We Were Less Connected, But Somehow Closer

There was a time when finding a website felt like discovering a place. Not a platform, not a feed, not another account to follow. An actual place.

My first one was a Dragon Ball Z fansite called Gokuspower. It lived on GeoCities, like half the internet back then, and it had everything a fansite was supposed to have: a visitor counter, a guestbook tucked into the navigation, a row of affiliate buttons, and a layout that looked exactly the way I wanted it to. That is not the same as looking good. If you were actually looking for me, though, you'd usually find me hanging around the PBXAnime forums.

It wasn't always beautiful, and it wasn't always easy to navigate. But it was mine. The sites I loved most were the same way: somebody's corner of the internet, built because they loved something and wanted it to look exactly right. If you liked what you found there, you stuck around. Sometimes for years.

You weren't important to the wider internet. But inside that little community, you were somebody, and that mattered.

The Internet Was Smaller, But the Communities Felt Bigger

It's an odd contradiction. Today we can talk to millions of people instantly. A Discord server can gather thousands of fans in seconds, and a single post can travel farther in an afternoon than an independent webmaster might have reached in a year. By almost every technical measure, we're more connected than ever.

And yet something about those older communities felt different. Joining a forum wasn't adding another account to your collection. You were becoming a member of somewhere. People recognized your username and your avatar. They remembered your signature, your opinions, and that ridiculous argument you started three months earlier about which Gundam series was better.

You weren't important to the wider internet. But inside that little community, you were somebody, and that mattered.

When Websites Had Neighbours

My path as a webmaster was not a straight line. After Gokuspower came more GeoCities sites, then a PHP-Fusion install on free hosting from a friend, which I spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to bend into something that looked like mine. Eventually I had real domains of my own.

Through all of it, I kept a list. Whenever I found a site that stopped me cold, it went on the list. Sometimes it was the coding. More often it was the webmaster: the way their personality leaked into every page, the tone of their updates, the way they talked to visitors. I studied those sites the way I studied the shows they were about.

Once a new site was ready and I'd collected a few affiliates of my own (honestly, sites a rung or two below mine), I'd work up the nerve to approach the ones on my list and ask to swap buttons. Cold. Most of them never knew they'd been the subject of months of creative stalking.

What I didn't fully appreciate at the time was that those buttons were rarely about traffic. An affiliate link might send you a handful of visitors a month. It was a sign of respect. A row of tiny 88×31 buttons at the bottom of a page was a webmaster saying, these are the people whose work I recognize.

And once you swapped, the conversations weren't really about anime. They were about the work. I'd help someone figure out why their comments script kept sorting wrong, and they'd help me wrestle my vBulletin templates into shape. We weren't competitors, and we weren't just fans talking to fans. We were builders talking shop. We respected the hustle.

We Didn't Just Consume. We Hung Out.

Older fan communities were built around returning to the same place. You checked your favourite forum every morning to see what everyone had talked about overnight. Someone would post a theory about an anime, another member would disagree, and someone else would dig up an old interview or magazine scan. The next day you'd come back to see where it went.

Because the conversation lived in a recognizable place, surrounded by familiar people, it built a history of its own. A thread could run for weeks. A running joke could outlive the argument that started it.

Today, much of the internet is organized around an endless stream of new content. We scroll, react, share and move on. A discussion can draw thousands of people and still vanish from our attention by dinner. That doesn't make modern communities less meaningful. Plenty of real friendships and creative partnerships start on today's platforms.

But the experience is different. We used to visit places to see what people were doing. Now we often visit platforms to see what they will show us.

The Beauty of Getting Lost

Here's something else I miss: getting lost on a website. Not because the navigation was broken, although that certainly happened. Lost because there was always something interesting around the next corner.

That's how discovery actually worked. A member on the PBXAnime forums who went by xxxXslayer told me I had to watch Gundam Wing, then pointed me to a site about it. That site had its own affiliates, its own forum, its own links page, and from there one door just led to another. An hour later I couldn't remember what I'd logged on to do, and I didn't care. There's something about discovering a thing because another fan thought of you, or because you were curious enough to click, that a feed can't quite replicate.

The Old Internet Wasn't Perfect

Nostalgia has a habit of softening the rough edges. The old web could be frustrating, cliquish and sometimes downright hostile. Forums had their arguments and gatekeeping, and some moderators wielded their authority like medieval kings.

In fairness to those moderators, I wasn't always a model citizen. I loved the old forum roleplaying threads, and I had a habit of joining them and just... inventing new rules. I was eventually banned from pretty much every one of them. They probably had a point.

Websites disappeared all the time, too, and I'm not innocent there either. My first real domain was jouningen.com, a misspelling of what was supposed to be "Jounin Generation," which tells you how carefully I planned things. I bought it around 2003, right as Naruto's bridge arc was wrapping up. By August 2004 it was listed for sale, because I'd stopped paying the server bill and moved on to my next project. Somewhere out there, someone probably had my button on their affiliates page, linking to nothing.

That's the quiet tragedy of the old web. When I pull up my old sites on the Wayback Machine today, the text is mostly still there, but nearly every image is gone, replaced by broken-picture icons. The words survived in an archive. The places themselves didn't.

Modern platforms solved real problems. They made publishing easier, lowered the technical barriers and let people with obscure interests find each other across the world. The problem isn't that the internet grew. It's that, in gaining convenience and scale, we sometimes traded away the feeling of having a place to call our own.

A Thousand Followers, or Ten Familiar Faces?

My first Naruto site, NarutoBlitz, was never my biggest. That honour went to access-anime.com, a project I'd worked on for a long time, which took off almost the moment it launched. It led my traffic by a mile, and for years I thought of it as the success story.

But when people bring up my old sites today, the one they remember is NarutoBlitz. And I've come to believe that's why access-anime took off so fast. The people who showed up on launch day weren't strangers responding to an algorithm. A lot of them already knew me from the smaller site, and they followed.

There's a difference between reach and recognition. Reach is a thousand people seeing something you made and moving on. Recognition is ten regulars who reply, share what they found, and remember what you posted months ago.

I spent years thinking of those as two different things you had to choose between. Looking back, it was never really a choice. Recognition is what reach was built on.

Why Build Another Fansite in 2026?

That's a question I've had plenty of time to consider while building AnimeHistory.org. Enormous databases, social networks and streaming platforms already exist. Why build forums, member profiles, galleries, playlists and an old-fashioned jukebox? Why bother with affiliate buttons and personal signatures, all those touches borrowed from another era?

After Access-Anime came AnimeHarvest, a site I'd built entirely from scratch. But between a forum hack, the changing culture of anime fansites, a brief adventure running my own web development business, and life generally getting in the way, I eventually walked away from coding altogether.

Then, in early 2026, I saw TotallyNotMark talking about Seed of Might's upcoming Dragon Ball Z restoration. I was STOKED. I wanted to find their website, meet other fans, and geek out about the release. Instead, I found myself navigating social media, where the algorithms seemed far more interested in feeding me shocking, hateful, and sometimes deeply disturbing material than helping me find the community I was looking for.

It struck me how much the internet had changed. We were more connected than ever, yet finding a little corner to simply enjoy something with other fans felt harder than it used to.

And somewhere in that frustration, an old thought came back.

Do I still have it in me?

In March 2026, I decided to find out.

AnimeHistory.org was born.

Part of the answer is that I never really stopped building the way I learned to build. The character pages on AnimeHistory are laid out almost exactly the way I laid them out on access-anime in 2004: portrait on one side, bio on the other, alternating down the page. I didn't plan that. It's just how my hands build a site. The other part is that I still believe in places built around genuine enthusiasm. When I finished the Dragon Ball Z gallery, all 291 episodes and nearly 60,000 screencaps, nobody asked me to do it and no algorithm rewarded it. I did it for the same reason I built Gokuspower: because I loved the thing and wanted somewhere for it to live.

I want AnimeHistory to be a place where someone arrives looking for one obscure piece of anime history and leaves having found fifty things they never knew. And maybe, somewhere along the way, they'll meet another fan. The archive is the reason to visit. The community is the reason to feel at home.

Maybe We Don't Need the Old Internet Back

I don't think we can recreate the internet of 2005, and perhaps we shouldn't try. The world has changed, the way we communicate has changed, and even the way we watch anime has changed. But that doesn't mean everything we loved about the old web has to disappear.

We can still build independent websites. We can still have forums where conversations are allowed to grow instead of sinking beneath tomorrow's content. And we can still link to each other's work, not for the referrals, but because we recognize the hustle.

So if you're out there building your own corner of the internet in 2026, whether it's a fansite, an archive or something only you would think to make, I'd love to hear about it. Send me your button. I'll show you mine.

Those communities may never have thousands of members. Maybe they'll only have a few dozen. But if those people recognize one another, share their discoveries and genuinely enjoy spending time together, that's worth something.

We spent twenty years making the internet faster, bigger and more connected. Maybe it's time to remember what made its smallest corners feel so special.

Because being connected to everyone isn't quite the same thing as belonging somewhere.