90s Web Nostalgia is Virtually Real ;)

90s web nostalgia is virtually real ;)

I’ve been time-traveling on a special project and having way too much fun looking at old websites I designed—man, I miss the internet of the 90s. In many ways, the early web of the mid-90s was like today’s dark web— raw, decentralized, chaotic, and free. Before the rise of mega-platforms like Facebook, Google, and Amazon, the web felt like a digital overgrown wild forest. 

🌌 Personal websites were handcrafted temples — GeoCities, Angelfire, Tripod, heck, even Myspace in the later internet days of the early 00s felt more of a pulse…like the web was breathing…alive. Handcrafted, hand-coded HTML dot coms built in our bedrooms by dim lights and a bag of chips to get us through those late nights of slow dial-up uploads. We were focused and dedicated to posting our little corner of the web where we could be as weird and wild as we wanted.

I made my very first version on AngieMason.com in 1996!

💻 It was full of hidden corners: live journals, blogs, strange zines, coded poetry, secret pages behind fake links.

🔐 There was a sense of mystery— you didn’t “scroll,” you explored, you never quite knew where the next click would take you. It wasn’t always pretty. But it was human, unfiltered, weird, and wonderfully alive. Do you remember it? I probably designed some of the pages you visited back then… honestly, you might have even caught me on a webcam… lol 😆 first job out of art school, a webcam company that made all the girls working there take turns being on cam while we worked🫠

🏢 Then the Platforms Came 🙄 The internet became a mall instead of a maze. Sites optimized for retention, surveillance, and ad revenue, the web became platforms, contained and controlled. 💤Creativity got flattened into brands and algorithms. Mystery was replaced with convenience.

The old internet used to be:

🖤A place for outsiders, wanderers, rebels.

🐞 Where anonymity is a feature, not a bug.

❤️‍🩹Where danger and beauty share space. 

It's me in the 90s!

That electric, eerie, exhilarating feeling of the early web? It wasn’t just nostalgia. It was freedom. It was like riding your bike alone as a kid on unknown paths. You could get lost and wander. And some of us are still out here trying to keep that flicker alive in the dark. Nudging and posting to our own websites, blogging, and steering clear of algorithms. 

Ahhh, web nostalgia, whoever thought that would be a thing, yet here we are.