Nostalgia?
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LFA | 2025-09-01 | #internet #history #thoughts
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Today I was remembering the first decade of the millennium, the time
of the blog phenomenon, the beginning of social networks, the people
who shared their photos on Flickr,... I've been through a lot of
those moments in my memory and I've probably got a bit  nostalgic.

Of all this, what I miss the most are the people who have fallen by
the wayside. I miss all the people who shared their hobbies and
obsessions with all of us through their personal blogs or collectively
in communities like DIY Planner, which was a community for fans of
planners, notebooks, office and writing supplies,...

I miss many of those personal blogs that were really personal, where
people mixed their hobbies with their day-to-day and where there was
no concern to publish crappy things to improve SEO positioning and
other similar nonsense.

There were people who were real artists and they shared on their blog
and/or on Flickr photos of their journals, which were a work of art in
themselves, where daily texts were mixed with pencil or ink drawings
painted with watercolors. I miss the scientist who told us how to use
a lab notebook one day and the next day he told us about he was going
to be a father, the guitar and electronics geek who made his own pedals
and explained how to do them and his next publication was about a
fanzine that you had not even imagined could exist.

I really miss all those authentic people with true hobbies, interests
and obsessions, who only intended to share them and connect with
people who shared those same interests. People who had no interest in
"monetizing" anything and in fact some of them didn't even sell their
sites when companies started buying everything they could get ads to.

Many of them decided to close shops and disappear many years ago, when
the web started to become the crap it is nowadays. Of them and their
creativity there are only some echoes that can be found in The
Internet Archive but that do not by far do justice to those people,
nor to that era.

It may be nostalgia, it may be something else...