Nah, it feels very different because Instagram et al has gamified the whole thing. Bob's labrador page is its own space, separate in a way from the rest of the internet. Bobslabs on Instagram is implicitly competing with celebrities and 'influencers' whether Bob likes it or notand that changes the feel.
It was very different. It was different in construction, discoverability, intent, and consumption. This isn’t nostalgia. I’m not particularly nostalgic about that time for other reasons and I was neither a kid nor a teen.
Nothing I do on Instagram can possibly make it as personal as my personal sites were. That’s not how I interact with Instagram at all and it couldn’t be even if I tried really hard. And even if I managed it, it’s not how it is offered by Instagram and not how it would be consumed.
That said, I don’t think that web is dead. It’s just a lot less discoverable and there’s a lot more noise. One of my favorite “old web” sites: https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/ I’m not even sure it’s actually old. It just is more like the old web.
Notice the first comment (towards the bottom of the page): “Low on modern-web-BS...” There’s a qualitative difference.
The shoelace site is wild, but it got me thinking. Detractors might say that Wikipedia would fill the void for this type of information.
...but I don't think that's true. Ian's shoelace site information would instead be edited ad-nauseum by a consortium of shoelace enthusiasts. It doesn't allow for personal opinion or in some cases specific things that aren't well known that can't have their history sourced properly (citation needed?)
I mean I get it. I still call it nostalgia because as you point out, it's still completely possible to do it's just a smaller overall percentage of what is on the web. I run a niche site that gets ~20k MAU:
I consider it the ultimate in no-modern-web BS. The only "modern" thing I use is GA, which even then, honestly I'm looking at replacing it with one of those 90s counters.
Nostalgia factor is very real, but I don't think it captures just how novel the internet was. Communicating en masse across the world had never happened in human history. And it made you feel like an explorer of an alien planet, at least until one too many "under construction" pages of the night.
So yes, Space Jam site itself was less about wowing, but gave a feeling of interacting with its creators on a more intimate level than other movie marketing. They were using the same tools that any one of us could do ourselves, unlike the millions spent on the movie. The Space Jam site looked much like dozens or hundreds of others from hobby coders or engineers in their free time.
And for me it's more melancholy than fun now, because it reminds me of that feeling of unbounded optimism that the early internet had.
