I miss the old web.

Not in a “things were better” way. Just in the way certain places used to feel. Slower, quieter, a little strange.

You’d land on someone’s page and it was clearly theirs. Weird fonts and broken links and an abandoned guestbook. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t trying to be anything.

Afternoons on AIM. The sound of a 56K modem, its signal reaching out into the ether like tendrils. GeoCities pages with scrolling marquees and visitor counters. CD-ROM encyclopedias. Myst.

It all felt smaller. But also bigger, somehow. Like there were more corners to get lost in. The world feels a lot smaller when you look at a map, and in the early web there were no maps. We wandered.

Now everything feels connected in the wrong way. A few huge platforms, endless feeds, recycled videos, AI slop.

So I go looking for quieter spaces. Neocities feels like one of them.

The Vestibule is my own quiet space. A small room between outside and in. Somewhere to pause for a moment before moving on.

That’s all this is.

Onward and upward.

kw54@protonmail.ch