Yeah, it's quite sad where we landed. Circa 2004-2006 while the internet was mostly open and accessible I mentally grouped "the internet" into two buckets. There was the real web plus usenet plus email and then there was "facebook" with its weird garden wall and exclusive invites or some such shit. I didn't think of facebook as being "on the web" even though they used the http protocol. It was highly unusual then to have any web content behind a registration wall.

So hardly anyone considered facebook to be a part of "the web". It was its own weird duck. Twenty years later and most people only frequent this "weird" part of the internet - this limited ensemble of paid and unpaid walled gardens.

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hdgvhicv 4 hours ago | parent [-]

That applies to aol, msn, compuserve etc, not to Facebook which you only ever accessed via http from a browser.

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abraxas 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah, those didn't count either. AOL and compuserve were not even available outside the USA in the late nineties. With AOL I'm quite sure nobody considered them to be a part of the web. Their pages didn't have URLs early on but AOL "keywords" instead. Compuserve also weren't using http I believe. It was some kind of commercial WAN that was pitched as a competitor to the internet, no?

	▲	zabzonk 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> AOL and compuserve were not even available outside the USA in the late nineties yes, they were, in the UK at least. speaking as a compuserve user.