761
Then and now
(i.imgflip.com)
1. Be civil
No trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour
2. No politics
This is non-politics community. For political memes please go to !politicalmemes@lemmy.world
3. No recent reposts
Check for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month
4. No bots
No bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins
5. No Spam/Ads
No advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live.
Bro that's anecdotally false, there were so many ham, electronics and random research sites I perused on angelfire and geocities.
Quality varied greatly, but lots of thought went into making posts, diagrams were sometimes done in ASCII art which was its own headache.
Point is, I don't agree with your take, and I don't think my similarly aged friends would agree either. Internet of late 90s/y2k wasn't an ad-free utopia, but the point was more about conversing and sharing info.
Lemmy is an attempt to return to that original intent, modernized as it must be.
You may want to give "HAM radio forums" a Google.
I don't care if you agree. I care what's correct. The Internet is many times larger than I was 20+ years ago, and all the same free networks exist. The really popular ones got big and monetized.
That's just how success works with anything.