• 05 Nov, 2025 *

Last months Bear Blog Carnival on early web memories is over and we got nine submissions, which I am really grateful for. Honestly didn’t expect to get so many good responses. There has been a wide variety of submissions spanning memories from multiple decades. I found it especially interesting to see the overlap there was between people having their early web experiences 30 or 5 years ago. Some things just stay the same.

Here are some selected excerpts from each entry.

Absurd Pirate reminded me of Space Cadet 3D pinball:

Like sometimes when I went with my dad to his work when he was a mechanic at a Chevrolet dealership, I would play Space Cadet 3D pinball on his work desktop in between doodling. This was probably the beginning of when I got into using the computer. I also discovered my favorite TV channels had websites as well as kids games from various snack brands.

In my own post I remember the hobbyist approach to website building:

I remember the ISP was called get2net and it came with both email and web hosting. The last bit was particularly exciting as get2net had a listing of all homepages made by its customers on their website, which was an absolute fantastic way to discover other HTML enthusiasts and of course contribute with my own handcrafted HTML manually uploaded via FTP. The web was a lot more personal, filled with handcrafted websites where people mostly just wrote about themselves and their hobbies.

Ivana’s post shows that exposing yourself to things you rather not see, is a constant for all generations:

Navigating the internet alone, seeking friends, and interesting topics I exposed myself to a lot of things my younger self didn’t need to see. Unfortunately now I’m so used to the absurdity of the internet it is just common place now. I have witnessed things on the internet even I don’t care to mention. Some moments I wish to forget, some have a slight fondness for my undersupervized youth in an odd way.

For inchwyrm, Tumblr was a major factor:

I have a love-hate relationship with Tumblr. On the plus side, I probably learned more about what it was like to be queer from there than I did from anywhere else, pre-college. Mainstream media was and is sanitized and mass-marketable. Tumblr was not. Sure, I knew gay and trans people existed before Tumblr, but I never knew what they were actually like or what they actually believed, and I certainly hadn’t thought that I could be one of them.

Xaya is acknowledging the influences the social media algorithms had:

As much as I dislike the way myself and other people get sucked into algorithmic niches, good and bad, I have to admit most of my tastes, later appreciation of certain hobbies and even budding careers were somehow related to some weird algorithm showing me a post. At that time I was heavily using Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Google plus to discover similar niches to my own interests, and it’s wild to think that these have had an impact, mostly bad with some good nuggets.

Bekah looks back at the classic “a/s/l”-question:

One of the first times I remember marveling at the Internet was in, I think, sixth grade, which would have been around 1997-98. I’d often spend the night at my best friend Nicole’s house. She had a computer in her family living room and we were given probably too much freedom to play on it. At one point we found some kind of voice chat application where you could get sort of proxy phone numbers and exchange them with other Internet people, then dial them up and basically have a phone conversation with them through the application. There’s no way I’ll remember what it was called and it sounds so simple, but it was amazing and exciting to us as kids with little exposure to the bigger world. We somehow (probably some variety of “a/s/l” in an AOL chat) connected with and exchanged numbers with a guy named, or claimed to be named, Nelson, and we both developed a mutual crush-slash-obsession with this person.

Ulik is remembering a couple of video games:

Super Mario RPG was the first game I emulated on my computer. Reading about Paper Mario, I found a website with download links for a ROM and snes9x. The site had also a full walkthrough of the game; useful because I was very bad at games. Before downloading the enormous 4-ish megabytes, I asked my mom if I could use the dial-up internet to do it.

Cris is referring to a certain “dark age”:

That “dark age” probably lasted until either 2016, when I joined Reddit (yes, I was late to the game), or 2017, when I started a Discord server that blew up about a year later. From then, until the end of 2023, I experienced my “social media addiction” phase. As a New Year’s resolution for 2024, I then deleted all of my social media accounts (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Reddit, 9gag, etc.), and retreated to Discord, YouTube, and Substack. That year I was a bit adrift on the Internet, until I “stumbled” on the IndieWeb through Bear Blog earlier this year (abandoning Substack), beginning a completely new phase.

Fran is looking back at the time where the whole “web”-thing was still very new:

I remember when newsreaders or tv presenters would plug a website, laboriously reading out “colon, forward slash, forward slash” and the concept having to be constantly explained. Like it was this niche thing. Like it might not catch on.

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Head over to Absurd Pirate for this month’s Bear Blog Carnival about your personal inventory.

#blog-carnival