#webhistory — Public Fediverse posts on home.social

Dead Parrot BBS @[email protected] · 2026-08-10 · 14:05 UTC

Why RSS Never Really Died

RSS never died; it quietly kept working while the rest of the web became more centralized, algorithmic, and controlled.

https://deadparrotbbs.com/why-rss-never-really-died/

#feedreaders #googlereader #openstandards #podcasting #rss #webhistory

Dima @[email protected] · 2026-04-21 · 19:19 UTC

Sometimes it is fun to do a manual audit of internet history. I just visited http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html and paused for a minute. It is literally the first website in the world.

The technical legacy of CERN is mind-blowing. They did not just smash particles! They gave us HTML, the WWW, and a strong culture of digital privacy. @protonprivacy for example, was founded by scientists who worked at CERN (it originally ran on protonmail.ch), and today it is one of the best tools we have to push back against Big Tech.

But then I got curious and went down a WHOIS rabbit hole. The registry shows cern.ch was registered "before 1 January 1996". However, the historically recognized first domain ever, symbolics.com, was registered on March 15, 1985.

I had a brief moment of cognitive dissonance: how could the first domain be six years older than the first website? Then it clicked. DNS and WWW are fundamentally different protocols. The DNS was already routing emails and networks long before Tim Berners-Lee invented hyperlinks.

To take it a step further, the same Tim Berners-Lee did not just invent the Web - he went on to found the W3C to keep it open and standardized, a mission that still continues today.

First domain != first website. It is basic technical logic, but connecting the dots manually gives that satisfying feeling of closing a mental background process.

#WebHistory #CERN #DNS #W3C #TechPhilosophy #InternetHistory #Proton #InfoSec #TechAudit #Blog #Privacy #History #Fediverse