Ask Lemmy

hamsterdance.org

Wiki

Kuro5hin (pronounced "corrosion").

It started with a lot of people who disliked Slashdot. Kinda like Lemmy is full of a lot of people who dislike Reddit. It had a broader subject matter than Slashdot, though. You might end up reading about someone's experience of being fully immersed in a BDSM relationship where all windows were covered, all clocks were removed, and they spend the entire day in service to their master until a safeword is called. (IIRC, that went on for something like 6 months, but when they came out, the person thought it was closer to 4).

Or it might just be about how badly WEP on WiFi broke this week. There was a lot of that at the time.

There were probably three waves of users. I was around for the first; my UID is around 2,700. Second started around UID 30,000 and I think it was also mostly Slashdot refugees. Third was around UID 50,000 and it really went downhill with that one.

XPhilez

Best free shit. Vanished without a trace in a day. No news, no heads-up just.. Gone

Egg2.com was my favorite flash game archive. Literally just a few hundred links to various flash games.

Anyone remember Happy Puppy?

There used to be rotten.com, which posted extremely disturbing pictures and I don't miss that part of it. But I do miss the Rotten Library, which used to be a bastion of suppressed literature.

My old stomping grounds, the indie gaming blog GameSetWatch.

Suck.com

There used to be a website called "thesmartass(dot)info". It had online emulators for old video game consoles as well as some flash games and a bunch of other stuff that I never used. The homepage also had a daily (or it might have been weekly, I've forgotten) artwork that was usually abstract but sometimes it got weird. Like, there is this one image that I sometimes think about, where it was a realistic looking image of a naked woman (or at least I think it was a woman) with a really long and flexible torso, and her torso is contorted so she fits inside a box.

I don't know when it happened but it seems like the domain has been transferred over to someone else and it's a completely different website now. Also, I did check the Wayback Machine and it is archived but it seems like it wasn't archived properly as the website is almost completely broken.

I used to use the NME website, which was a weekly music paper in the UK, back in the day.

It had forums and free webmail, so I had had an nme.com address that made me feel kinda cool (I was a teenager and music was very much my identity).

Then they cancelled the webmail and that was that. All my teen emails gone forever. I'd love to get them back, and who knows,they could be sitting on a server somewhere, but I doubt it.

Oh, also Bebo. Posted a lot on that precursor to Facebook and now it's all gone.

&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.

fuckedcompany.com

Searchlores.org

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.

Firingsquad - gaming focused hardware and news

https://web.archive.org/web/20040630053837/http://firingsquad.com/

Iminlikewithyou / omgpop

Peak Myspace-era cringe but so fun

back when there was not much excite was very nice. If it would have gotten tabs like yahoo it would have went at least as long.

I mean, whether or not I liked Sodahead, whether or not it was good for me, and whether or not it was a good website are all questions without definitive answer, but I sure did spend my teenage years there

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

Something happened to fmh-child.org

It isn't what it used to be.

I kinda miss stumbleupon. Found a lot of cool flash games and stuff from that!

Reddit. Unfortunately it's defunct beyond repair now, but back in the day it was a nice place to discuss all sorts of topics with knowledgeable and like-minded folk.

Not dead, but not nearly as alive as it used to be.
https://homestarrunner.com/

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/

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.

YTMND from 20 years ago.

Technically it still exists but it's effectively dead.

not dead, but pretty dead anyway: cracked.com

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/

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.