Back in the day, when social media was not even a twinkle in its developer's eye, the internet was wild and free. Anyone could make a website about absolutely anything, and a lot of people did just that. My first website was named "Ribbon" as that was my username for Demon, a dial-up ISP. I had had to come up with a word on the spot as a username and I don't know why ribbon was the first thing I thought of! But my first site was Ribbon, and was hosted on the 5mb of space that Demon gave its customers. After that I discovered Geocities and Fortunecity and there was no holding me back!

There was a certain style, a convention, in websites made by women in those days. There would be pages on one's family and pets, interests and hobbies. And there were dozens of social groups setting up to provide friendly communities. Geocities had a women's section, Wellelsy, and my first site was there. In 1999 my sister bought me my first domain for my birthday and I had it pointed to my Geocities site. In those days private hosting was ruinously expensive and Paypal was not as ubiquitous as it is now. So I relied on free webspace at a whole host of Geocities-wanna-be's. I became a "neighbourhood guide" in the Paris district in Geocities, and had a similar role in two "Irish" districts in Fortunecity. We were given extra space and our duties involved visiting other people's websites in the sections we had been assigned to, and checking that the rules were being kept. I once had to report some nasty porn in Fortunecity, as I remember. Luckily not so nasty as to give me nightmares.

It is sad that eventually the love of money destroyed those happy, creative places. As you probably know, Geocities was sold to Yahoo who systematically stripped out everything that made it a fun place to build one's website. And they eventually closed Geocities. The same thing happened with Fortunecity. Both companies decided to concnetrate on paid hosting and on selling domains. The same thing happened with other website providers, such as Disney, and their "Go" webspace. The way was open for (shudder) social media and the boring phase of the internet began.

Boring? Well yes, given that most people are content with the likes of Facebook and Twitter, where they don't even have to think or do anything remotely approaching creativity. There are wordpress blogs, which tend to use the same half dozen templates. They are more interesting but they're not websites. Not as they used to be, not as they should be, back in the day of Web 1. As Wednesday said, in the eponymous TV series, "I find social media to be a soul-sucking void of meaningless affirmation", and I do agree! There are still places which offer free webspace, such as X10hosting, Neocities, and Altervista. But there are also a lot of companies who offer budget hosting with small prices, and often better support.