“The new wave of social networking is all about rediscovering who your real friends are,” Chayka wrote. When the major social networks are flooded with advertisers and pseudo-friends, how can you wade through them all?

By treating the web like a blank canvas, just as Web 1.0 did. While Geocities and Angelfire turn in their long-forgotten graves, the users of the self-proclaimed "cheap, unmodified Unix computer" Tilde.club works as a clear example of the revival leading to a niche community that allows for, as Chayka pointed out, "free-form self-expression." Users create their own pages, customize them, and post what they want. The only difference is it doesn't act like a social network.

And that’s where things get tricky. The Internet naturally allowed for online communities to form, and those online communities naturally led to the social networks we have today, which eventually made the Internet into an epic echo chamber, where anything and everything is public.

That public identity is the most jarring transformation the Internet has seen. Where Web 1.0 had been a fun, playful platform, today's version can be far more dangerous. “Spam may have been a latent threat in the Web 1.0 era, but the prevalence of anonymity and the simple nature of social networks made it feel generally harmless,” Chayka wrote. “The loss of online privacy has become a much more imminent danger as of late. The internet is now a much more public place where anything that gets written has a tendency to fall into the wrong hands almost immediately.”

The Internet doesn't have to be this way—and the shift back to its nascent days ultimately serves as a reminder of its early feeling: that through it you could discover what was on the web for yourself, that you could find others interested in what you're interested in and create your own spaces.

In a way, that's what Facebook's Rooms is trying to recapture by having users make their own communities. As Facebook's Josh Miller, who leads the team behind Rooms, told an Atlantic reporter this week, "You pop open Netscape and you didn't have a trending page.... It felt like you were going to different places with every different website."

That's a squarely Web 1.0 feel. And designer nostalgia is bringing about far more than a change in how sites look. Developers are now making different decisions about how apps and platforms should work, trying to give users the best parts of both the new and old web.

This nostalgia, therefore, works kind of like the Windows 93 project. There's the harmless, if obnoxious-looking, desktop-as-time-capsule, but there's also the twisted sense of the unknown.

The aesthetics instantly bring you back to that early digital era, but the point of the project is to dive into the applications themselves. Some are fun Easter Eggs. Others are threats. And so Windows 93—and all these exercises in micronostalgia—serve a third function: to act as a reminder of how quickly the Internet can change.

And how—seriously, take my word for it—you should never trust the dolphin.

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