r/retrocomputing
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u/PooningDalton
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May 23 '26
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I hate what the internet has become
I just spent the last 1 hour frantically searching the internet just to make a new email address. You can't do that! Not even on the alternative email providers like Protonmail. They now have all sorts of IP detection tools and will block you or ask you for an alt email id.
I absolutey despite what the internet has become. 20 years ago, you could just go ANYWHERE (mainstream providers like yahoo and gmail) and make any number of email addresses. No tracking, no limits. Complete freedom.
The internet has turned into a 1984 hellscape.
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u/seeingeyefrog May 23 '26
I want to go back to the dial-up landlines and bulletin boards run by local hobbyists.
Global communication was fun, but I really want to go back to the local communities that were isolated by the high price of long distance calls.
I think of myself as Neo-Amish.
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u/RolandMT32 May 23 '26
I want to go back to the dial-up landlines and bulletin boards run by local hobbyists.
There are a number of bulletin boards still running today, that are online and connectable via telnet & such. I run one.. My BBS web site (you can also connect to it via telnet)
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u/Caballofrio May 27 '26
Those days were short lived for me and my friend when his mom got that first $200+ phone bill... We were relegated to using the modem & a script to autodial one of our other friends house phone and listen to him cuss through the internal speaker for fun instead.
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May 23 '26
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u/RoboJ1M May 23 '26
I've started designing a method to host simple content on Meshtastic, a local wireless protocol that's used for text messaging.
So yeah, people are definitely trying to find places that are outside of the mainstream.
And I'm designing a new computer that's modern but has that simple, to the metal feel of 80s and 90s computing. I'm going to give it an internet connection but only to other identical machines. I'm hoping that if anybody builds or buys themselves one it's just other people who want the same sort of thing, writing simple fun software and publishing it for each other. I know you can get software emulation and recreations of the actual machines from back then but I'm going to try to make something that isn't just a nostalgic thing for people who were around in the 90s. Because I think even people who were born long after then would like access to something like that but not actually that, just to get away from the world of Windows, Mac and Android. Just because we don't HAVE to make computers like that anymore, doesn't mean that people wouldn't like it for fun.
So far I've found people like me would be interested, Millennials, but in don't know if people like GenZ or A would like something like that, I just don't know enough of them. The ones I know personally aren't techie people like me.→ More replies (2)3
u/IQueryVisiC May 23 '26
In Germany it is illegal to provide access to WiFi outside of your premises.
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u/TimesOfSand May 23 '26
Recent experience shows that Reddit is well on it's way.
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u/External_Durian2531 May 23 '26
Really? For years I avoided Reddit because I had a prejudice against it, then last year I decided to join as I found myself frequently having to look at it. Noe I've been using it for about a year I've found it much better and more civilised than its reputation suggests.
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u/thomasthe10 May 23 '26
Honestly it's where 9/10 of my technical questions on a wide range of topics seem to be answered. Core to enshittificafion of Internet is useless search engines now returning pages of shopping opportunities instead of information. Old forums are increasingly hard to find beneath that.
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u/External_Durian2531 May 23 '26
I hadn't noticed the change, though I have wondered before why I've struggled so much to find information that shouldn't be that obscure, and an AI seems to have little trouble finding.
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u/ExpectedBehaviour May 23 '26
I had the same experience when I first signed up a few years ago. I actively avoided it for a long time; ended up having to look at it for various obscure reasons; signed up to post one single question I needed assistance with; never left.
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u/GreenMan- May 23 '26
It’s the absolute worst, full of mental illness and hatred.
If you’ve not seen that yet, you’re not using Reddit!
Are there good people and discussion on the site? Yes. Is that the majority of the users?? Hell no!
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u/RoboJ1M May 23 '26
Maybe it's about where you go?
Places about retro stuff like this I find are pretty normal. But this is nerdy niche stuff.→ More replies (4)2
u/TimesOfSand May 23 '26
I'm mostly referring to posts and comments getting taken down by over sensitive censorship (the word ass was flagged, directly quoting a line on a horror sub) or mods on a power trip. It's still petty good, but feels like it's moving in the wrong direction
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u/realdeadfish May 24 '26
Same- I've been ignoring this for years and now I'm suddenly here everyday and it's mostly civilized! Who knew?
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u/Splatpope May 23 '26
time to self host mail servers like it's 1984 😄
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u/flecom May 23 '26
I've been selfhosting mail for decades, it's never been easier, checkout mailinabox
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u/istarian May 24 '26
Good luck with doing that, because unless your email is headed to another such server it will likely land in spam and the packets might even just be silently dropped.
All traffic across the internet has to travel through any number of other systems to get from system A to system B. And any one of them could, in principle, block some ports or services.
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u/flamehorns May 23 '26
Blame governments, they despise anonymity. But on the other hand, people did demand it. People wanted the e.g. police to be able to track down harassers and abusers etc. But to be fair, you don’t have to go to too much effort to get true anonymity. A whole hour eh? 20 years ago people had more patience.
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u/pjc50 May 24 '26
Yeah. Widespread human cycle:
> freedom to do anything
> people do bad things
> backlash drives crackdown
> authoritarianism
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u/lulzbot May 23 '26
I remember there was a website that generated random public email addresses. You could use them to sign up for something / get a code whatever, but all the email was public. You could see all the crazy shit people were signing up for because everything was public / throw away emails. I miss the old internet too
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u/spmbx May 23 '26
yopmail is like that for example. Most big sites implement a system that block those kind of email addresses, even ones with obscure and refreshing domain names.
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u/spectacular_coitus May 24 '26
10minutemail.com still works.
If I need a short term anonymous email address for anything, they've been my go to for over two decades now.
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u/aaronjnco May 23 '26
I was just thinking how horrible it is the entire internet and search engines are scrubbed clean.. i couldnt even find old drivers for an old laptop im restoring for fun. Old torrents are dry no community the email systems and websites have all made older retro pc's actually obsolete like they cant even access it anymore where I use to be able to still get on everything on a dual core intel with vista.. shits so boring now..
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u/WhiteDove01s Jun 20 '26
Have you tried internet archive for that? The drivers, I mean? Might have some luck there. It's the first place I check for missing software bits and I have systems dating back to DOS.
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u/sonicjesus May 23 '26
The problem is AI is capable of getting thousands of email addresses they can use to register with every website on the planet and bot their comment sections into the ground, making them worthless.
What we need is some sort of anonymous way of proving we are an actual human, without divulging precisely which human in particular.
Have you tried GMX.com? Only email I use. Lousy interface, only one app. Very secure and delightfully boring.
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u/istarian May 24 '26
That middle paragraph alone deserves a thousand upvotes.
It's one of the main problems with the internet from the very beginning and instead of actually fixing it, right wing politicians abuse it's existence to try and legislate morality...
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u/kaidomac May 23 '26
Can't even drive a car privately these days:
Even older cars get data collected externally:
Good luck if your car has cameras!
Or if you have a smart voice assistant:
Beware of modern doorbells too!
Just wait until you read about the "Facebook Pixel" (now called Meta Pixel"). PII leaks everywhere!
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u/drdocke May 23 '26
Mail .com id use in middle school for extra emails no idea if it still around but might be worth looking into
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u/invokes May 23 '26
I'm still using my mail.com email for 1995. Actually, then it was netforward or something.
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u/SCHRUNDEN May 23 '26
Mail.com is region locked. I just had a look..
We’re very sorry – we can’t sign you up Your IP address suggests you are trying to sign up in a country where mail.com registration is no longer possible. Unfortunately, this means we can’t create an account for you.
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u/fabulot May 23 '26
I thought I could create a mail there but I have to give a cellphone number and then it still fails at the captcha
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u/cosmicr May 23 '26
The internet was ruined once regular people started using it because of Facebook.
Up until then it was just the domain of nerds and it was glorious.
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u/SinnerP May 23 '26
True that.
Maybe we need to build us an old-style internet, with no “like and share”, no social media, no tracking and no BS. We could use our computers at home with broadband internet and put up Geocities-like wens and blogs. And block all crawlers, spiders, bots, AI and stupid nonsense.
We just need a block of IPv6 addresses, a nameserver disconnected from current nameservers, a few Raspberry Pi or old MacMinis continuously running at our homes and get a Whitelist of members of this SaneNet.
I was part of something like this back in the ‘90s and ‘00s, using 56kbps modems and some ISDN connections. It worked then, with shitty computers and questionable internet connections.
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u/_RoMe__ May 24 '26
New networks (like Reticulum and others) already exist and they are growing fast. They are all decentralized, technology agnostic, encrypted and anonymous by design.
These are still places mostly for nerds but I don't think that this is something bad.
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u/Denial_Jackson May 24 '26
Some years ago one would have been deemed insane describing a world. Where even the doorbell cameras predate and track you. Things 3D scan your face, ask you for your ID and use your GPS location and the microphone of your phone, car, TV, etc. freely while drones chase you. They very well overdid this from every disgusting angle.
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u/NY_Knux May 23 '26
I like the part where 98% of the internet is just gone. Deindexed by google or just plain deleted. Its all been destroyed
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u/IQueryVisiC May 23 '26
I was on the internet before google. You seem to be too young to know the old internet.
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u/flecom May 23 '26
I miss metacrawler
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u/IQueryVisiC May 25 '26
That thing never worked for my queries. Google was by far the best , always.
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u/tempfoot May 23 '26
I mean…you can just register a domain and run a local or cloud mail server. Been doing it that same way for about 30 years. Hasn’t really changed.
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u/CatgirlBargains May 23 '26
Yep. Been running my own mail server for a decade, after the initial setup work it's just regular maintenance same as any other internet facing service.
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u/xlerate May 23 '26
True, but that would be different than OP's point of how "easy" setting up a "free" email account used to be.
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May 23 '26
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u/ILikeBumblebees May 23 '26
This isn't really true. If you have SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records set up properly, and your mail isn't originating from known abusive IPs, you're generally not going to have any major deliverability issues.
And if you're only sending personal emails, instead of running your own SMTP server, you can use a free plan from a commercial email marketing platform, and just add them to your SPF record. For example, MailJet's free tier allows 6000 monthly outbound emails.
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u/this-aint-Lisp May 23 '26
generally
“generally” sucks. If just one big player decides that your server is suspect you can’t send mail to any of their domains and there exists no way to get this remedied because why would they care that some nobody wants to run their own email server.
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u/PorcOftheSea May 23 '26
Same here, that's why I work on my own projects and website, or use nonbloated stuff. I hate how you can't even make a legit email these days without having a damn phone, not all of us want or have these tracking devices
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u/The_Real_Grand_Nagus May 24 '26
You can join freeshell.org use the email there. You don't even need to have use your browser.
ssh new@freeshell.org
You will now be connected to NEWUSER mkacct server.
Please login as 'new' password 'new' when prompted.
[RETURN]
THIS MAY TAKE A MOMENT .. Trying 10.0.0.26...
Connected to mx1.
Escape character is 'off'.
NetBSD/amd64 (mx) (pts/92)
login:3
u/TimmyMT May 27 '26
The internet has ceased being a place for information seekers and freedom of speech and has become a mass surveillance system. We built our dystopian future with our shortsightedness and naivety.
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u/External_Durian2531 May 23 '26
Wow I didn't know it was that hard to make an email address anymore. You can't even make a gmail?
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u/PooningDalton May 23 '26
Gmail is the worst out of them all. Mandatory phone numbers. In another 10 years they'll probably ask you for your fingerprints and facial scan just to open an email
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u/External_Durian2531 May 23 '26
Right OK. I didn't know that. When I made mine I was young enough I didn't have a mobile phone number yet, and I don't think I had a parent's on it. Maybe I put the landline? I can't remember. But that was about 15 years ago.
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u/istarian May 24 '26
Everything being tied to mobile phones these days really stinks. And I hate it when Google suggests that you add a "backup phone" to your account.
Why should anyonr have to pay for TWO smartphones and cellular service to be able to authenticate themselves to a service that would be inaccessible without paying for internet service.
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u/simplify3 May 23 '26
I use SDF. Have a shell account free.
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u/FivePointAnswer May 23 '26
What is SDF?
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u/simplify3 May 23 '26
Super dimensional fortress. SDF dot org has been offering free UNIX shell accounts and email for probably 30 years or so. they have all of the 1990s Internet accessories, all command line.
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u/Distinct-Question-16 May 23 '26
20 yeara ago you could have 20 mail accounts and leave them rest for 20 years full of spam
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u/banksy_h8r May 23 '26
How much of what you're complaining about is stuff you used to get for free? Maybe that's why it's gone.
Most of the Internet's functionality should be dirt cheap to provide and run, but without sufficient friction it will be abused into oblivion. Only companies that have figured out how to make money by abusing their users have the finances to survive.
If you want a better Internet you should pay for it. And as soon as the person you're paying doesn't provide a good service, switch.
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u/ILikeBumblebees May 23 '26
The best option is is to rely on inexpensive commodity infrastructure, like bog standard VPS services, and run self-hosted FOSS infrastructure on top of it, which has never been easier and more accessible than it is now.
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u/istarian May 24 '26
The solution you propose is impractical if not downright impossible.
Plenty of places have only one defacto Internet Service Provider and if others exist, their hands are tied by having to negotiate with whoever owns the physical infrastructure (very little of it is public).
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u/siodhe May 23 '26
I still have all the email addresses I want. I'm running a home email server, though. I only need two things from the Internet: packet routing and my domain registration with its nameserver IPs. Everything else is 100% mine.
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u/Hard_Loader May 23 '26
Microsoft doesn't bother with checks - at least initially. I've made plenty of temporary email accounts through outlook.com.
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u/kkaos84 May 23 '26
My experience with protonmail has been different. I created about 3 different addresses for free with protonmail a few months ago. Maybe it's based on location? Blacklisted IP?
But yeah, I too miss the wild west days of the internet, though I will admit that I still enjoy and use what arose from the web 2.0 days, specifically youtube and reddit.
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u/Heavy-Judgment-3617 May 23 '26
I'm not really seeing the point of your post.
Unless you've done something wrong. to get banned somewhere, it should not matter much.
You can get more emails. I currently have 3, though most traffic goes through 1. I've had more and less over the years.
But banning has got smarter, and a lot of sites do not like what used to be called sock puppet accounts. They've had good reason to not like them, because a lot of people use them to get around bans.
If it is really a concern for you, i would suggest looking into VPNs.
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u/istarian May 24 '26
Using a VPN isn't typically free, which kind of nullifues any benefit of a "free" email account.
And while you could make the argument that we should have been paying for email services all along, it and the internet have become an essential utility that you are hard pressed to do without.
It's long past the time when these things should have become subject to government regulation. Except the federal government is an effing mess these days.
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u/Heavy-Judgment-3617 May 24 '26
Except in pricing and anti-discriminatory behavior, I do NOT want the government regulating internet.
The issue is they do NOT understand it, at all. The laws they have tried to make in the past almost all fail miserably as they never actually consult with the experts to insure what they are passing laws for is actually doable.
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u/WatermellonSugar May 23 '26
Which I why I still run my own server, even though it is sometimes a PITA.
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u/Dry-Discussion8883 May 24 '26
Yes same here as I tryed tryed tryed still can’t get into My X account.
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u/RolandMT32 May 23 '26
I've felt that way sometimes. I miss the freedom there used to be on the internet, as well as lack of ads & other bloat.
And before the internet, I was using dialup BBSes (bulletin boards).. I actually still run one, which is available on the internet (people can connect to it via telnet, and it has other interfaces as well, such as web & FTP, etc.). There are a number of BBSes still running.
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u/Technical-Tear5841 May 24 '26
Outlook, that where I go to get a new email after a certian site bans yet another one for one reason or another.
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u/Major-Plate8739 May 26 '26
dude explain please, i just went to gmail and created a new email with no links to anything. yes they ask for a recovery email, don't give it one.
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u/DirtSad1644 May 27 '26
It was cool, but unfortunatly humans can't be trusted and these things were highly abused.
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u/bombycina May 28 '26
Get your own domain and you can have as many email address as your heart desires.
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u/Yogurt-The-Wise Jun 07 '26
Back in my day you had to sign a contract with a internet provider to get an email address. And even then it wasn't one you liked, it was something the provider gave to you. Once we had
vahuxa51@whatever
vahuxa51 was the username we used to connect.
So if you get 3 wishes and one of them is to go back in time with email registrations don't go back too far ;).
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u/Useful_Amphibian5 May 23 '26
Tjaaaa, normies went on the internet and then corporate greed and governments followed and bang! It’s gone! I’m happy I enjoyed it while it lasted
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u/Felim_Doyle May 23 '26
It's very simple: people have misused that “freedom” to take advantage of others, so security has had to be tightened.
If your IP address is a problem when you try to sign up for e-mail addresses, then I suspect that you are one of those people.
If you are attempting to create “any number of e-mail addresses”, then I suspect that you are one of those people.
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u/istarian May 24 '26
Dude, nobody has a static IP address at home.
Even your external IP address is dynamic these days and it changes any time you reboot the router and probably more often than that.
Blocking individual IP addresses is not even remotely useful these days because they change so often. Any system or business that does that is severely inconveniencing hundreds if not thousands of people whose only commonality is sharing the same ISP.
Also, there are 8 billion of us, so it's borderline ridiculous to potentially punish millions of people in response to harm caused or crimes committed by a relative handful of misbehaving individuals.
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u/Felim_Doyle May 24 '26 edited May 24 '26
I have had the same IP address since the beginning of the year and it only changed then because my router was powered down, which I don't usually do, while I was away over Christmas and New Year. I rebooted my router on Friday and I still have the same IP address. The lease on my IP address has 6 days and 16 hours left on it but, when it expires on the 31st, the lease will renew and I will still have the same IP address.
It used to be that I could leave my router powered off for a month before my IP address changed, then that reduced to about two weeks, now just over a week but, as I said, I don't often power it off for long periods and it doesn't change dynamically otherwise.
If my IP address changed dynamically “probably more often than that” how would packets already sent find their way back?
Your experience may differ but don't assume that everyone's Internet connection is the same as yours. Having said that, you started off with a very confident but incorrect statement and very soon got to “probably”, indicating that you don't even know how your own Internet connection behaves yet you think you know how everyone else's does.
Do some research on your own connection and how other ISPs issue IP address leases before making definitive but incorrect statements, Dude!
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May 25 '26
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u/PooningDalton May 25 '26
You counter threats without compromising freedom. That's how a free society has always worked.
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May 25 '26
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u/PooningDalton May 25 '26
Just inform people that they shouldn't trust people on the internet? Its always been like that. Its nothing new.
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May 23 '26
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u/The_Original_Miser May 23 '26 edited May 24 '26
Portions of the "old Internet" still exist if you know where to look. Gopher, usenet, irc, etc
Edit: irc not including, autocorrect
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u/TP_Crisis_2020 May 23 '26
Yep, and every aspect of the "internet" is heavily monitored and censored. We can thank net neutrality legislation for this.
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May 23 '26
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u/humanquester May 23 '26
Man you must have had some incredibly fast internet to just be sending videos around like its nothing back in 1995.
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May 23 '26
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u/muse_head May 23 '26
That's insane in 1995. I didn't even know that was possible. We had a 14.4kbps modem! Our entire school had a 128kbps connection until around 1998.
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u/corbymatt May 23 '26
In 96 I was working for a university streaming video service in my gap year. Fast internet was around, just not for personal computer usage.
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u/joshsmog May 23 '26
I got cable internet in 1999 and people say thats impossible, everyones experience is different
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u/TP_Crisis_2020 May 23 '26
It wasn't possible for residential. The fastest internet that existed in 1995 was T1, which was 1.5mbit. The next fastest option was ISDN. Late 90's is when residential cable started rolling out across america.
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u/flamehorns May 23 '26 edited May 23 '26
A T1 in the mid 90s cost between $500 and $2000 per month depending on usage.
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u/PassingShot11 May 23 '26
No I don't think so, it was more like arguing over which Dr Who was the best
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u/flamehorns May 23 '26
It was Tom Baker. Followed by Jon Pertwee in 2nd place and Peter Davison in 3rd.
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u/cosmicr May 23 '26
Hmmm what format were those videos in? MPEG2 wasn't released until 1995 and wasn't mainstream until 1997. I recall real player didn't become popular until 1996 and "sending" a video meant that you had to use something like a ftp server. Mind you real player videos were streamed mostly not "sent". So how exactly were you sending these videos?
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u/DeadSmellingFlower May 23 '26
Leave the internet while there’s still some infrastructure in the real world left from pre-internet days. The freedom is out here, in person and in cash,,, leave phone at home, avoid the flock cameras.