You can't do email the "old way" because you'll be buried in spam, and even if you can handle that, others who don't do it the old way may never get your mail.
You can't put a server on the internet the old way because there is nonstop automated door knocking for security violations. In the old days, the attacks were much less sophisticated and mostly a "gentleman's agreement" meant they didn't happen at all.
You can't just open a port and expose a service if you're on CG-NAT or if your provider prohibits or blocks it otherwise.
You can't really do instant messaging the old ways (remember pidgin?) because 99% of the people you'd want to message are on systems with no external API to connect to.
Aside from that yes. I still have an old school static IPv4 address that serves an old school, mostly static HTML web site (and behind authentication some other useful stuff to immediate family members). Uh oh, did I just invite more door knocking?
gerdesj 1 days ago [-]
I'm still running multiple email systems the "old way". Been doing it for 30 years and don't intend to stop now, both at work and at home.
There are a few extra hoops these days to jump through ... but still it moves.
stackghost 16 hours ago [-]
Eh, I used to be in that camp.
I did it the right way. I set up SPF, DMARC and DKIM. I shopped around for a dedicated box with a v4 address that had a clean reputation. I ensured the provider's ASN was also clean. I used a well known TLD. I sent absolutely zero spam. No newsletters no nothing, just regular correspondence.
But I don't send enough emails to keep my IP reputation warm, I think, because deliverability into the big providers like Microslop and Google was very hit and miss. The end result is I would never know if someone just didn't want to reply, or if my message has been silently dropped. It stopped being fun and started becoming a chore and a headache.
Nowadays I pay fastmail to worry about that bullshit. I have more important things to do with my time.
nkapias 1 days ago [-]
> And obviously you’ll want a VPN too (skip Mullvad) — Proton’s VPN works fine for that.
Why skip Mullvad ? I thought it has a great reputation.
627467 8 hours ago [-]
Apparently nowadays in this globalized world how a single person opinion on their home country politics in a single election is meant to massively influence 8B people opinion and decision making across then entire planet, cultures and values.
ooterness 24 hours ago [-]
Previous discussion: "The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party"
Thank you (and everyone else who replied). I wasn’t aware of this controversy.
I wouldn’t express an opinion on the subject, however, I’m glad when information is made public, as it allows everyone to weigh whether it should influence their decisions.
CM30 24 hours ago [-]
Wonder if they're one of those people who thinks one of the founders donating to a right wing political parties make the service not worth dealing with:
Alternatively, it could be a lack of servers meaning that a few services seem to be blocking all traffic from them. I've had that issues when trying to use it for services like Reddit.
judah 24 hours ago [-]
The post author mentions in the comments he doesn't like the politics of the Mullvad and Brave creators.
Brave creator Brendan Eich is also the creator of JavaScript, which powers most of the web today. Eich donated to Republicans and pro-marriage causes, yes.
The author thinks that should disqualify his tooling from the open indie web.
I find that kind of political gatekeeping fit for a bygone and dead era. It’s a point of view that says we must cut off from our lives everyone who disagrees with our politics, even in the slightest.
Commercialized sites like Reddit are on the decline in part because of over-zealous mods driven by politics who ban and silence dissent. Facebook and pre-acquisition Twitter were also focused on silencing dissent; so much that they banned a sitting US President.
But the indie web of the ’90s? It was filled with free speech and live-and-let-live libertarians. Reddit originally was a bastion of free speech, and its founders were libertarian-leaning. Their vision has been polluted by the commercialization and big media takeover of Reddit..
The indie web is not likely to revive for many reasons. But it certainly will not revive with the kind of political gatekeeping the blog author is advocating.
RunSet 23 hours ago [-]
> Eich donated to Republicans and pro-marriage causes, yes.
Pro-marriage as in "prohibit marriage", I presume, since that is the cause to which he donated.[0]
Right, but being against gay people isn't exactly the live and let live vision
627467 8 hours ago [-]
Its funny because its deploying the same broad shunning mechanism the other side is accused of using
benj111 12 hours ago [-]
>I find that kind of political gatekeeping fit for a bygone and dead era
This is a new thing though. I'm on my 40s, you didn't used to expect people to cancel things because you disagreed with the creators politics.
>Twitter were also focused on silencing dissent; so much that they banned a sitting US President.
Should the sitting president get a free pass? For better or worse these platforms do need to have rules. If those rules are to be fair, everyone should be held to the same standard.
InsideOutSanta 17 hours ago [-]
Reddit and Facebook are on the decline because both are full of slop. The problem is undermoderation, not overmoderation. Twitter's real decline started after the acquisition and its ostensible return to free speech.
I should also think that libertarians should be in support of private people deciding not to support companies or people that support causes they disagree with. That's an excellent example of people's freedom of action.
vouaobrasil 16 hours ago [-]
> Reddit and Facebook are on the decline because both are full of slop. The problem is undermoderation, not overmoderation.
I don't think that's really the problem. I think it's just because Reddit and Facebook are too large to work, period - sort of what Kirkpatrick Sale was trying to get at in his book "Human Scale". Global systems of humans connected and interacting are probably doomed to this regardless of what mechanisms are instituted, unless those mechanisms limit in some way the local size of the interaction.
InsideOutSanta 14 hours ago [-]
I agree that this isn't the primary issue; my comment was a response to somebody making a specific claim, which is why I highlighted the moderation issues on Reddit and Facebook.
I agree with you that sheer scale is the primary issue, but for a particular reason: these systems are all prime targets for malicious actors intent on manipulating people on a large scale.
benj111 12 hours ago [-]
>I should also think that libertarians should be in support of private people deciding not to support companies or people that support causes they disagree with
As a liberal, not a libertarian, I would say that's a bit reductive.
People should have the right to express their political beliefs. The fear of cancellation and potentially losing their job etc isn't conducive to freedom of thought. Yes you individually may not agree and may choose not to support them, but here we have people actively calling on others not to support them, and condemning those who would choose to carry on engaging.
It's very divisive, 'you are either with us or against us'. That is far from any kind of liberty.
InsideOutSanta 12 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure if I understand what you're saying. Isn't calling for boycotts an essential part of free speech and libertarian-style freedom? If libertarians favor small governments and believe that free markets will govern themselves, aren't boycotts exactly how that happens?
benj111 7 hours ago [-]
Well as I said, I'm a liberal, not a libertarian. I don't believe in small government or the power of the free market in a political sense. I do believe in freedom of speech and allowing others that freedom, even if I disagree with it.
Punishing others, because they don't enforce your values is anathema to me.
Basically what is being suggested is that if I believe in democracy and freedom, I should be ok with an elected police state. It should be obvious that I can be pro democracy, but anti bad things that come out of that process.
I don't think it would be hypocritical for someone to support freedom or some other value, by removing freedom, or contradicting that value. I support freedom of speech, that doesn't extend to allowing others to lie, especially in the name of removing others freedoms. That doesn't invalidate my views or values.
viccis 23 hours ago [-]
One of its founders donated to a party that opposes immigration into Sweden. Some people seem to think that this is a conflict of interest because they assume that the surveillance necessary to accomplish what they think that political party wants to do (they claim they want to do mass forced deportations) is at odds with Mullvad's mission.
I personally don't think a single founder making that contribution is a strong enough tie to Mullvad to expect it to influence their behavior. I also don't think there's any reason to think that that party's goal will necessarily entail the curbing of digital security products like VPNs.
If anything, I think that Mullvad taking a "it's his business; it's not our role to tell individuals what they can think or do" stance is exactly what I would like a VPN to do. Others disagree.
tl;dr: It still has a great reputation outside of the Blueksy crowd.
doug_durham 1 days ago [-]
An alternate framing for these types of "the old web was better" articles is: "I really liked the web better when only privileged, highly educated people could put up content". The reality is that there was a lot of implicit gatekeeping going on in the early web because of the technical hurdles.
TFNA 1 days ago [-]
The early web that many people are nostalgic for stretches to the early millennium, by which time it was pretty straightforward for ordinary people to set up a blog on a number of platforms. That era of the web was still characterized by longform text that could actually express nuance, and there was either only gentle or no monetization (as opposed to the SEO and attention economy), and that is what people are usually contrasting the later web to.
isabelc 2 hours ago [-]
Me and all the other poor Kmart shoppers in the 1990s got free Internet access from their "Bluelight" Internet access. Don't know if this was everywhere, but it was a think in the US.
nine_k 1 days ago [-]
Won't it still be useful to have access to content posted by educated and well-meaning people without a direct commercial intent? The ancient original filter (access from universities) is long gone, and both low-content posts (a minor problem), and intentionally intrusive, addictive, and deceptive content (the major problem) abound.
Hence the longing for the times when this was not yet the case, and the quest for places that still maintain these qualities. (These places are often intentionally hard to find from outside; see the dead forest hypothesis.)
manytimesaway 1 days ago [-]
The era of MSN, MySpace and self/ISP-hosted pages didn't feel like gatekeeping at all; sure, there was some privilege involved (internet access still is a privilege in 2026), but there was less shame about attempting stuff.
doublerabbit 23 hours ago [-]
In the golden era the care wasn't there. I didn't care someone said something offensive. You just kind of shrugged and moved on. It shouldn't be said but hey they did; report & ignore. That's why 4chan is 4chan, Encyclopaedia Dramatica et cetera.
Political correctness eventually tainted the internet as then if someone's values were hurt, drama would roll around only fuelling the troll further. This later led to gatekeeping and entitlement; Tumblr as example.
The internet has now made everyone so sensitive and now
most want to broadcast their feels upon social media or whatever, you end up with elitism of groups and communities who think they know best.
itsbczurstupid 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
bigbuppo 24 hours ago [-]
It took less effort to setup a geocities page than a myspace account.
Mezzie 20 hours ago [-]
I had a Geocities page in 1995. I was 6 years old. (I also remember how people were kind of freaked out when they realized us kids were on there.)
I lived in rural MI and neither of my parents had a 4 year degree. I wasn't the kid of someone at MIT or in the Valley. We weren't an impoverished family, but we were somewhere between middle and lower-middle class. We were by far some of the lowest people on the web totem pole, socio-economically speaking, but access wasn't out of the question for people who didn't come from a lot of financial/educational privilege.
stackghost 13 hours ago [-]
>An alternate framing for these types of "the old web was better" articles is: "I really liked the web better when only privileged, highly educated people could put up content". The reality is that there was a lot of implicit gatekeeping going on in the early web because of the technical hurdles.
First of all, there wasn't much in the way of technical hurdles when it came to myspace or geocities, so I don't buy your premise at all. I was LARPing as a video game reviewer at 10 years old in 1995 with my awful <blink> tags/tiled backgrounds/table layouts. I was a dumb kid and still managed to figure it out. So did approximately one squillion of other people.
Secondly, the same tired, obnoxious comment about privilege and technology can be trotted out and applied to the early web, early facebook, early usenet, early IRC, early LLMs, early crypto. What does this comment do to advance the discussion in any meaningful way?
bitexploder 20 hours ago [-]
AOL existed…
euroderf 1 days ago [-]
Didn't a lot of people come to the internet proper after first using outfits like AOL and Compuserve ? I wonder if those outfits served as "training grounds" or "boot camps", and what kind of culture shock their customers had upon hitting the "real net" (newsgroups etc.), and whether they learned "enough" netiquette before "graduating to" the wider net.
TFNA 1 days ago [-]
Articles like this one, talking about how the original web is still around, miss a key point IMO: that indie web that exists today is socially irrelevant. In the early millennium it was common for people meeting IRL to feel a sense of community because they followed a shared ecosystem of blogs, whether about a band, a religious denomination, a city neighborhood, or a travel subculture.
Today if you read indie web content, it is highly likely that you are the only person you know IRL that reads it. So, when social isolation is a problem many people today complain about, it can be glaring that the indie web doesn't scratch that itch as it once did.
manytimesaway 1 days ago [-]
Quite ironic to post this on a platform that uses 1/4 of the screen for advertisement and a drowning GDPR prompt. (Also the CSS makes it tedious to read on a computer.)
Why the refusal of Mullvad, though?
doublerabbit 23 hours ago [-]
The Founder of donated to a controversial political party of Sweden.
Same reasoning to why we shouldn't be using Kagi because the founder uses Yandex, a Russian state search engine for a data source.
Yolo I guess.
mghackerlady 8 hours ago [-]
At least with kagi it's not like they have a better option. They could go with bing but then they'd just be another bing frontend
itsbczurstupid 2 hours ago [-]
If Kagi uses Yandex, that makes me want to use it even more, since a) Yandex is a search engine that actually is still useful, unlike all American search engines and b) it's a lot safer if the KGB is spying on me rather than the CIA, since I live in Soviet America.
viccis 23 hours ago [-]
The medium is the message. People posted websites and interacted other websites like that back then because hypertext static webpages were the medium of the time. We've already progressed through forums, social media, app-ified social media, image and then video and then short form video content, etc. Trying to go back has historically been challenging and mostly the realm of enthusiasts whose usage is warped by the fact that they sought it out. See also: typewriters, horse carriages, etc
Rendered at 21:07:40 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
You can't do email the "old way" because you'll be buried in spam, and even if you can handle that, others who don't do it the old way may never get your mail.
You can't put a server on the internet the old way because there is nonstop automated door knocking for security violations. In the old days, the attacks were much less sophisticated and mostly a "gentleman's agreement" meant they didn't happen at all.
You can't just open a port and expose a service if you're on CG-NAT or if your provider prohibits or blocks it otherwise.
You can't really do instant messaging the old ways (remember pidgin?) because 99% of the people you'd want to message are on systems with no external API to connect to.
Aside from that yes. I still have an old school static IPv4 address that serves an old school, mostly static HTML web site (and behind authentication some other useful stuff to immediate family members). Uh oh, did I just invite more door knocking?
There are a few extra hoops these days to jump through ... but still it moves.
I did it the right way. I set up SPF, DMARC and DKIM. I shopped around for a dedicated box with a v4 address that had a clean reputation. I ensured the provider's ASN was also clean. I used a well known TLD. I sent absolutely zero spam. No newsletters no nothing, just regular correspondence.
But I don't send enough emails to keep my IP reputation warm, I think, because deliverability into the big providers like Microslop and Google was very hit and miss. The end result is I would never know if someone just didn't want to reply, or if my message has been silently dropped. It stopped being fun and started becoming a chore and a headache.
Nowadays I pay fastmail to worry about that bullshit. I have more important things to do with my time.
Why skip Mullvad ? I thought it has a great reputation.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48717469
I wouldn’t express an opinion on the subject, however, I’m glad when information is made public, as it allows everyone to weigh whether it should influence their decisions.
https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2026/7/20/donation-controversy
Alternatively, it could be a lack of servers meaning that a few services seem to be blocking all traffic from them. I've had that issues when trying to use it for services like Reddit.
Brave creator Brendan Eich is also the creator of JavaScript, which powers most of the web today. Eich donated to Republicans and pro-marriage causes, yes.
The author thinks that should disqualify his tooling from the open indie web.
I find that kind of political gatekeeping fit for a bygone and dead era. It’s a point of view that says we must cut off from our lives everyone who disagrees with our politics, even in the slightest.
Commercialized sites like Reddit are on the decline in part because of over-zealous mods driven by politics who ban and silence dissent. Facebook and pre-acquisition Twitter were also focused on silencing dissent; so much that they banned a sitting US President.
But the indie web of the ’90s? It was filled with free speech and live-and-let-live libertarians. Reddit originally was a bastion of free speech, and its founders were libertarian-leaning. Their vision has been polluted by the commercialization and big media takeover of Reddit..
The indie web is not likely to revive for many reasons. But it certainly will not revive with the kind of political gatekeeping the blog author is advocating.
Pro-marriage as in "prohibit marriage", I presume, since that is the cause to which he donated.[0]
https://www.pcmag.com/news/new-mozilla-ceo-addresses-anti-ga...
This is a new thing though. I'm on my 40s, you didn't used to expect people to cancel things because you disagreed with the creators politics.
>Twitter were also focused on silencing dissent; so much that they banned a sitting US President.
Should the sitting president get a free pass? For better or worse these platforms do need to have rules. If those rules are to be fair, everyone should be held to the same standard.
I should also think that libertarians should be in support of private people deciding not to support companies or people that support causes they disagree with. That's an excellent example of people's freedom of action.
I don't think that's really the problem. I think it's just because Reddit and Facebook are too large to work, period - sort of what Kirkpatrick Sale was trying to get at in his book "Human Scale". Global systems of humans connected and interacting are probably doomed to this regardless of what mechanisms are instituted, unless those mechanisms limit in some way the local size of the interaction.
I agree with you that sheer scale is the primary issue, but for a particular reason: these systems are all prime targets for malicious actors intent on manipulating people on a large scale.
As a liberal, not a libertarian, I would say that's a bit reductive.
People should have the right to express their political beliefs. The fear of cancellation and potentially losing their job etc isn't conducive to freedom of thought. Yes you individually may not agree and may choose not to support them, but here we have people actively calling on others not to support them, and condemning those who would choose to carry on engaging.
It's very divisive, 'you are either with us or against us'. That is far from any kind of liberty.
Punishing others, because they don't enforce your values is anathema to me.
Basically what is being suggested is that if I believe in democracy and freedom, I should be ok with an elected police state. It should be obvious that I can be pro democracy, but anti bad things that come out of that process.
I don't think it would be hypocritical for someone to support freedom or some other value, by removing freedom, or contradicting that value. I support freedom of speech, that doesn't extend to allowing others to lie, especially in the name of removing others freedoms. That doesn't invalidate my views or values.
I personally don't think a single founder making that contribution is a strong enough tie to Mullvad to expect it to influence their behavior. I also don't think there's any reason to think that that party's goal will necessarily entail the curbing of digital security products like VPNs.
If anything, I think that Mullvad taking a "it's his business; it's not our role to tell individuals what they can think or do" stance is exactly what I would like a VPN to do. Others disagree.
tl;dr: It still has a great reputation outside of the Blueksy crowd.
Hence the longing for the times when this was not yet the case, and the quest for places that still maintain these qualities. (These places are often intentionally hard to find from outside; see the dead forest hypothesis.)
Political correctness eventually tainted the internet as then if someone's values were hurt, drama would roll around only fuelling the troll further. This later led to gatekeeping and entitlement; Tumblr as example.
The internet has now made everyone so sensitive and now most want to broadcast their feels upon social media or whatever, you end up with elitism of groups and communities who think they know best.
I lived in rural MI and neither of my parents had a 4 year degree. I wasn't the kid of someone at MIT or in the Valley. We weren't an impoverished family, but we were somewhere between middle and lower-middle class. We were by far some of the lowest people on the web totem pole, socio-economically speaking, but access wasn't out of the question for people who didn't come from a lot of financial/educational privilege.
First of all, there wasn't much in the way of technical hurdles when it came to myspace or geocities, so I don't buy your premise at all. I was LARPing as a video game reviewer at 10 years old in 1995 with my awful <blink> tags/tiled backgrounds/table layouts. I was a dumb kid and still managed to figure it out. So did approximately one squillion of other people.
Secondly, the same tired, obnoxious comment about privilege and technology can be trotted out and applied to the early web, early facebook, early usenet, early IRC, early LLMs, early crypto. What does this comment do to advance the discussion in any meaningful way?
Today if you read indie web content, it is highly likely that you are the only person you know IRL that reads it. So, when social isolation is a problem many people today complain about, it can be glaring that the indie web doesn't scratch that itch as it once did.
Why the refusal of Mullvad, though?
Same reasoning to why we shouldn't be using Kagi because the founder uses Yandex, a Russian state search engine for a data source.
Yolo I guess.