Though if your friend is over and wants to check their msn, DO NOT LET THEM LOG IN TO YOUR TRILLIAN. It will merge your friends lists because Trillian followed a "one person many accounts" model, not a "many people each with many accounts" one.
I think the problem is that all the other chat services that they used to connect to closed off their connection protocols. Can't serve a bunch of shitty advetisements if users aren't using your website or app.
Just one open source free platform would be fine. IRC with modern protocols for pics and video that can be viewed in the chat app of your choosing. Keep it simple, or add backgrounds. Mini chat boxes, or transparancy. Basic low resource use, or heavy, you decide, same open cross app platform.
ICQ was pretty good. You could message offline people, which AOL/aim didn't support. Of course, this lead to a whole experience of waiting for your friend/crush to log on, but then not messaging them immediately... but then they log off and the opportunity passed.
It takes me a minute to remember my cell number, but I can rattle off my IQC number in a second. My ICQ fridge magnet was kept for decades through multiple moves
I remember i downloaded ICQ for my counter strike clan. That was the first i had ever heard of it, but i guess it had hit international popularity already . When I realized you just got a number, i was baffled that i couldnt search by name. Didnt take me long to memorize that number and make many online friends
Random chat made me some amazing friends that I kept in touch with for decades. Those friendships lasted longer than IQC did. Sadly, the Internet is a different place now.
I loved ICQ too at the time, but I'm not giving up End-To-End encrypted messaging for copyright stealing ICQ.
“You agree that by posting any material or information anywhere on the ICQ Services and Information you surrender your copyright and any other proprietary right in the posted material or information. You further agree that ICQ Inc. is entitled to use at its own discretion any of the posted material or information in any manner it deems fit, including, but not limited to, publishing the material or distributing it.”
But I'm totally okay to see ICQ brought back as a "skin" for the matrix-protocol. Something that looks, sounds and works like ICQ, but is based on modern communications technology.
OLED. Can still use modern advances in practical tech. Can still have open source, modern kernel linux, modern ram and low power 3nm chips. Just keep all the tech simple and clean of marketing and addiction. All the good, less of the bad.
How about a non-chain? Local pizza places still thrived in the 90s. That was one of the best parts of the 90s. Wal*Mart was slowly killing off mom-and-pop shops, but it hadn't finished yet, so there was a lot of variety and still a lot of craftsmanship in general.
yeah like star trek holodeck style where we have all the trappings of the 90s without the misogyny, homophobia, racism, ableism, transphobia, or the war on drugs.
just the nightmare is alive in Gary. ain't had power in weeks from what i heard. and it's dog days. there's no way the delays in repairs ain't intentional.
Honestly, the 90s was a shit time for many LGBTQ people and often PoCs as well. Can we have (at least) todays levels of wokeness? Oh and today levels of healthcare... and today levels of assistive technology for people needing assistance, oh and...
Blonkboster's is legally distinct from Blockbuster's and it smells the same, but i say you can still taste the hog anus when you get blasted by the air freshener
Come waste some more hours, I posted the details of the network I'm on in a other comment in this thread (dont want to spam it too much and make people upset about it). Its very active and full of cool people :)
My channels were niche ones with the same regular people. A safe place to hang out and talk about anything. It was my introvert version of going to the mall.
If someone is going to run with this idea, I very sincerely ask that you please do it in one of the locations marked on this map. Then my company will be able to operate a 1990s-technology cellular phone network in the proposed neo-Amish town, a network that will enable 1990s GSM cellphones to actually work! And I do mean it with full seriousness - the linked website is my actual company, with all attendant legal and contact info.
Out of the set of locations marked on the linked map, I strongly prefer the ones in Oregon. I and the rest of my founding team are based in California, and I am a trans woman - hence certain places are, quite sadly, simply unsafe for to me travel to, let alone the intricate tasks of building towers, installing equipment and then operating and maintaining it. There are no PCS spectrum vacancies in our home state of CA, but OR is close, has good spectrum available, and it is a lovely state with strong LGBTQ+ rights.
Please elaborate on your comment. What do you mean by "managed a 2G website"? The technology we advocate for, whose proper name is GSM but which is more commonly referred to as 2G because it is a "second generation" cellular tech, is a voice call technology that has nothing to do with websites or Internet.
Or are you asking how we put up a website for our non-profit company? If that is the question, then I don't see what is so mysterious: our website is currently just one HTML page, simple enough to be hand-coded in vi, and that method is indeed how I made it...
Or are you asking how we managed to create and run the actual company behind the website? Now here the answer is extreme devotion and dedication, my friend! I gave decades of my life to GSM technology, in my previous project going back to 2011 I sought to design and build my own GSM phone handset, hence I have just the right combination of qualifications and dedication to pursue my new/current idea of building a replacement network for the one that was wrongfully shut down. Just earlier this month the evil overlords of T-Mobile USA shut down their nationwide GSM/2G network; while everyone in r/vintagemobilephones on Reddit only cried and lamented, I gritted my teeth and kept working.
But I feel like we could import some of the modern improvements, and improve on them even more. Like #metoo, lgbtq rights, and generally acknowledging and attempting to reduce/solve subconscious and systemic bigotry (racism, sexism etc)
The last time I was in a discussion about the 90's it was a group of people agreeing that they needed to go back to the 90's because it was the best time, that it truly was the peak of human civilization... and I got downvoted for pointing out how homophobic the era was. I'm glad to see there's a different outcome this time.
It's really fucking sad that Pizza hut is seen and remembered in any positive way in the US, it really shows how fucking bad you have it.
A pizze hut opened in my city here in Sweden about two decades ago and it immediately became "ooh, this american thing everyone has heard of through movies is so bad that everyone has to go to it just to experience the unimaginable shit quality and taste."
Even the cheapest street corner pizzerias we have are in a whole other universe comparably.
The key there is that it is remembered in a positive way, not that people thing of it positively now. Pizza Hut used to be it's own thing, you would get deep dish personal pizza that came out on the cast iron pan they cooked it in. It wasn't the greatest thing ever, but it was good and different. Now, it's just shitty generic pizza and i don't know why anyone would go there, I don't think I've been there for at least 20 years now. It also used to be more like a restaurant, not a fast food joint.
Pizza Hut was never good but it was one of the conglomerations that led to a fairly universal experience. Everywhere had and has a Pizza Hut. It wasn’t limited to the northeast people that genuinely have access to good pizza. It was also generally a childhood experience, where one cared more about the other parts of the whole thing rather than the quality. 90s Pizza Hut was known for “book it”, a program that joined with schools. If you read a book you’d get a star, 5 stars meant a free small pizza. In a world not over saturated by gamification of every single thing it was pretty meaningful
'80s Pizza Hut is entirely different to modern (ie post 2000) Pizza Hut. They may not have been quite as good as the best pizzarias, but they were actually good. '90s is where the decline started, but they weren't "unimaginable shit" until the turn of the century.
20 years ago was 2006. As I understand it was still okay in 1996 though when I was negative three years old. Also the one near me is actually pretty okay, greasy slop but hey sometimes thats all you want.
I hate to be the regressive, but yeah…this was better.
I am always a forward looking person but i agree with this. The '90s is probably the best time period for humanity. Other parts of the world had it bad of course, but the cold war was over and the economy was amazing. It was the second "Era of Good Feelings".
The '90s is probably the best time period for humanity. Other parts of the world had it bad of course
I was going to say, "only if your idea of humanity was very narrow".
For certain groups of people in the west it was great. But, for the vast majority of the world, it was much worse. We don't realize how close most of the world was to starvation as just a daily threat back then.
At the very least, the West in the 90s had been more welcoming of migrants and refugees fleeing chaos and economic decline, such was the case with Rwanda and Yugoslavia at the time. The more prosperous nations had been willing to share the safety and prosperity to people outside. But now though? I can't say the same about the richer countries being more welcoming than before.
Part of the reason for that is that the rest of the world was so incredibly poor that only a handful of refugees could make it to the US. There was simply a lot less migration and asylum-seeking back then. It wasn't because people were better off. It's really because they were worse off.
The rest of the world is now richer, and most of the world can afford access to a cell phone. That means they know about the US and how much better it is there, and can often find a way to try to slip through the border to get refugee status.
AI was the last straw. Have you heard of that island off India where the indiginous population kills any outsiders fool-hardy enough to land? They are doing the rest of us a favor by preserving a way of life we may need again someday, or at the very least should not want to see completely extinguished. A reminder. Never forget your roots. Here in Pennsylvania we have the Amish performing a similar function. Significantly less hostile, though still set apart, they bear witness to what was normal for all of us a couple short centuries ago: horse and buggy, wood stoves and lanterns. My intent is to be AI Amish, which means Internet Amish. Not 1780, but 1980. Neo-Amish. I'm fine driving a car and flipping a lightswitch, by which I mean that they don't make me into something I hate, which AI and doomscrolling do.
I think we can do better than Pizza Hut and block buster.
Nostalgia is a powerful drug, but the 90s was not so great. But sure, let’s take the good parts and leave behind the CRT screens and 20 mins to load a jpg.
If only they wouldn't become unmanageably large at current bigger sizes. And you can slim down with projection, but why use CRT at that point. I never though I would appreciate making my screen 'worse', but for a lot of games on the RetroPi, having the appropriate (CRT) filter makes it much closer to how it would have looked back in the day.
Also even if you do go down the historical route, a lot of that tech is kind of a pain in the arse to recreate in this day and age. Take it from someone who's genuinely interested in this kind of thing! If you want television as it was in the UK pre-switchover for example, you basically have to rely on a bunch of SDRs and HackTV (very modern tech) to get it to actually work as a television did back in the day with the remote, channel flipping, and everything the TV actually did back then. All the equipment that did it 'for real' went into landfill in the early '10s; yes you can get a crappy little RF modulator for PAL or NTSC still but technologically speaking if you want an accurate recreation of the full feature set (ie an actual UHF PAL signal with proper VSB modulation, NICAM and teletext) this means relying on modern tools to recreate the old-fashioned signal in software. Yes you can do HDMI-VGA-composite chains or better yet HDMI-VGA-RGB but most modern equipment for this is total rubbish. It would be better to do a limited production run of CRTs with proper digital inputs, but that's a whole load of R&D nobody can really afford given the tiny market for it. The industrial capacity for it just doesn't exist any more.
It's the same thing with dial up, you absolutely could in 2026 implement a '90s style dial up ISP on a private old-school telephone network for a '90s town (if the PSTN hasn't been ripped out already like the UK, otherwise you'd have to lay new copper) but a) literally nothing is optimised for that any more, so unless you resort to ahistoric measures like MITMing all the traffic and replacing most of it with optimised versions it's going to be a colossal waste of lifeblood and b) even if you went to such lengths dial up was genuinely a pain in the arse. We adopted broadband fairly early (getting WiFi to work with Windows 98 was about as fun as you'd expect!) and it was a genuine revolution in how the internet used. It would be better to just serve the modern internet but aggressively curtail what got through on the ISP level in my opinion.
I like HaLow for the mesh aspect. 30mb mesh is pretty hot. Use BlockBuster for it's actual intent. But give us a 30mb channel for everything else. Brings us up to early broadband. nobody wants 200bps irc over LoRa. :) Blockbuster doesn't have music :)
Me watching the original Matrix "That filthy guy willing to betray humanity just to be a little happy"
Me living in the post covid/trump ruins the world/Jewish people doing a genocide... "Hook me up, you don't even have to make me rich, but that Joey Pants was on to something"
That's going to be our dementia towns isn't it? No 1950s world for us. We'll all be sat there playing Mario 64, listening to The Prodigy, and wondering who that nice old lady is that lives with us...
Personally if my mind starts going haul me to the desert and give me a loaded gun. It's not like I'll be on meds so the cultures wont be sickened by my corpse.
Yeah I have zero intention of experiencing dementia from a first-person perspective regardless of what my government has to say on the matter, if I outlive my wits then something has gone horribly wrong in my view.
The problem with that thinking is that you're thinking now as an outside observer who can look at your mental decay and say "that guy should kill himself". But, when you're in the body apparently it's different. My friend's dad died of alzheimers, it took more than a decade.
At first he was just a bit forgetful and absent-minded. But, he was still driving, doing woodworking projects, taking care of his grand kids, helping around the house, etc. Then he had to give up driving, but he was fine taking the bus, and he just made sure to have his cell phone on him all the time in case he needed some help. He even took a camping and hiking trip with my friend and his kids later in the process when he was regularly mistaking people for other people and couldn't do much anything unsupervised. Eventually he had to go into a specialty care home.
At what point in the process would you, as an outside observer, think "ok, it's time to kill yourself"? And, do you think he felt that way in his own head? Even when he had noticeably diminished capacity, he still enjoyed spending time with his family and friends.
Well for one I have no intention of having friends and family and for two given my familial medical history I'll probably get cancer around the same time. My end goal would be to put myself into a situation where survival is minimum, so even if I can't kill myself with a bullet then heat stroke, dehydration, or exposure will finish the job.
But I'll also admit I'm kinda hoping I get killed before I'm 30, want to beat my grandfather's record of 32. Passive suicidality ftw.
It's too bad that a lot of the games that kids of the 80s/90s played were platformers, or "action games", or other games where your coordination and reaction speeds matter. When you get to be 70/80, your reaction speed will be crap, so those kinds of games won't be as fun (unless you can play on an emulator that lets you slow things down).
But, turn based games like Final Fantasy will still work. The selection of those games on older consoles was mediocre. But, if you include newer Steam games, there are decades of good turn based games you could play in an old folks home.
I wonder what happens when the first generation that played games online starts hitting old folks homes. Will there be a seniors home with a minecraft (Java Edition) server? Will there be a wow classic server for the residents? That could actually be fun.
I think I have enough hardware laying around to serve as a dialup ISP for this. And the upstream bandwidth I already have is probably more than that of my dialup ISP 30 years ago.
Super agree with that. I was literally on AIM until the servers went down, not even kidding, and I love the cozy feel of N64 games rented at Blockbuster with Pizza Hut and so on... but I actually don't wanna go back to tank controls or AIM. I like Telegram and Signal a lot better. I like Summoning Salt videos on youtube. I don't really wanna go back.
Yep, fighting for a cause today means posting on social media. Most people are all talk and no action, which makes it easier for the few who do act to get their way.
I've been wondering what tech levels would be SELF SUSTAINABLE. Like the amish lifestyle is a circular economy, everything they need they can make themselves, grow themselves, and compost themselves. Like mostly.
But can you have something like electric motors or wind power in the same way? Can you have electronics? Can you have eReader? Like if you had a town the size of 50.000 people.
Theoretically advances in technology could allow for things like biological computing. Like a variety of seeds to produce plants making all sorts of medicine, or single cell cultures then organize into simple electronics. Not sure how sci-fi that is. But in a way that would be a "safe point" for civilization.
Because even after a limited nuclear exchange which is is getting more and more likely each year we're not going to have any global supply chain left.
One of the more misunderstood things about Amish people is that they cant have anything electronic. They arent against electronics. Like you said they practice self reliance above anything else, so they refuse to use anything that is powered by oil and gas because they cant make oil and gas products themselves.
One thing that has become really popular with the Amish is EBikes and solar power. Theyre fine with buying those things even though they dont produce them. And theyre fine with anything that runs on solar power because they have plenty of access to the sun.
Im not sure exactly how the loophole works that allows them to buy solar panels, since they aren’t producing them on their own. But the bigger thing to them is that the source of energy itself is widely available to them, which isnt true of oil or gas. Maybe it is that they could theoretically harvest solar power in other ways, so they are fine with buying a more efficient way to do it than what they can produce within their community. Something like that
Im not sure exactly how the loophole works that allows them to buy solar panels
I'm certainly no expert, but I had the impression that the big thing was if something they got required ongoing resources, leaving them beholden to outside the community beyond the initial transaction. They will trade with outside communities, just if that thing you buy now means you need to get gasoline every week or if that thing requires you to pay an electric company, then it's a liability. So buy a solar panel, ok, one and done. Now things that can run and charge from them may be fair game.
The bigger 'loophole' is phones. They generally have phones available, though they limit their availability. Notably the concept of a phone ringing disrupting a family meal is unacceptable, so they likely would confine phone usage to some outbuildings. Also meant only to facilitate things like business or emergencies, not for personal communication.
Woah that's interesting. So they wouldn't be opposed to something like kite power, if you could turn the electronic software control program into a mechanical "clockwork" style mechanism.
And the invention of a grid storage battery that is circular / fully recyclable would be great too. But obviously there are already solutions like nickel iron but they aren't that efficient.
Genetically engineering a plant that is ultra efficient in producing a biofuel would be great. Ideally a bush that doesn't have to regrow and doesn't need to be replanted every year, but produce oil for diesel motors. Or some biofuel that can be used in a fuel cell, if you can build a simple fuel cell. Ammonia fuel cells maybe. (Sorry just a bunch of fancy ideas lol)
I don't think you could even have anything approaching 1970s level of tech and be self-sustainable in a small city. Would you know how to make a discrete transistor? How big a community would you need to spin up even a basic electronics factory?
I think 50,000 people means you're not even at the industrial revolution level of tech. You're certainly not going to be able to manufacture any electronics. That completely limits the power generation options. Also, you'd have to use pretty basic materials, because 50,000 people isn't enough to have advanced materials processing facilities. You'd also have a severely restricted diet, growing only whatever the local climate permits. It would probably have to be vegetarian, unless you had enough space for hunting (with bows and spears).
Yeah. That is what I mean, we rely on increasingly long global supply chains. Which makes local democracy and regulation harder. And makes sure that we get bigger hierarchies and people or institutions with larger wealth and power. And when the collapse comes all of it is going away. Besides optical drives, all our magnetic or electronic storage only lasts like a few decades too.
So IF we could like genetically engineer certain key technologies to replace even such things like rubber fore tires or biofuels or a way to efficiently produce at least some plastic precursors it would be huge. You only need the seeds and knowledge on how to grow them, collapsing complex industrial supply chains.
And if we could someone develop biocomputers that can store most of our libraries (e.g. anna's archive) and allow you to read we could preserve our knowledge too.
I'm not sure why you think that democracy and regulation are harder with global supply chains. It would seem to me that it's going to be harder to establish firm regulations in a small community where everyone knows everyone else. It's much easier to give your cousin Jim a pass than it is to adhere to strict regulations with someone close to you like that.
As for "when the collapse comes", that "when" is doing a lot of work.
And "biocomputers"? What makes you think that an imaginary technology that hasn't been invented yet is going to be better at storage than what we already know?
I am not down for this.
There are modern non Ai audio tools I use.
I like the media rich chat services we have too..
But, I understand.
We mustn't hide.
We mustn't run.
we must get into the damn robot.
And eleminnate the rich religious nut heads who are disappointed God hasn't come to vist and constructed a false God.
You can keep the IMs. I would like MP3s, though. A library could have a computer that can be booked for research purposes.
I'm debating over on-demand video and better TVs. Maybe a compromise would be the community decides its own broadcast schedule so it's not as instant but still allows some modern media.
I would probably choose the era of roughly 2012-2016.
Blockbuster went out of business for a reason. It was worse than Redbox and worse than Netflix's mail service. And eventually Netflix's streaming reached a magical peak where it was still affordable and had a great library. Almost everything was either Netflix or Hulu, and HBO waa only for really expensive high-budget stuff. Used to be Disney movies on Netflix.
Also... Idk how old this tweet is but it's weird to suddenly zee Nikki Limo pop up. I used to really enjoy her Tasty Tuesday show years ago.
Would you be OK with shifting the location just a tiny bit eastward, from Bend OR to Prineville OR? Crook County (which hosts Prineville) has vacant/unclaimed PCS spectrum, so we can operate our own 1990s cellular phone network, while Deschutes County (which hosts Bend and Sisters) unfortunately lacks the same. And yes, I and my team did explore that area with actual boots on the ground in the fall of 2025, less than a year ago.
I dream of a time in my life when I can sit around in my grandpa chair playing 80's and 90's video games on my 90inch PPMQ+LER/LED with macrovision and google-tone color rendering 3D/8D ultra-thin TV in a retro case to make it look like a giant version of those old floor model "piece of furniture in and of themselves" TVs like my grandpa had back in '84. Maybe my AI grandson can play along so I can relive the childlike wonder of playing through these games for the first time from the perspective of a kid AI.
We, uhm, do still have IRC. Right here. No need for a new town or anything. Most servers block Tor because of the chud spammers that have nothing else to do, unfortunately. Although most servers themselves will assign you a fake hostname.
Most of it is tech themed, although some channels are just people being people, sharing random stuff like stories from work. Technically still a project chat but they are never on topic. Or it's #project-offtopic.
Anything with a processor inside of it and connected to a high speed internet connection will enshittify. One wat is to limit CPU speed and internet, say use solar/wind powered mesh routers instead of fiber connections, so good enough to get info and simple communication, not enough for lots of pictures and video. That means you need a blockbuster for video.
Anything with a processor inside of it and connected to a high speed internet connection will enshittify.
No. Anything running proprietary software will enshittify. Pretending the problem is some sort of inevitability that can't be solved with Free Software is just doomerism.
Absolutely. Yeah, there have been attempts at enshittifying FOSS projects, they fork or are replaced. Control your own data, own your hardware, use open source, and enshittification can’t happen.
Other way around. If there's an open system that attracts a sufficient amount of users, companies will come to use money and shiny stuff to pull users to their proprietary platforms. It'll always happen when you let them use their bells and whistles.
If you want to bottle neck, just bottle neck the RAM. It doesn't even have to be an absolute limit, just mandate that off the shelf products can only have so much active memory, but people are free to buy more and install it themselves. That alone would enough of a barrier to entry that it keeps things reasonable for the vast majority of users, without inconveniencing those who have the inclination or professional necessity to go beyond.
The energy cost of replacing fiber optics with wireless... ugg, I shudder to imagine.
And we'd give it all up to go back. "You're here, breathing this dirty air, while you talk about how much better the clean air was. What hypocrisy!" ... Fuck off, Ben Shapiro
Lemmy is a link aggregator. When most people talk about "social media", they aren't talking about link aggregators. They're talking about something like Diaspora or Mastodon.
220 Comments
RoidingOldMan@lemmy.world · 156 pts · 1d
You’re shockingly close to the plot of The Matrix.
Godort@lemmy.ca · 133 pts · 1d
Me in 1999: Really? This is the peak of human civilization? Everything sucks though.
Me now: Maybe they were onto something
MoffKalast@lemmy.world · 31 pts · 1d
"I say your civilization, because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization." - ChatGPT
msage@programming.dev · 2 pts · 1d
rustyfish@piefed.world · 6 pts · 1d
More like The Village by M Knight Shamalambalan.
I would sign up?
lividweasel@lemmy.world · 13 pts · 19h
Whoa, Black Betty, Shyamalan
Karjalan@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 18h
Also, tangentially, the plot of project zomboid. Basically the zombie apocalypse happens in the late 90s so the survivors are stuck there forever
Sergio@piefed.social · 91 pts · 1d
OK, but we demand IRC instead of AOL-IM.
Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 35 pts · 1d
It’s period appropriate, should be fine
jdr@lemmy.ml · 24 pts · 1d
I want Pidgin or Trillian so I can talk to my friends on both MSN and Yahoo.
Also shoutouts to the brief period where everything was xmpp and Gmail could talk to Facebook and self-hosted.
Buddahriffic@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 1d
Though if your friend is over and wants to check their msn, DO NOT LET THEM LOG IN TO YOUR TRILLIAN. It will merge your friends lists because Trillian followed a "one person many accounts" model, not a "many people each with many accounts" one.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 23h
oh fun. that is an oversight.
bitjunkie@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 1d
Both still exist:
https://trillian.im/
https://pidgin.im/
jdr@lemmy.ml · 2 pts · 1d
Sure, and it's nice, but the network effect is a removed
dubs@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 2 pts · 21h
I think the problem is that all the other chat services that they used to connect to closed off their connection protocols. Can't serve a bunch of shitty advetisements if users aren't using your website or app.
cknight@fedinsfw.app · 2 pts · 22h
Just one open source free platform would be fine. IRC with modern protocols for pics and video that can be viewed in the chat app of your choosing. Keep it simple, or add backgrounds. Mini chat boxes, or transparancy. Basic low resource use, or heavy, you decide, same open cross app platform.
gnufuu@lemmy.ca · 21 pts · 1d
uh oh
Enkrod@feddit.org · 19 pts · 1d
No, not ICQ
jtrek@startrek.website · 16 pts · 1d
ICQ was pretty good. You could message offline people, which AOL/aim didn't support. Of course, this lead to a whole experience of waiting for your friend/crush to log on, but then not messaging them immediately... but then they log off and the opportunity passed.
ToiletFlushShowerScream@piefed.world · 9 pts · 1d
It takes me a minute to remember my cell number, but I can rattle off my IQC number in a second. My ICQ fridge magnet was kept for decades through multiple moves
Sc00ter@lemmy.zip · 4 pts · 1d
I remember i downloaded ICQ for my counter strike clan. That was the first i had ever heard of it, but i guess it had hit international popularity already . When I realized you just got a number, i was baffled that i couldnt search by name. Didnt take me long to memorize that number and make many online friends
ToiletFlushShowerScream@piefed.world · 2 pts · 20h
Random chat made me some amazing friends that I kept in touch with for decades. Those friendships lasted longer than IQC did. Sadly, the Internet is a different place now.
gnufuu@lemmy.ca · 9 pts · 1d
sad ship horn noises
MirrorGiraffe@piefed.social · 3 pts · 22h
I loved ICQ! I'm sure some people thought it was a horrible idea to see people type in real time but to me it was peak messenging.
Enkrod@feddit.org · 1 pts · 14h
I loved ICQ too at the time, but I'm not giving up End-To-End encrypted messaging for copyright stealing ICQ.
But I'm totally okay to see ICQ brought back as a "skin" for the matrix-protocol. Something that looks, sounds and works like ICQ, but is based on modern communications technology.
cknight@fedinsfw.app · 1 pts · 22h
I still know my ICQ number by heart, and a close friends too, who is lower than mine by about 50k. 140... and mine was 201...
Haven't used em in about 25 years.
But then I also still know my childhood phone number.
somebody_to_love@lemmy.today · 7 pts · 1d
Give me back the golden era of Usenet!
Bane_Killgrind@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 6 pts · 1d
Both. Pagers with LCD or eink only. No LED screens.
Ele7en7@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 1d
I think I have my Advisor Gold around here somewhere
cknight@fedinsfw.app · 1 pts · 22h
OLED. Can still use modern advances in practical tech. Can still have open source, modern kernel linux, modern ram and low power 3nm chips. Just keep all the tech simple and clean of marketing and addiction. All the good, less of the bad.
Bane_Killgrind@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 1 pts · 22h
Not sure that will work, ubiquitous video is still possible.
HuudaHarkiten@piefed.social · 4 pts · 1d
Well, the IRC part is easy. Just got to connect and start chatting.
If you are interested, may I suggest irc.inthemansion.com/6697 join #lobby to get started
Theres also a webchat available on the website :)
ElJefe@lemmy.ca · 3 pts · 23h
And Domino’s instead of Pizza Hut
rumba@lemmy.zip · 3 pts · 22h
Let's do both, gotta have options. and a Taco Bell
merc@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 5h
How about a non-chain? Local pizza places still thrived in the 90s. That was one of the best parts of the 90s. Wal*Mart was slowly killing off mom-and-pop shops, but it hadn't finished yet, so there was a lot of variety and still a lot of craftsmanship in general.
tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 22h
Dominos is the best national chain now, in the 90s not so much. But Pizza Hut has always been too oily.
Malica@lemmy.zip · 2 pts · 1d
Yahoo Messenger
zod000@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 2 pts · 1d
Maybe that's why I still use IRC. I was doing this subconsciously all along.
dubs@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 2 pts · 21h
IRC is still around and kicking. My friends and I use it all the time.
WolfmanEightySix@piefed.social · 1 pts · 10h
Yahoo or MSN.
artifex@piefed.zip · 52 pts · 1d
This is how you accidentally start a Gen-X commune.
fireweed@lemmy.world · 49 pts · 1d
Can we keep the "no smoking inside commercial establishments" policy at least? Otherwise I'm down.
Lushed_Lungfish@lemmy.ca · 34 pts · 1d
Also can we keep the progress (what little there has been) we made for LGBTQ folks?
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world · 12 pts · 23h
I would like to add one exception to this: explicitly for smoking establishments. It'd be nice to have a weed'n'feed is all.
applebusch@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 5 pts · 17h
yeah like star trek holodeck style where we have all the trappings of the 90s without the misogyny, homophobia, racism, ableism, transphobia, or the war on drugs.
MunkyNutts@lemmy.world · 36 pts · 1d
captainlezbian@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 1d
The nightmare of the 90s is alive in Ft Wayne
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 23h
just the nightmare is alive in Gary. ain't had power in weeks from what i heard. and it's dog days. there's no way the delays in repairs ain't intentional.
TIEPilot@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 1d
There are (or were) pockets of this in many cities. ATL was East Atlanta and Decatur, Richmond, VA has one.
I did want to retire to Portland but I'm not so certain thats a good idea anymore.
Shortstack@reddthat.com · 2 pts · 1d
Bruh it’s been gentrified for a long time
Gresham, the former sketchy part of town is posh now lol
Drewmeister@lemmy.world · 36 pts · 1d
Take me back to the time when I would finish before the bottom half of jenna jameson even manages to load
DarrinBrunner@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 1d
Well, with dial-up that could be 10 minutes.
You'd still beat me by 50 minutes, though.
rumba@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 22h
Data over LoRa is like 200bps :)
we don't draw things in real time tho, we wait for them to finish
Enkrod@feddit.org · 30 pts · 1d
Honestly, the 90s was a shit time for many LGBTQ people and often PoCs as well. Can we have (at least) todays levels of wokeness? Oh and today levels of healthcare... and today levels of assistive technology for people needing assistance, oh and...
DarrinBrunner@lemmy.world · 14 pts · 1d
We don't need to recreate every aspect.
chaogomu@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 1d
Treat it like a Ren Faire.
Wear the No Fear shirts and carry a Walkman, but do it for fun.
Sit back, watch some Reading Rainbow or Erie Indiana.
Maybe sing the Song that Never Ends.
It's all play acting, but it's nice. Especially if we focus on the nice parts of the 90s, the stuff that led to the wokeness of today.
Enkrod@feddit.org · 1 pts · 14h
I'm down for that
mojo_raisin@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 1d
Ya, and maybe we can have "Blockbuster's" and it'll be a co-op clone of the og.
Enkrod@feddit.org · 7 pts · 1d
I'm down for anything co-op
Sc00ter@lemmy.zip · 3 pts · 1d
Is a co-op clone just a community library with extra steps?
mojo_raisin@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 22h
Libraries are state run, unbranded, and mostly lend, Blonkboster's would be a company, just much less shitty.
Sc00ter@lemmy.zip · 3 pts · 21h
"Community" library. Like those stations where people store books to share with their neighbors for free.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 23h
Blonkboster's is legally distinct from Blockbuster's and it smells the same, but i say you can still taste the hog anus when you get blasted by the air freshener
captainlezbian@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 1d
Yeah I really don't want to have to lie to my doctor and say I'm into men to get my estrogen
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 23h
i got better healthcare in the 90s dude. but i needed less back then, so i got whatever i asked for.
otacon239@lemmy.world · 24 pts · 1d
Really, you have the opportunity to recreate the past and I’m stuck with AIM? I’ll stick to XMPP and IRC thanks.
Kirp123@lemmy.world · 12 pts · 1d
IRC is the shit. I remember wasting so many hours as a teenager just shooting the shit with random people.
AmyAye@nord.pub · 7 pts · 1d
IRC still exists man.
HuudaHarkiten@piefed.social · 5 pts · 1d
Come waste some more hours, I posted the details of the network I'm on in a other comment in this thread (dont want to spam it too much and make people upset about it). Its very active and full of cool people :)
Rhaedas@fedia.io · 4 pts · 1d
My channels were niche ones with the same regular people. A safe place to hang out and talk about anything. It was my introvert version of going to the mall.
Malica@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 1d
Our parents playing with fire
BallShapedMan@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 1d
Or at least ICQ!
bizarroland@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 1d
We should also have a couple of BBSs that run multiple MUDs.
zod000@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 3 pts · 1d
I can't wait to play LORD and Usurper again.
mnfalconia_a2gc@retrolemmy.com · 24 pts · 19h
If someone is going to run with this idea, I very sincerely ask that you please do it in one of the locations marked on this map. Then my company will be able to operate a 1990s-technology cellular phone network in the proposed neo-Amish town, a network that will enable 1990s GSM cellphones to actually work! And I do mean it with full seriousness - the linked website is my actual company, with all attendant legal and contact info.
Out of the set of locations marked on the linked map, I strongly prefer the ones in Oregon. I and the rest of my founding team are based in California, and I am a trans woman - hence certain places are, quite sadly, simply unsafe for to me travel to, let alone the intricate tasks of building towers, installing equipment and then operating and maintaining it. There are no PCS spectrum vacancies in our home state of CA, but OR is close, has good spectrum available, and it is a lovely state with strong LGBTQ+ rights.
RFKJrsBrainworm@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 6h
How did they manage a 2 G website‽ Amazing!
mnfalconia_a2gc@retrolemmy.com · 2 pts · 4h
Please elaborate on your comment. What do you mean by "managed a 2G website"? The technology we advocate for, whose proper name is GSM but which is more commonly referred to as 2G because it is a "second generation" cellular tech, is a voice call technology that has nothing to do with websites or Internet.
Or are you asking how we put up a website for our non-profit company? If that is the question, then I don't see what is so mysterious: our website is currently just one HTML page, simple enough to be hand-coded in vi, and that method is indeed how I made it...
Or are you asking how we managed to create and run the actual company behind the website? Now here the answer is extreme devotion and dedication, my friend! I gave decades of my life to GSM technology, in my previous project going back to 2011 I sought to design and build my own GSM phone handset, hence I have just the right combination of qualifications and dedication to pursue my new/current idea of building a replacement network for the one that was wrongfully shut down. Just earlier this month the evil overlords of T-Mobile USA shut down their nationwide GSM/2G network; while everyone in r/vintagemobilephones on Reddit only cried and lamented, I gritted my teeth and kept working.
a_random_fox@discuss.tchncs.de · 24 pts · 1d
Reminds of this bit from Freefall: http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff3200/fc03150.htm
SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world · 22 pts · 11h
I hope it doesn’t include 90’s racism, homophobia and transphobia. It was way worse than it is today.
zarkanian@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 3m
Or '90s crime.
QueenHawlSera@piefed.social · 21 pts · 22h
But will it have LGBT Rights?
WoodScientist@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 21h
We'll make it a gay blockbuster!
Aneb@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 20h
I feel like we can grandfather that into the 90s, you've watched nightmare on elm street I'm assuming,
Karjalan@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 18h
The 90s did a terrible job of that...
But I feel like we could import some of the modern improvements, and improve on them even more. Like #metoo, lgbtq rights, and generally acknowledging and attempting to reduce/solve subconscious and systemic bigotry (racism, sexism etc)
QueenHawlSera@piefed.social · 4 pts · 15h
The last time I was in a discussion about the 90's it was a group of people agreeing that they needed to go back to the 90's because it was the best time, that it truly was the peak of human civilization... and I got downvoted for pointing out how homophobic the era was. I'm glad to see there's a different outcome this time.
Aneb@lemmy.world · 17 pts · 20h
So um is this just millennial retirement? Boomers are getting their senior communities we need our own communities
fyzzlefry@retrolemmy.com · 9 pts · 20h
I'm gonna run d&d 10 hours a day when I retire
parrhesia@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 17h
Oh heck ya
Leather@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 18h
Did you know there is a generation between boomers and millennials?
Duranie@leminal.space · 11 pts · 17h
I feel both entirely seen and unseen at the same time.
DaleGribble88@programming.dev · 2 pts · 17h
Really? Never heard about them. They must be forgettable.
andxz@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 4h
I think you're truly onto something there.
M137@lemmy.today · 17 pts · 15h
It's really fucking sad that Pizza hut is seen and remembered in any positive way in the US, it really shows how fucking bad you have it.
A pizze hut opened in my city here in Sweden about two decades ago and it immediately became "ooh, this american thing everyone has heard of through movies is so bad that everyone has to go to it just to experience the unimaginable shit quality and taste."
Even the cheapest street corner pizzerias we have are in a whole other universe comparably.
__Lost__@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 2 pts · 4h
The key there is that it is remembered in a positive way, not that people thing of it positively now. Pizza Hut used to be it's own thing, you would get deep dish personal pizza that came out on the cast iron pan they cooked it in. It wasn't the greatest thing ever, but it was good and different. Now, it's just shitty generic pizza and i don't know why anyone would go there, I don't think I've been there for at least 20 years now. It also used to be more like a restaurant, not a fast food joint.
ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 1 pts · 4h
Pizza Hut was never good but it was one of the conglomerations that led to a fairly universal experience. Everywhere had and has a Pizza Hut. It wasn’t limited to the northeast people that genuinely have access to good pizza. It was also generally a childhood experience, where one cared more about the other parts of the whole thing rather than the quality. 90s Pizza Hut was known for “book it”, a program that joined with schools. If you read a book you’d get a star, 5 stars meant a free small pizza. In a world not over saturated by gamification of every single thing it was pretty meaningful
JcbAzPx@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 2h
'80s Pizza Hut is entirely different to modern (ie post 2000) Pizza Hut. They may not have been quite as good as the best pizzarias, but they were actually good. '90s is where the decline started, but they weren't "unimaginable shit" until the turn of the century.
ibelieveinthehousehippo@lemmy.ca · 1 pts · 1h
The Blockbuster glazing going on these days is more egregious in my opinion.
I loved renting movies in general, but no one talking about how great it was was old enough to be an account holder with them.
zarkanian@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 2m
Forgetting about the Blockbuster censorship. Being able to rent video games was pretty awesome, though.
PalmTreeIsBestTree@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 7h
vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 7h
20 years ago was 2006. As I understand it was still okay in 1996 though when I was negative three years old. Also the one near me is actually pretty okay, greasy slop but hey sometimes thats all you want.
PalmTreeIsBestTree@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 7h
vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 7h
Wouldn't know. As I said I was born in 99.
"Where were you on 9/11" Fuck if I care I wasn't sapient yet.
WraithGear@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 15h
i think it was mostly the mood lighting and the cups, and they ripped families in with the scholastic reading coupons.
Ashiette@lemmy.world · 15 pts · 12h
That's basically the premise of The Matrix.
RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world · 15 pts · 22h
IRC and newsgroups, too. Self hosted websites and forums.
I hate to be the regressive, but yeah…this was better.
TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 22h
I am always a forward looking person but i agree with this. The '90s is probably the best time period for humanity. Other parts of the world had it bad of course, but the cold war was over and the economy was amazing. It was the second "Era of Good Feelings".
veniasilente@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 2 pts · 18h
There's a reason Agent Smith said the 90s was the peak of humanity. He should know.
merc@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 5h
I was going to say, "only if your idea of humanity was very narrow".
For certain groups of people in the west it was great. But, for the vast majority of the world, it was much worse. We don't realize how close most of the world was to starvation as just a daily threat back then.
TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 5h
At the very least, the West in the 90s had been more welcoming of migrants and refugees fleeing chaos and economic decline, such was the case with Rwanda and Yugoslavia at the time. The more prosperous nations had been willing to share the safety and prosperity to people outside. But now though? I can't say the same about the richer countries being more welcoming than before.
merc@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 2h
Part of the reason for that is that the rest of the world was so incredibly poor that only a handful of refugees could make it to the US. There was simply a lot less migration and asylum-seeking back then. It wasn't because people were better off. It's really because they were worse off.
The rest of the world is now richer, and most of the world can afford access to a cell phone. That means they know about the US and how much better it is there, and can often find a way to try to slip through the border to get refugee status.
dubs@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 6 pts · 21h
The word "was" is doing a lot of work here. Those things all still exist, and I currently use all of them :)
merc@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 5h
Newsgroups are just a good technology. Decentralized, moderated as much as the forum decides it needs. Not monetized in any way.
waggz@programming.dev · 1 pts · 21h
websites you could only discover via a webring
friend_of_satan@lemmy.world · 14 pts · 1d
This guy is doing it https://openpath.quest/2026/i-am-retiring-from-tech-to-live-offline
Khruks@aussie.zone · 13 pts · 6h
I think we can do better than Pizza Hut and block buster.
Nostalgia is a powerful drug, but the 90s was not so great. But sure, let’s take the good parts and leave behind the CRT screens and 20 mins to load a jpg.
__Lost__@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 6 pts · 5h
CRT screens are great, i wish they hadn't stopped developing them.
Chee_Koala@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 3h
If only they wouldn't become unmanageably large at current bigger sizes. And you can slim down with projection, but why use CRT at that point. I never though I would appreciate making my screen 'worse', but for a lot of games on the RetroPi, having the appropriate (CRT) filter makes it much closer to how it would have looked back in the day.
mobyduck648@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 3h
Also even if you do go down the historical route, a lot of that tech is kind of a pain in the arse to recreate in this day and age. Take it from someone who's genuinely interested in this kind of thing! If you want television as it was in the UK pre-switchover for example, you basically have to rely on a bunch of SDRs and HackTV (very modern tech) to get it to actually work as a television did back in the day with the remote, channel flipping, and everything the TV actually did back then. All the equipment that did it 'for real' went into landfill in the early '10s; yes you can get a crappy little RF modulator for PAL or NTSC still but technologically speaking if you want an accurate recreation of the full feature set (ie an actual UHF PAL signal with proper VSB modulation, NICAM and teletext) this means relying on modern tools to recreate the old-fashioned signal in software. Yes you can do HDMI-VGA-composite chains or better yet HDMI-VGA-RGB but most modern equipment for this is total rubbish. It would be better to do a limited production run of CRTs with proper digital inputs, but that's a whole load of R&D nobody can really afford given the tiny market for it. The industrial capacity for it just doesn't exist any more.
It's the same thing with dial up, you absolutely could in 2026 implement a '90s style dial up ISP on a private old-school telephone network for a '90s town (if the PSTN hasn't been ripped out already like the UK, otherwise you'd have to lay new copper) but a) literally nothing is optimised for that any more, so unless you resort to ahistoric measures like MITMing all the traffic and replacing most of it with optimised versions it's going to be a colossal waste of lifeblood and b) even if you went to such lengths dial up was genuinely a pain in the arse. We adopted broadband fairly early (getting WiFi to work with Windows 98 was about as fun as you'd expect!) and it was a genuine revolution in how the internet used. It would be better to just serve the modern internet but aggressively curtail what got through on the ISP level in my opinion.
Lemminary@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 5h
20 min to load a jpeg is exactly what kept us humble
SalmonTractor@discuss.tchncs.de · 13 pts · 1d
Instead of AIM, MeshCore. Cheap, off-net, encrypted, solar-powered, simple.
rumba@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 22h
Reticulum and HaLow please. Give me enough bandwidth to stream a movie from my house.
SalmonTractor@discuss.tchncs.de · 1 pts · 18h
Ubiquiti p2p microwave links for gigabit speed backhaul. But that defeats the purpose of Blockbuster.
rumba@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 9h
I like HaLow for the mesh aspect. 30mb mesh is pretty hot. Use BlockBuster for it's actual intent. But give us a 30mb channel for everything else. Brings us up to early broadband. nobody wants 200bps irc over LoRa. :) Blockbuster doesn't have music :)
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works · -1 pts · 23h
Meshcore, and the underlying LoRa, are trash.
Rhaedas@fedia.io · 12 pts · 1d
Black Mirror's San Junipero.
It's interesting how so many virtual realities tend to offer the 80s-90s as the best world to be in.
mrmisses@lemmy.world · 11 pts · 1d
Lost me at allowing AOL. I was there as a teenager for the first AOL and looking back it was not a good thing.
SpruceBringsteen@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 1d
Warning for /u/mrmisses: 12:15:11 PM You've been warned by /u/SpruceBringsteen. Your warning level has increased from 0% to 20%.
Stolas@lemmy.ca · 11 pts · 20h
I'm not. There were some awful parts of the 90s.
It'll never be the same anyway. Something that a lot of legacy gaming servers has taught me is that you can't replicate nostalgic memories.
JcbAzPx@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 2h
We don't have to do everything. Even the Amish allow for some advancement.
BigDanishGuy@sh.itjust.works · 11 pts · 10h
AIM? I think you meant to say "we use ICQ and everyone have a 5digit number"
Ooh can we have a IRC server too? We need a place to coordinate super soaker fights. Where did the humongous super soakers with backpacks go?
WolvenSpectre@lemmy.ca · 10 pts · 1d
Me watching the original Matrix "That filthy guy willing to betray humanity just to be a little happy" Me living in the post covid/trump ruins the world/Jewish people doing a genocide... "Hook me up, you don't even have to make me rich, but that Joey Pants was on to something"
Blackmist@feddit.uk · 9 pts · 14h
That's going to be our dementia towns isn't it? No 1950s world for us. We'll all be sat there playing Mario 64, listening to The Prodigy, and wondering who that nice old lady is that lives with us...
dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 11h
Honestly, if I start to loose my mind, that's where I'd want to be. :(
vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 7h
Personally if my mind starts going haul me to the desert and give me a loaded gun. It's not like I'll be on meds so the cultures wont be sickened by my corpse.
mobyduck648@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 6h
Yeah I have zero intention of experiencing dementia from a first-person perspective regardless of what my government has to say on the matter, if I outlive my wits then something has gone horribly wrong in my view.
merc@sh.itjust.works · 3 pts · 6h
What culture won't be sickened?
The problem with that thinking is that you're thinking now as an outside observer who can look at your mental decay and say "that guy should kill himself". But, when you're in the body apparently it's different. My friend's dad died of alzheimers, it took more than a decade.
At first he was just a bit forgetful and absent-minded. But, he was still driving, doing woodworking projects, taking care of his grand kids, helping around the house, etc. Then he had to give up driving, but he was fine taking the bus, and he just made sure to have his cell phone on him all the time in case he needed some help. He even took a camping and hiking trip with my friend and his kids later in the process when he was regularly mistaking people for other people and couldn't do much anything unsupervised. Eventually he had to go into a specialty care home.
At what point in the process would you, as an outside observer, think "ok, it's time to kill yourself"? And, do you think he felt that way in his own head? Even when he had noticeably diminished capacity, he still enjoyed spending time with his family and friends.
vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 5h
Well for one I have no intention of having friends and family and for two given my familial medical history I'll probably get cancer around the same time. My end goal would be to put myself into a situation where survival is minimum, so even if I can't kill myself with a bullet then heat stroke, dehydration, or exposure will finish the job.
But I'll also admit I'm kinda hoping I get killed before I'm 30, want to beat my grandfather's record of 32. Passive suicidality ftw.
Sunflier@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 5h
Uh, "Golden Eye"; pyramid level, slaps only, no Odd Job.
merc@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 6h
It's too bad that a lot of the games that kids of the 80s/90s played were platformers, or "action games", or other games where your coordination and reaction speeds matter. When you get to be 70/80, your reaction speed will be crap, so those kinds of games won't be as fun (unless you can play on an emulator that lets you slow things down).
But, turn based games like Final Fantasy will still work. The selection of those games on older consoles was mediocre. But, if you include newer Steam games, there are decades of good turn based games you could play in an old folks home.
I wonder what happens when the first generation that played games online starts hitting old folks homes. Will there be a seniors home with a minecraft (Java Edition) server? Will there be a wow classic server for the residents? That could actually be fun.
Zorque@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 1d
The technology isnt the problem, though. Its how people are using it that is.
This is just the "80s were so much better... as ling as you werent gay" or "50s were so much better... as long as you werent black" but for the 90s.
The people making our lives arent going to stop just cause you slap a fresh coat of
denialnostalgia over it.thagoat@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 8 pts · 1d
Can I have my portable cd player back?
orbituary@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 8 pts · 1d
I just bought a Sony Minidisc player... I miss N3P Mixtape CDs. So, I'm embracing ludditerousness.
NotEasyBeingGreen@slrpnk.net · 2 pts · 1d
I mean, you can get an old phone and rip your CDs and put each one on a separate 1 GB SDcard...
papalonian@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 1d
They can also... Get a portable cd player
Sergio@piefed.social · 3 pts · 1d
I once had a DVD player that played CDs with MP3s on it. (I just felt like letting everybody know.)
NotEasyBeingGreen@slrpnk.net · 1 pts · 3h
Wow, it didn't occur to me that these still exist! 😅
Only like €30 new! Probably like €5 used....
SatansMaggotyCumFart@piefed.world · 8 pts · 1d
Blockbuster doesn't carry pornography.
bitjunkie@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 1d
They don't carry anything
SatansMaggotyCumFart@piefed.world · 2 pts · 1d
That's not entirely true.
MintyFresh@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 23h
They carry rose tinted memories
mlg@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 1d
RCEs, RCEs everywhere
But I mean at least everything has a small memory footprint instead of using 4Gb to load a god damn web page.
neidu3@sh.itjust.works · 7 pts · 1d
I think I have enough hardware laying around to serve as a dialup ISP for this. And the upstream bandwidth I already have is probably more than that of my dialup ISP 30 years ago.
Solrac@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 10h
will AOL Chat rooms be Matrix or XMPP?
SpookyBogMonster@lemmy.ml · 2 pts · 7h
AIM operates on an open protocol that you can still use :)
LoremIpsumGenerator@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 1d
Skate parks, bmx(s), towering ice cream, starcraft on battlenet.
DarrinBrunner@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 1d
Towering ice cream? Twin towers?
With a little airplane cookie stuck in.
It's been 25 years, I think it's time.
orbituary@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 6 pts · 1d
ICQ, please. Mine was 737916.
ilovededyoupiggy@sh.itjust.works · 6 pts · 1d
I had a six digit number too and I have unfortunately forgotten what it was and this is now one of my life's greatest disappointments.
orbituary@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 3 pts · 1d
Mine was using the password "buddha" for my ICQ account and getting it stolen by somebody in Russia. Shameful.
cknight@fedinsfw.app · 1 pts · 20h
2179????... For anonymity, I'm not posting the actual numbers here.
You were a very early adopter.
My GF was 1403????
orbituary@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 1 pts · 17h
Do you actually think someone can look you up this far after it was shut down? I'd accept that challenge if one could from my ICQ number alone.
Pulsar@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 19h
let's bring ICQ back.
Snowcano@startrek.website · 3 pts · 19h
I’m down, I still remember my number!
merc@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 5h
I'm 4170129
EmilieEasie@fedinsfw.app · 6 pts · 22h
people who say this never actually, like, quit social media or anything that would bring them closer to this
mob@lemmy.zip · 3 pts · 21h
Because it sounds better in theory and people dont realize how spoiled technological advancements have made us.
EmilieEasie@fedinsfw.app · 1 pts · 21h
Super agree with that. I was literally on AIM until the servers went down, not even kidding, and I love the cozy feel of N64 games rented at Blockbuster with Pizza Hut and so on... but I actually don't wanna go back to tank controls or AIM. I like Telegram and Signal a lot better. I like Summoning Salt videos on youtube. I don't really wanna go back.
ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 2 pts · 15h
I have, unless this counts. I know this is a link aggregator more than a social media, but it's the closest I get.
LovableSidekick@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 22h
Yep, fighting for a cause today means posting on social media. Most people are all talk and no action, which makes it easier for the few who do act to get their way.
AlteredEgo@lemmy.ml · 5 pts · 17h
I've been wondering what tech levels would be SELF SUSTAINABLE. Like the amish lifestyle is a circular economy, everything they need they can make themselves, grow themselves, and compost themselves. Like mostly.
But can you have something like electric motors or wind power in the same way? Can you have electronics? Can you have eReader? Like if you had a town the size of 50.000 people.
Theoretically advances in technology could allow for things like biological computing. Like a variety of seeds to produce plants making all sorts of medicine, or single cell cultures then organize into simple electronics. Not sure how sci-fi that is. But in a way that would be a "safe point" for civilization.
Because even after a limited nuclear exchange which is is getting more and more likely each year we're not going to have any global supply chain left.
ToastedRavioli@midwest.social · 7 pts · 14h
One of the more misunderstood things about Amish people is that they cant have anything electronic. They arent against electronics. Like you said they practice self reliance above anything else, so they refuse to use anything that is powered by oil and gas because they cant make oil and gas products themselves.
One thing that has become really popular with the Amish is EBikes and solar power. Theyre fine with buying those things even though they dont produce them. And theyre fine with anything that runs on solar power because they have plenty of access to the sun.
Im not sure exactly how the loophole works that allows them to buy solar panels, since they aren’t producing them on their own. But the bigger thing to them is that the source of energy itself is widely available to them, which isnt true of oil or gas. Maybe it is that they could theoretically harvest solar power in other ways, so they are fine with buying a more efficient way to do it than what they can produce within their community. Something like that
jj4211@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 6h
I'm certainly no expert, but I had the impression that the big thing was if something they got required ongoing resources, leaving them beholden to outside the community beyond the initial transaction. They will trade with outside communities, just if that thing you buy now means you need to get gasoline every week or if that thing requires you to pay an electric company, then it's a liability. So buy a solar panel, ok, one and done. Now things that can run and charge from them may be fair game.
The bigger 'loophole' is phones. They generally have phones available, though they limit their availability. Notably the concept of a phone ringing disrupting a family meal is unacceptable, so they likely would confine phone usage to some outbuildings. Also meant only to facilitate things like business or emergencies, not for personal communication.
AlteredEgo@lemmy.ml · 2 pts · 8h
Woah that's interesting. So they wouldn't be opposed to something like kite power, if you could turn the electronic software control program into a mechanical "clockwork" style mechanism.
And the invention of a grid storage battery that is circular / fully recyclable would be great too. But obviously there are already solutions like nickel iron but they aren't that efficient.
Genetically engineering a plant that is ultra efficient in producing a biofuel would be great. Ideally a bush that doesn't have to regrow and doesn't need to be replanted every year, but produce oil for diesel motors. Or some biofuel that can be used in a fuel cell, if you can build a simple fuel cell. Ammonia fuel cells maybe. (Sorry just a bunch of fancy ideas lol)
merc@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 5h
Apparently they also cheat a lot, like have a secret cell phone that they keep hidden and don't admit to having.
merc@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 5h
I don't think you could even have anything approaching 1970s level of tech and be self-sustainable in a small city. Would you know how to make a discrete transistor? How big a community would you need to spin up even a basic electronics factory?
I think 50,000 people means you're not even at the industrial revolution level of tech. You're certainly not going to be able to manufacture any electronics. That completely limits the power generation options. Also, you'd have to use pretty basic materials, because 50,000 people isn't enough to have advanced materials processing facilities. You'd also have a severely restricted diet, growing only whatever the local climate permits. It would probably have to be vegetarian, unless you had enough space for hunting (with bows and spears).
AlteredEgo@lemmy.ml · 1 pts · 2h
Yeah. That is what I mean, we rely on increasingly long global supply chains. Which makes local democracy and regulation harder. And makes sure that we get bigger hierarchies and people or institutions with larger wealth and power. And when the collapse comes all of it is going away. Besides optical drives, all our magnetic or electronic storage only lasts like a few decades too.
So IF we could like genetically engineer certain key technologies to replace even such things like rubber fore tires or biofuels or a way to efficiently produce at least some plastic precursors it would be huge. You only need the seeds and knowledge on how to grow them, collapsing complex industrial supply chains.
And if we could someone develop biocomputers that can store most of our libraries (e.g. anna's archive) and allow you to read we could preserve our knowledge too.
merc@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 2h
I'm not sure why you think that democracy and regulation are harder with global supply chains. It would seem to me that it's going to be harder to establish firm regulations in a small community where everyone knows everyone else. It's much easier to give your cousin Jim a pass than it is to adhere to strict regulations with someone close to you like that.
As for "when the collapse comes", that "when" is doing a lot of work.
And "biocomputers"? What makes you think that an imaginary technology that hasn't been invented yet is going to be better at storage than what we already know?
Bluedragon012@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 2h
I am not down for this. There are modern non Ai audio tools I use. I like the media rich chat services we have too.. But, I understand.
We mustn't hide. We mustn't run. we must get into the damn robot. And eleminnate the rich religious nut heads who are disappointed God hasn't come to vist and constructed a false God.
hypeerror@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 1h
Winamp. You can have Winamp.
Bluedragon012@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 1h
Oh, I agree for listening to music, but for making music, different story.
diaphragmwp@discuss.tchncs.de · 1 pts · 1h
impulse tracker
ianhclark510@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 5 pts · 1d
i'm still gonna run around with an Shenandoah beard, wide hat and wil clothes, and you can't stop me
PrimeMinisterKeyes@leminal.space · 2 pts · 1d
What's a Shenandoah beard?
SatansMaggotyCumFart@piefed.world · 1 pts · 1d
Basically a reverse hitler.
farmgineer@nord.pub · 4 pts · 19h
You can keep the IMs. I would like MP3s, though. A library could have a computer that can be booked for research purposes.
I'm debating over on-demand video and better TVs. Maybe a compromise would be the community decides its own broadcast schedule so it's not as instant but still allows some modern media.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 23h
Guck that, move it to summer 2001 so we can at least use ICQ and constantly warn everyone about 9/11
honestly right now ain't so bad. we got microbreweries and shit.
cdf12345@lemmy.zip · 3 pts · 21h
looks around
There’s not enough microbrew in the world to get me drunk enough to pretend everything isn’t a complete shit show.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 21h
i'm pointing at canada and europe mostly. places with legal weed.
paultimate14@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 1d
I would probably choose the era of roughly 2012-2016.
Blockbuster went out of business for a reason. It was worse than Redbox and worse than Netflix's mail service. And eventually Netflix's streaming reached a magical peak where it was still affordable and had a great library. Almost everything was either Netflix or Hulu, and HBO waa only for really expensive high-budget stuff. Used to be Disney movies on Netflix.
Also... Idk how old this tweet is but it's weird to suddenly zee Nikki Limo pop up. I used to really enjoy her Tasty Tuesday show years ago.
hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 8 pts · 1d
Your wish is granted. You'll forever live Trump's first campaign
paultimate14@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 1d
Better the campaign than the presidency
Also technically his first campaign was in 2000. Officially, 2016 was his 2nd campaign. Unofficially, it was his 4th.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 23h
they might be lucky enough to not be statesian, let's not be USonormative
hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 2 pts · 21h
I'm not USAian, but it was annoying to follow from Europe too
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 20h
i mean, we were bathed in it. i don't know your media experience, but i imagine there were other channels besides the statesian ones.
pumpupthejam@piefed.social · 4 pts · 1d
Sounds like oomer behavior.
NickwithaC@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 1d
I can't tell if you meant boomer or zoomer and now I think you did that on purpose because both work.
rainbowbunny@slrpnk.net · 4 pts · 23h
Bend, Oregon
CPMSP@midwest.social · 2 pts · 20h
Home of one of the best breweries too!
mnfalconia_a2gc@retrolemmy.com · 2 pts · 19h
Would you be OK with shifting the location just a tiny bit eastward, from Bend OR to Prineville OR? Crook County (which hosts Prineville) has vacant/unclaimed PCS spectrum, so we can operate our own 1990s cellular phone network, while Deschutes County (which hosts Bend and Sisters) unfortunately lacks the same. And yes, I and my team did explore that area with actual boots on the ground in the fall of 2025, less than a year ago.
NotASharkInAManSuit@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 23m
And the Pizza Hut still serves legitimately good pizza, and they don’t fucking count cheese as a topping.
ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de · 3 pts · 1d
As long as we make it taste like pizza hut from the early 90s, cause they went down hard and their pizza is kind of ass, now.
TIEPilot@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 1d
Oh we need LAN parties too! Bawls and pizza and Total Annihilation!
cknight@fedinsfw.app · 2 pts · 22h
ICQ, IRC, and Livejournal.
Not Amish, LoTeK!
LadyButterfly@reddthat.com · 1 pts · 12h
RIP elljay
LovableSidekick@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 22h
I've heard people mocked for being "stuck in the 60s."
ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 1 pts · 15h
Only if AIM is encrypted now. Else can we update it to Delta Chat and pretend it's AIM because Encryption?
TIEPilot@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 1d
Have you seen those Pizza Hut Classics? Old school as hell!
InvalidName2@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 20h
I dream of a time in my life when I can sit around in my grandpa chair playing 80's and 90's video games on my 90inch PPMQ+LER/LED with macrovision and google-tone color rendering 3D/8D ultra-thin TV in a retro case to make it look like a giant version of those old floor model "piece of furniture in and of themselves" TVs like my grandpa had back in '84. Maybe my AI grandson can play along so I can relive the childlike wonder of playing through these games for the first time from the perspective of a kid AI.
treesquid@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 2h
If we still have IRC, I'm in. AOL was just a little too lame, sometimes you want to have a conversation that doesn't start with "A/S/L???"
diaphragmwp@discuss.tchncs.de · 1 pts · 1h
We, uhm, do still have IRC. Right here. No need for a new town or anything. Most servers block Tor because of the chud spammers that have nothing else to do, unfortunately. Although most servers themselves will assign you a fake hostname.
Most of it is tech themed, although some channels are just people being people, sharing random stuff like stories from work. Technically still a project chat but they are never on topic. Or it's #project-offtopic.
kuiskaaja@lemmy.ml · 1 pts · 1d
and the economic crisis?
Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 1 pts · 1d
Count me in.
Flower@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 1d
Anything with a processor inside of it and connected to a high speed internet connection will enshittify. One wat is to limit CPU speed and internet, say use solar/wind powered mesh routers instead of fiber connections, so good enough to get info and simple communication, not enough for lots of pictures and video. That means you need a blockbuster for video.
grue@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 23h
No. Anything running proprietary software will enshittify. Pretending the problem is some sort of inevitability that can't be solved with Free Software is just doomerism.
BartyDeCanter@piefed.social · 5 pts · 23h
Absolutely. Yeah, there have been attempts at enshittifying FOSS projects, they fork or are replaced. Control your own data, own your hardware, use open source, and enshittification can’t happen.
Flower@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 21h
Other way around. If there's an open system that attracts a sufficient amount of users, companies will come to use money and shiny stuff to pull users to their proprietary platforms. It'll always happen when you let them use their bells and whistles.
BartyDeCanter@piefed.social · 1 pts · 18h
There are at least two defenses against this.
AppleTea@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 16h
If you want to bottle neck, just bottle neck the RAM. It doesn't even have to be an absolute limit, just mandate that off the shelf products can only have so much active memory, but people are free to buy more and install it themselves. That alone would enough of a barrier to entry that it keeps things reasonable for the vast majority of users, without inconveniencing those who have the inclination or professional necessity to go beyond.
The energy cost of replacing fiber optics with wireless... ugg, I shudder to imagine.
Noyesster@piefed.social · 1 pts · 21h
sign me up
nullify3112@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 2h
My dudes Lemmy is social media. How is your cognitive dissonance going, upvoting this and engaging with it here on social media?
treesquid@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 2h
And we'd give it all up to go back. "You're here, breathing this dirty air, while you talk about how much better the clean air was. What hypocrisy!" ... Fuck off, Ben Shapiro
zarkanian@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 4m
Lemmy is a link aggregator. When most people talk about "social media", they aren't talking about link aggregators. They're talking about something like Diaspora or Mastodon.