Internet Artifacts

would be cool for it to be less west/america-centric.

You mean the Internet? ;-)

I was thinking the same. this is a very american centric vision of the internet - especially when it comes to the websites mentioned

That's a byproduct of being a site made by an English speaker.

Kind of hard to make a site about things you don't know from languages you don't speak. It's completely possible for people from other places and speakers of other languages to make their own versions of this site.

And I don't mean that in a dismissive way. Every culture has their own history. It's worth recording.

Works for me as a German, online since 96.

Oh please yes create a version that applies to your cultural background and how you experienced the net!

what about https://web.archive.org/web/20010630195810/http://www.fireba... or studiVZ, knuddels, or even xing, for example?

now all the internet is basically an oligopoly, but in the late 90s and early 2000s there was much more variety, and any historiography of the early internet should consider that, indeed.

> Oh please yes create a version that applies to your cultural background and how you experienced the net!

As an American, I'd love to see this. Been online since AOL came on 3.5" floppies, but I know the US-centric version is only half the story. An example I was exploring recently was Tetetext which I have no memory of in the US. From what I understand, only a handful of bigger cities tried it and it simply was not that popular here. Growing up, we also had the perception that the BBC, in general, was a stuffy old news corp and had no real idea about the BBC Micro since Commodore and Atari dominated here. As an adult, it feels like I missed out on half the computing world back before things became a bit more interconnected.

If someone is up for making such a site, I'd be interested in watching or even contributing if I have anything valuable to offer.

I was online (in the US) since mid-90s as well, so definitely many of these artifacts resonate. That said, I was also a new transplant from Russia so was looking for anything I could find from my homeland - there was very little. I could probably count Russian-language websites (those I could find, anyways) on my fingers, and they all IIRC were university-based. I do believe there was a lively BBS tradition via FidoNet, but I never got into that. Circa '97 I was stoked to find a .wav fragment of a new song (still remember which one!), the first audio file I happened upon. By 2000 Russian-speaking web was huge and I was downloading music videos and full movies from FTP dumps.

Here are some staples of the 2000s runet that I recall (haven't been there since then really)

- bash.org.ru, IT and programmer humor site that produced some classic memes (I know of the American one, but this one was its own thing)

- Masyanya, popular flash cartoon series.

- Padonki internet slang, Russian that is distorted, misspelled and vulgar, similar to leetspeak.

i find this fascinating! there is so much to the internet i have never seen...

All that stuff is fascinating to me.

I would also love to learn about the Chinese internet, which to this day is pretty closed to us.

There is a treasure trove of writings, jokes, stories, games, books, history in there we have no idea about...