneyspears.com email address for a while.

Well, have a nap, then FIRE ZE MISSILES!

I have a lot of nostalgia for the late 90s/early 00s when the internet was still exciting. Videos! Games! Flash! Chats! Piracy! Winamp!

It was obviously when Homestar Runner was at his peak (the character himself, the webseries named after him, and the website it's hosted in all at the same time). This guy literally changed the accents of some people.

'99-2009, the best time for me..some aspects are better now (cheaper, faster, more stable) but search engines are absolute shit now and social media is a stain on society. The never ending need for increasing profits year on year kills everything in the end... It's killed so many good aspects of the net.

The best era is the first 5 years you experience it. That's when all the magic happens. Recapturing that level of awe wonder and pure joy is hard after you become a veteran.

2006-2012 - Torrenting was king and you could easily get anything you wanted.

Now you need to set up a VPN and hope you can trust it then find good torrent sites that are more hidden.

I'd have to do some digging to come up with the year, but I can describe it. It was after WWW happened, and all sorts of web content and communities took off. Search engines, like Altavista, had no algorithms except trying to find the thing you were looking for. Everything was free because it was ad supported, but (and this is key) the ads were no worse than what you'd see in a magazine: no popups, no sites making it impossible to hit the back button, etc. Maybe the worst thing was something would blink.

Once the war between ads getting worse and ad blockers avoiding them happened, everything went to hell. People making content had to come up with different business models, search engines started pushing paid content, paywalls started popping up, and the user experience went down the toilet.

Personally, for me, it was up until about 2008ish. YouTube and blogging existed but it was all still mostly amateurs having fun. There weren’t really paywalls and the iPhone was still so new that you didn’t assume someone else had a smartphone. My circle of friends mostly had blackberries so we could chat/email with friends and get information (like news headlines or sports scores or even directions) but going fully online was still a deliberate thing you did on a computer. Bosses, being older, still assumed you were unreachable after work hours.

Basically, it was the era right before the internet became a requirement to function in society but it still had lots of fun content.

Anywhere from the 90s to the mid to late 2000s because that's when you saw the most personal websites being made and what I would consider the golden era of Newgrounds. Now, I wasn't able to experience the personal websites of the 90s, but through various means I've seen some really cool personal websites from back then.

The few years before social media and the iPhone.

Early YouTube and early Facebook were really good. I liked old Facebook, as well as the timeline update. I miss Joe it used to work. I don't use it or any other equivalent social media because none of them work like that anymore. Lemmy is the only social media I use and that's more of a discussion board rather than keeping up with IRL friends.

Early YouTube comment was great before it got inundated with ads and sponsorships. I miss the silly humour you don't really see that much anymore. The last good era of YouTube was the height of youtube haikus, that sadly, like a lot of things, got replaced by tiktok content.

The 2000s for sure - from early online games and MMORPGs to a lot of forums, when Slashdot and Reddit were good, the start of Wikipedia, etc.

There was more optimism around everyone communicating with eachother internationally, and fostering communities. Nowadays it feels everything is dominated by a few big monopolies, and there's a lot more censorship.

Before the web when it was all ad free and just nerds was pretty cool. The email list / Forum era was pretty good.

I used to love doing web design. Was perfect career for me, a mix of creativity and coding. Websites then were art, creative, took risks. Then cms became standard, sites all looking the same. Sites are more user-friendly now, but I miss the wild, weird internet of its early days.

The few years when Google was fully usable.

The Fediverse, today.

But no not really. If you are on Tiktok or shit like that suddenly there are actually people living close to you. Connecting to people you can actually meet is important.

For me, right now. I’m having a blast figuring out how to self host all the enshittified services that I’m closing off access to.

Catch 22 really, I’m enjoying it because I’m learning so much, so fast but probably shouldn’t have to and it’s not feasible for most I realize.

Before the questionable fake content and the pollution of websites by intrusive ads.

I like the internet a lot now but I miss the Flash era. So many game devs creating so many unique bitesize concepts. I still play many of them on flashpoint but every now and then you get hit with the depressing realization that its over. Like watching old taped cable and realizing you can't actually change the channel.

The best era was 1993. I'd spend maybe 1 hour a day and read every new thing there was to read on the web.

Things went quickly wrong after you couldn't read every webpage update before new updates. The www was no longer human comprehensible.

I really got into the Internet in the mid-00's and I would say the early days of YouTube, Digg, and most things still being pre-social media with forums being widespread was my favorite era. However, my second favorite era is going on right now. I always wished open source services would be more popular and even back then there were issues with corporate controlled services screwing over their users (see the Digg Migration). I'm so glad to see the Fediverse finally taking off, with self hosting options and no centralized entity who can shut the whole thing down at the flick of a switch. Leaving Twitter and Reddit behind has been very refreshing.

The early 2000's. When I clicked the chat button on ICQ that connected me with a stranger anywhere in the world, that blew my mind as a kid.

When e-mail addresses required "!" separators.

Livejournal in the late 90s-early 2000s. God I made such great lifelong friends there. Nowhere else has had that level of intimacy.