If you’ve got nothing nice to say, go the fuck away. I’m instantly blocking shitheads who want to poke fun at this for their own amusement. You lead sad little lives.

I am probably the last of the group of people that were some of the early adopters of the internet. The internet didn’t fully become public and more accessible until 1994, I didn’t start using the internet until 1996. I am nearing 30 years old on the internet by next year. People from my group, we’ve seen it all by this point.

We’ve seen the internet at it’s infancy, as it developed, the explosion of it’s usage, the dot com bubble burst, Web 1.0, Web 2.0, Flash’s death and the ongoing enshittification of the internet today as we know it.

  • GeeDubHayduke@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    50 minutes ago

    Family line. I did want kids for a while, but lacking a willing partner, and seeing the state of the world, that isn’t happening.

  • PiecePractical@midwest.social
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    2 hours ago

    I think my wife and I might be one of the last couples to be embarrassed enough about meeting on the Internet to lie about it. When we talk about how we met around our niblings, we always have to explain that “we met on the Internet back when that was something you lied to your friends about”

    • Diddlydee@feddit.uk
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      2 hours ago

      Niblings. There’s a word I’ve never heard before. I’m guessing it means niece or nephew. I like it.

      • PiecePractical@midwest.social
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        53 minutes ago

        Yeah, my wife found it somewhere online a while back. Not having kids ourselves, we end up talking about our niblings a lot but we always felt like the phrase “nieces and nephews” was a bit cumbersome in conversion so, it filled a need for us. I keep hearing it from people that have no connection to us so it seems like we’re not the only ones who’ve latched onto in recent years.

  • juliebean@lemm.ee
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    3 hours ago

    i’m not sure i understand the question. if it is meant to ask what experience i’ve had that no other living person has or ever will experience again, then i’m probably not old enough in my mid 30s to lay any such claim. this doesn’t seem likely to be what you mean though, since it should be obvious to you that you aren’t the only surviving person who used the internet in the 90s.

    my second interpretation of the question would be that you want to know what experience i am the most recent person to have experienced, which would work with your example, if you consider the ‘early’ internet to have ended and become the regular internet, right after you first got online. for that, a couple hours ago, i walked atop a particular out of the way concrete block wall on my way home. probably nobody has done that since then.

  • djsoren19@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    6 hours ago

    My familial line. Sorry nerds, the buck stops here. I’m not gonna force anyone else into this hellscape against their will. If I ever adopt, they can keep their familial names.

    • PiecePractical@midwest.social
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      2 hours ago

      Same here! Only child of my adopted parents and only kid my birth parents had together so, I’m ending a couple of lines. I’m the god parent of a few niblings but if (God forbid) they should ever become my responsibility, they’re not getting a name change.

  • AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world
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    7 hours ago

    I don’t understand—you think you’re one of the last people left who started using the internet in the 90s?

    • Moose@moose.best
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      3 hours ago

      I think what OP is trying to say is that people in their age range will end up being the last of those people, ie. the internet was one of their earliest memories and that happened to be right as it took off. A similar example from my age range, we will probably be the last to remember the WTC attacks. It’s one of the earliest memories I have. Not me specifically, unless I am graced with an incredibly long life, but someone around my age who is.

  • HubertManne@moist.catsweat.com
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    5 hours ago

    Its sorta a wierd way to say it. Im not the last. There is still a whole host of folks alive my age and older. I have thought of it as sorta what defines the experiences of folks who are born around my time. For me its knowing an all analog world. I mean the integrated circuit was invented before my birth but most folks were not interacting with anything digital really. What stands out is space invaders showing up at the pinball arcade. I was very young. Like my first memories. None of my older siblings had been into pinball but for some reason we stopped in. I think my brother saw one of his friends. Anwyay there was a huge crowd around this space invaders game that im pretty sure was the first time the people had seen an electronic game. Slowly from there you saw other games, the pong at home thing, digital clocks. Arcades became things with mostly digital games and pinball became a smaller and smaller part of the arcade and home systems became better. odyseey, atari, vectrex, collegovision. digital watches and calculators became a thing. Word processors showed up before computers took the typewriters place. photocopiers took over for mimeograph machines. It was only a glimpse in my youngest years but I experienced an all analogue existence for a short span of my life.

  • Cruxifux@feddit.nl
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    7 hours ago

    I think I’m one of the only long distance runners that still smokes. I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who runs as much as I do and smokes cigarettes every day.

      • Cruxifux@feddit.nl
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        4 hours ago

        Eh I only smoke about 4-5 a day usually and at my heaviest running I did 5k plus for 8 months every day. Now I do about 15k a week.

      • Cruxifux@feddit.nl
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        4 hours ago

        Not generally, but I did a couple half marathons where I smoked one or two smokes during the run just because it was funny. Even came in top ten percent one run when I did that.

          • Cruxifux@feddit.nl
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            3 hours ago

            I also used to bring a micci of rye with me on these runs. I generally run with my running backpack, and I’d pull out the rye and take a shot and pull out a smoke and light it, all as im running, and keep going. It always got at least one laugh and one “wtf” from the other runners.

  • Diddlydee@feddit.uk
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    7 hours ago

    As of now (4.45pm GMT on 25th Feb 2025) I’m the last to comment on this post of a person who (erroneously) believes they are the last of the early adopters of the internet (I’d say there are millions of us).

    • BCsven@lemmy.ca
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      5 hours ago

      As they stated it became accessible to the average person in 1996. Prior to that you would be lucky if their was a local ISP offering access to the internet. I worked at several engineering companies in 1991 onward, and even though we had high end systems and tech back then we didn’t get Internet and email until 1996. And initially it was useless because your clients didn’t all have email yet.

      • wheeldawg@sh.itjust.works
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        4 hours ago

        The usage of those terms became blurred immediately, as far as general public awareness goes.

        If you use enough brain cells to be above “lol, I like that clip clicks like lolol”, then you’re labeled a nerd.

        If you’re familiar with any acronyms that have to do with tech, then you’re a super nerd.

    • venotic@kbin.melroy.orgOP
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      4 hours ago

      Oh lol, you tried sounding smart there.

      You’ve only sourced what is essentially a step of development for the internet. Do you even read?

  • eldavi@lemmy.ml
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    7 hours ago

    add to this that the internet forced so many of us to become technically & technologically proficient because it was a necessary step to get us online.

    that further spurred on knowledge of things that laymen wouldn’t have cared about otherwise like cpu architectures or clock frequencies; operating systems internals with things like linux or bsd; knowledge of basic networking fundamentals; html/css/javascript for geocities & myspace pages; etc.

    as the enshitification turns the internet into walled gardens and people continue to use smart phones that “just work”; they are no longer able to repair their own devices like we had to do, which spares them from having to learn the nuts and bolts of the technology that enables our lives.

    • PassingThrough@lemm.ee
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      6 hours ago

      And don’t even get me started on “AI”.

      As the family technical person, I can say after years of attempting to teach people to understand and solve their own problems, my support calls are down in the past year! Is it because they got smarter? No! They started using ChatGPT, CoPilot, etc and following it blindly. Do they understand the concepts of what they are changing and doing? No, but as long as the original problem is fixed, who cares if a dozen more are created, as long as they keep quiet.

      I am cursed to be in the middle, couldn’t just be given a well paying technical job like my forebears, but nobody thinks they need my technical skills anymore, so I have talents now viewed as outdated and of limited use.

      • eldavi@lemmy.ml
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        5 hours ago

        i occupy a different sort of middle ground in that i’m at the right generation to get those well paying technical jobs simply because i had to monkey around with off-the-shelf hardware and linux when they were both new to most people; but i also don’t get as many requests for technical help as i once did from family.

        however, in my case, it’s been because the entire younger generations of my family have gone with iphones along with apple’s walled garden so they’ve never had to struggle with something like getting winsock working on windows 3.11 just to get internet porn. lol

        somehow, it’s only the other older & leftist in my family that insist on diy implementations with linux and foss hardware, including de-googled androids; while the moderates and conservatives alike just buy iphones and never learn because of it.

        like in your case; they see that technical skillset as mildly useful at best even though it underpins their own technology choices. worst of it all to me is that i get to witness them struggling to afford another iphone or its fees simply because they refuse to go with “poor people androids” or they don’t want to deal with the frustration of getting things to work without apple’s walled garden; some prioritize it over food or rent simply due to the exorbitant costs.

      • KittenBiscuits@lemm.ee
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        6 hours ago

        When USRobotics first brought the 56k modem to market, they had an online contest to give away 100 of them. I won one. My ISP couldn’t even serve me 56k for about another year.

        Also, I miss silly fun winnable online contests and freebies.

  • Asafum@feddit.nl
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    7 hours ago

    My paternal family name. No one else carries my last name and I’m almost 40, been single for a decade now so kids are out of the question.

    God knows how many generations of this name existed only to die out because I’m pathetic lol

      • Asafum@feddit.nl
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        6 hours ago

        I appreciate the suggestion, but I’m single and live in a garage “apartment.” It wouldn’t be a good life for them.

    • Bademantel@lemmy.world
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      5 hours ago

      I really liked the game something like 15 years ago. But it seems like a bad idea to get back into it now with only a few very dedicated players left.

  • cosmicrookie@lemmy.world
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    6 hours ago

    It is depressing to think that this is what you feel makes you unique… any 45+ person is in the same boat as you my friend…

    You are special though, but this is not what makes you special.

    • venotic@kbin.melroy.orgOP
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      3 hours ago

      It’s even more depressing that it seems like your legacy is to just shit post and troll. That’s even more pathetic. Why don’t you go and actually try accomplishing something in life?

  • AZERTY@feddit.nl
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    6 hours ago

    I will be last person to take the last hit from my very nearly empty lemonade raspberry dispo at some point later today.