Quite different. Old homepages were more "building" less "sharing". Beyond the coding, there was planning and categorising. You put thought into the interface and structure.
Seems like a small thing but its the difference between being a hobby mechanic or just owning a car. Or buying a desktop vs building one. You end up with the same thing, but "feels" like a very different endevour.
I think that’s a beautiful way of describing the differences.
These days the web is all Ikea flat pack. It does it’s job and in many cases it works really well for the price. But the individuality has gone since people aren’t just hacking together something based on their own tastes and limited carpentry/web development skills.
This is rose colored glasses IMO. The vast majority of pages were just no standardization
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If you want all that hobby mechanic stuff you can do all the same now with firebase or pages or whatever just like you were with frontpage or dreamweaver back then.
That's true, but that small amount of effort is still about 1000x more than is required to use Instagram.
And it was really the discovery of such web pages back then that was the thrill. It really did feel like exploring an alien planet or following a treasure map of link exchanges. Each click was an investment of a couple minutes at the rate pages loaded, so you really couldn't explore every link. And browsers didn't have tabs -- you were looking at one page at a time and maybe bookmarking it for later.
The editorial and stylistic independence is what I miss.
Absolutely: there is more stuff on the internet than there was then.
But! How much of that stuff is creatively controlled by actual end users? I'd say < 10%.
The large platforms are right out - restyling Facebook?! The build-a-site platforms all look somewhat similar because form follows tooling defaults. And because of the professionalization of web technologies, laypeople are locked out from just making their own page (or at least don't believe they can).
While true, it also puts up a hurdle - most people wouldn't bother learning how to build a website because of how difficult it looks.
But now putting pictures of your labrador on the internet is accessible to everyone. In practice, there's thousands of times more labrador pictures on the internet now. However, it's lowered the value and uniqueness of said labrador pictures.
Seems like a small thing but its the difference between being a hobby mechanic or just owning a car. Or buying a desktop vs building one. You end up with the same thing, but "feels" like a very different endevour.