this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2025
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[–] ouRKaoS@lemmy.today 6 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

stile project went from a collection of bafflingly weird shit to a shitty porn site.

Yeah, there was a lot of porn before, but it wasn't really the main focus- it was basically a collection of shock value pics & videos that probably played a big part in me becoming desensitized... It was my source of "Eh, I've seen worse"

[–] the_crotch@sh.itjust.works 1 points 20 hours ago

I liked his comics

[–] Agent641@lemmy.world 2 points 16 hours ago

&TOTSE

I got there right after the facelift in the early oughts, when they switched to vBulletin.

Shortly before the last shutdown, I cloned the entire website and I host it privately just for myself for future browsing.

[–] victorz@lemmy.world 8 points 23 hours ago

Reddit, I guess. And Google.

[–] ProfThadBach@lemmy.world 4 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago)

The Dark Side of the Net and Goth Girl of the Week. There use to be a goth dating site but I can't remember the name. It doesn't matter I suppose. I will be dead soon any way.

[–] vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de 17 points 1 day ago (3 children)

not dead, but pretty dead anyway: cracked.com

[–] HotsauceHurricane@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Cracked had a 10/10 movie podcast that was stopped abruptly (after it was bought up & butchered ,laying off like 100 staff) & it was the best movie podcast.

[–] vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 22 hours ago

i fondly remember one post once that had me in tears, about teaching somali pirates about ebay

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[–] ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works 20 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

YTMND from 20 years ago.

Technically it still exists but it's effectively dead.

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[–] lemmyknow@lemmy.today 3 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

Club Penguin. RIP :(

Waddle on, folks. Waddle on…

[–] Jolteon@lemmy.zip 1 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

There was still an iteration of it up last I checked.

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[–] Clent@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 18 hours ago

fuckedcompany.com

[–] LemmyThinkAboutIt@lemmy.zip 5 points 22 hours ago

I spent a lot of time in chat rooms roughly 30 years ago. Yahoo chat rooms were fun, and also The Offspring's old website from back in the late 90s had a chat room. Also I used to get a kick out of the "Ate my balls" webring and the dance ones that started with hamster dance.

[–] tal@olio.cafe 11 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (5 children)

I don't know about number one, but a few that I miss.

  • freshmeat.net. Announcements of open source software releases and updates.

  • newegg.com


computer components retailer


is still around, but it doesn't hold the spot it once did.

  • bash.org. Searchable list of funny, ranked quotes from IRC and similar. There are some archives, like this one.

  • A few "hosting" sites that went down with a lot of user-created content. No one thing was amazing, maybe, but it produced a lot of dangling links. Geocities: "At least 38 million pages, most written by users, were displayed by GeoCities before it was terminated.[7] The GeoCities Japan version of the service lasted until March 31, 2019.[8]". AngelFire. Tripod. Apparently the latter two are still around in some limited form.

  • Kaleidoscope.net, a site featuring themes for the eponymous classic MacOS themeing software package. They did a good job of generating theme previews. Fun to browse through.

[–] SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 23 hours ago

As for bash.org: there's a fedi bot that posts a random quote once per hour:

https://p.mr64.net/users/bash

Comes with the warning about early 2000s humor

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[–] Underwaterbob@sh.itjust.works 13 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Imagine my surprise when I just now typed in fark.com and saw that it's still there and it looks exactly like it did 25 years ago. Mind blown! I might even go back.

!fark@ibbit.at

[–] chunes@lemmy.world 2 points 23 hours ago

Florida man

[–] Adderbox76@lemmy.ca 12 points 1 day ago

I used to love IMDB before it got taken over. Especially the old forums where pretty much every TV show, every actor, etc... all had a forum on their page to discuss.

I would spend hours on there discussing the latest episodes of BSG, or Lost, or what have you. It was legitimately a water cooler for television watchers when no one in the real world shared the same television interests as me.

For Lost, the number of debates during that first couple seasons about what the connection would be in Locke and Hume being named after philosophers who wrote on human nature.

Or basically an easy place to go and discuss any thoughts or questions about a movie you just watched, or to find out if anyone else felt like an actor's performance was good/bad/etc...

It was just a fun place to hang out for a movie/TV buff. When they took it away, I was pretty sad.

[–] lemmyng@piefed.ca 7 points 1 day ago

Not favourite, but I used to use Google search almost exclusively because the results were good, and I could tell it to never show results from certain sites.

No need to tell this community the sad state of affairs it's in now...

[–] Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 16 hours ago

I loved DDRFreak forums and RODiary. RIP to both of those sites.

[–] EndOfLine@lemmy.world 23 points 1 day ago (5 children)

Not defunct and was only my favorite for a very short period of time, but it left an impression and I still find myself referencing it from time to time. Serving the same great content for 25 years!

https://zombo.com/

[–] Agent641@lemmy.world 2 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago)

Zombocom was and still is the only website in the world.

[–] Tedesche@lemmy.world 3 points 21 hours ago

I hear anything is possible at that website! Anything at all! The infinite is possible! The unattainable is unknown!

[–] Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world 8 points 1 day ago
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[–] AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

BBS and IRC. Technically neither are totally dead, but that was my introduction to the Internet a few years before the WWW existed.

[–] tal@olio.cafe 4 points 1 day ago

There are a few people running telnet-connected BBSes on the Internet.

kagis

Ah, someone has a list.

https://www.telnetbbsguide.com/

The Telnet BBS Guide focuses Bulletin Board Systems – the original Social Network, serving the BBS community for over 27 years! We list both Dial-Up and Telnet accessible Bulletin Board Systems all over the world. We currently list 976 BBS and related systems with brief and detailed descriptions and a downloadable text-version listing suitable for listing on your BBS or for as a download for others to view and use.

[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 21 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

It's not defunct tho... Newgrounds is still around.

Actually, none of my favorite websites are defunct. Something Awful, LiveJournal, and Penny-Arcade are also still going.

[–] sirboozebum@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago

Long live the old internet.

There was a site I found in '98 or '99 that showed a crap graphics bubble wrap sheet and you could click them all and hear popping sounds!

[–] gary@piefed.world 11 points 1 day ago (4 children)

Digg.com used to be my absolute favorite. Then it got bought out by a company who turned it into a content farm and it eventually died out. Now it's back and owned by Kevin Rose again, and I do like it a lot better than Reddit, but I still spend more time on Piefed these days.

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[–] oddlyqueer@lemmy.ml 15 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I wouldn't say it was a number one favorite, but I feel like the internet isn't the same without timecube.com

TW: conspiracy nonsense, racism, crimes against grammar https://web.archive.org/web/20050829015921/http://www.timecube.com/

[–] Fyrnyx@kbin.melroy.org 2 points 19 hours ago

I would say MSN Chat/Groups. I know MSN itself is still alive and well, but those two things used to have been a way to feel a bond within a community. It was some of my earlier stages of roleplaying online with people, up until the day Microsoft decided to slap a subscription onto chat and then outright discontinuing it when that model fell apart.

[–] gigachad@piefed.social 4 points 23 hours ago

hamsterdance.org

Wiki

[–] soar160@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago

Not A website, but in the early modem days there used to be these things called web rings. When you were done going through one site (usually just a few short pages or a short story kind of deal back then), you clicked the 'next' button and it brought you to another random, related (usually) website. My favorite web ring was the Star Wars ring. Learned a lot of expanded universe stuff, and random fan fiction. There was one site it brought me to that told me how to use the force...still trying to make my beer come to my hand :-)

[–] _thebrain_@sh.itjust.works 8 points 1 day ago

Way way way back in the late 90s I visited slashdot multiple times a day. I know it's still around but it is nothing like the commander taco days

Pick pretty much any forum.

[–] the_riviera_kid@lemmy.world 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Not really a web site but stumble upon was magic.

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[–] BurgerBaron@piefed.social 11 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

gamehippo.com was basically itch.io of the late 90's / early 2000's.

The Wayback Machine, I misremembered but sometimes you can find an archived binary/archived external mirror. Often the screenshots are at least.

Edit: Some examples:

2001: https://web.archive.org/web/20010401174047/http://www.gamehippo.com/

2004: https://web.archive.org/web/20040830074642/http://www.gamehippo.com/

2006 (best bet for finding active links): https://web.archive.org/web/20060112161747/http://www.gamehippo.com/

[–] rumschlumpel@feddit.org 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

mspaintadventures.com, home to the Homestuck web"comic" (it's very mixed-media) among others. It still exists, but doesn't work properly, in part because Homestuck was heavily built on flash animations.

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[–] RagingRobot@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago

VideoGameJams

Was a website of midi versions of video game songs and also had guitar tabs for the songs. I would legitimately just listen to those versions of the songs themselves.

[–] meathorse@lemmy.world 2 points 23 hours ago
[–] Perspectivist@feddit.uk 5 points 1 day ago

Stickdeath

No idea if it's still up or not.

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