There is also https://neocities.org with free static web hosting and zero ads. Many features and tools.

Seems to be down.

The tinkerers were a larger proportion of web users in the 90's and hence had more visibility with their larger share of available content. Now they're drowned by the sea of services for norms to consume.

And seeking them out seems to have gotten harder. I want to see more tinkering!

Gimme some more of that sweet walled garden.

No joke, I do remember when Facebook came onto the scene, I liked it way better than MySpace. I absolutely hated how customized MySpace pages became. It was dreck. Sound would blast when you opened someone's page. You could barely read what was on the page at times. It was occasionally fun but more often than not really terrible.

Reading the article my thought was "one person's fun and weird is another person's loud and obnoxious".

These days people have to focus more on the content because the presentation is so locked down. This may be for the better, but it can definitely feel antiseptic and corporate. The sense of fun is lost.

Where does Facebook offer a place to put "content"? AFAIK You can give them personal info and suggest interesting things, and Facebook decides how, if, or when to present this information, and to whom.

When Myspace came along, it clearly seemed to be the cesspool of the internet; I never created a page and never visited it out of principle. There was nothing I wanted out there.

Facebook's clean design was what I actually wanted. Not some autoplay crap music.

In fact, back in the day, everything in Facebook was a search. I could click on your residence or your class/section and see everyone else in it. It was awesome and useful.

Zuckerberg is apparently red-green colour-blind which influenced FB being all blue. [1]

It also started out simple and therefore there was little to make it cluttered.

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/09/20/the-face-of-fa...

Samy is still your hero and you know it!

Thank god youtube got rid of that. One day you would browse a dark page, and boom! Searing white at 3AM! But it’s nostalgic.