Previously on isoul.uk: Discovering Anime on the Wild Internet of 2007 — the internet stopped being a reference tool and became the place we went to find what to watch next.
I don’t think the old internet was necessarily better.
It was slower, less reliable, full of broken links and often much harder to use.
But it did feel different.
The easiest way I can describe it is that I used to feel as though I was moving through the internet. Today it often feels as though the internet moves through a handful of feeds towards me.
That change has made things dramatically more convenient.
It has also changed the feeling of discovery.
You used to go looking #
A lot of my interests developed because I had to actively search for them.
When I got deeper into anime around 2007, I used places like Veoh and Justin.tv. Finding a show often meant following recommendations from people, searching around, reading discussions and ending up on sites I hadn’t known existed an hour earlier.
There wasn’t one universal homepage deciding what I should see next.
That made the web messy.
It also made it feel enormous.
Communities had places #
Forums were destinations.
You deliberately visited them.
The same people appeared repeatedly, usernames became familiar and conversations could continue for days rather than disappearing beneath the next few hundred posts in a feed.
Those communities certainly had problems. Nostalgia has a habit of removing the bad parts.
But there was something valuable about the idea that a community lived somewhere.
You went there because you wanted to be there.
Everything became easier #
The modern internet solved a lot of genuine problems.
Streaming services made video effortless. Social networks made it easy to find people. Cloud storage removed the need to think about where files physically lived.
Phones made all of it available almost constantly.
For years, I happily adopted those conveniences.
Like most people, I accumulated accounts without really thinking about the long term.
Email, photos, contacts, calendars, browsing history, video history and countless other pieces of my life ended up spread across services run by other companies.
It worked.
Until I started asking whether convenience was the only thing I cared about.
Why I started pulling things back #
More recently I have been moving parts of my digital life back under my own control.
Photos went to Immich.
Files and calendars moved towards Nextcloud.
I started thinking more carefully about email, browsers, tracking and the amount of history sitting inside accounts I had used for decades.
At the same time, my homelab grew.
None of this means I intend to disappear from the public internet.
I still use online services. I still use cloud services where they make sense.
The difference is that I no longer automatically assume the easiest hosted option should become the permanent home of everything.
Self-hosting is partly about the old feeling #
This is where nostalgia and self-hosting unexpectedly meet for me.
Running a service yourself is obviously a technical exercise. There are containers, DNS records, certificates, backups, updates and plenty of opportunities to break things.
But there is also a psychological difference.
A small self-hosted service feels like a place.
My photo library lives somewhere I understand. My files have a home. My DNS does something because I configured it to do that.
It reminds me, a little, of the older web.
Not because the technology is similar.
Because I am actively participating again instead of simply consuming whatever is put in front of me.
I don’t want the old internet back #
I am not interested in pretending everything was perfect before smartphones and social media.
It wasn’t.
What I would like to keep is the sense that the internet is something we can build, explore and own parts of.
Not just a small number of dominant feeds we endlessly scroll.
That is one of the reasons self-hosting appeals to me.
It gives me a tiny piece of the internet that feels like mine.