Mostly true but not quite.

You can't do email the "old way" because you'll be buried in spam, and even if you can handle that, others who don't do it the old way may never get your mail.

You can't put a server on the internet the old way because there is nonstop automated door knocking for security violations. In the old days, the attacks were much less sophisticated and mostly a "gentleman's agreement" meant they didn't happen at all.

You can't just open a port and expose a service if you're on CG-NAT or if your provider prohibits or blocks it otherwise.

You can't really do instant messaging the old ways (remember pidgin?) because 99% of the people you'd want to message are on systems with no external API to connect to.

Aside from that yes. I still have an old school static IPv4 address that serves an old school, mostly static HTML web site (and behind authentication some other useful stuff to immediate family members). Uh oh, did I just invite more door knocking?

> And obviously you’ll want a VPN too (skip Mullvad) — Proton’s VPN works fine for that.

Why skip Mullvad ? I thought it has a great reputation.

Didn't a lot of people come to the internet proper after first using outfits like AOL and Compuserve ? I wonder if those outfits served as "training grounds" or "boot camps", and what kind of culture shock their customers had upon hitting the "real net" (newsgroups etc.), and whether they learned "enough" netiquette before "graduating to" the wider net.

An alternate framing for these types of "the old web was better" articles is: "I really liked the web better when only privileged, highly educated people could put up content". The reality is that there was a lot of implicit gatekeeping going on in the early web because of the technical hurdles.

Articles like this one, talking about how the original web is still around, miss a key point IMO: that indie web that exists today is socially irrelevant. In the early millennium it was common for people meeting IRL to feel a sense of community because they followed a shared ecosystem of blogs, whether about a band, a religious denomination, a city neighborhood, or a travel subculture.

Today if you read indie web content, it is highly likely that you are the only person you know IRL that reads it. So, when social isolation is a problem many people today complain about, it can be glaring that the indie web doesn't scratch that itch as it once did.

Quite ironic to post this on a platform that uses 1/4 of the screen for advertisement and a drowning GDPR prompt. (Also the CSS makes it tedious to read on a computer.)

Why the refusal of Mullvad, though?