[fuzzfactor]

Probably one of the forgotten things missing today is the personal home page.

Even with a lowly ISP like AOL, in addition to web access you were encouraged to create a personal web page on their domain so you could upload things to share with the world.

This is what you were paying them monthly for.

Most people weren't actually using it since it's not all that easy to build a web page, then along came Myspace who made it easier to put a page on their network.

I guess ISPs silently withdrew one of the main things in their bundle which millions of people once had and no longer do.

[TheFreim]

I remember this! The ISP we had while I was growing up let you host plain html web pages, it was probably my first experience setting up my own web site.

I feel like ISPs really dropped the ball, I could see a parallel reality where ISPs ended up continuing this but developing into being a federated (at the ISP level) social network where you'd have an account with your ISP and they'd in turn work with other ISPs behind the scenes to connect everything. It'd have the benefits that come with cebtralization along with a few of the benefits of decentralization.

[Turboblack]

personal web pages on http for retro lovers - we are trying to revive this. There are too few people willing to join the community. people often say online how cool it was, but don’t want to do anything to make it cool again http://web1.0hosting.net/

[fuzzfactor]

Thank you for posting this, it looks very interesting.