What is time on the web?

[Melooon]

Sometimes me and a friend spend time in the city; sometimes I spend time at home; sometimes there is time to rest and sometimes there is no time at all?? 

Mountains experience time quite differently to ladybugs, and the galaxy must think mountains pass like winks. All this time is going in all sorts of directions; sometimes time is in the middle, and sometimes its at the end. When VHS tapes were common you could pause time in a movie and start it again years later.

Animating movies takes a LOT of time to do, but it plays back very fast. It can take years to animate 30 seconds of images 

When I think about the colour of time I think it's a sort of dark purple, but some people tell me that time is golden? but how can time be golden when gold never seems to age??

All of these questions swirl in my head at this moment, but when you read them time will have moved on. People often ask me why web revival sites often lean into 90s and 00s styles; Is it nostalgia for another time? Is it a wish for the web to have an alternative future and an alternative past? Or, is it that time on the web is moving at unexpected speeds and in unexpected directions through the void of non space?

Websites are lot like animations; they are slowly created and played back in an instant each time they load; but when does a website start and when does it end? Is there a middle if there is no end?

On the web, time seems to go too fast; fads come and go like burgers in a mc donalds! Everyone is eating e-burgers all the time! 

The web is animating in a concentric spiral of middle moments that fall like droplets of sunlight in a pointless dream of dancing gifs; maybe they don't care about time at all, they just keep dancing 

Maybe time on the web is like kids playing in a school yard; far away in a world of their own, in an infinite now, for 20 minutes before the bell rings and classes start.

  I would like to know how people feel about time on the web!

[candycanearter07]

i feel like the concept of "time" online is just looking at snapshots of the past that people left, and leaving your own as a response. nothing more and nothing less. like, any post on this forum is presented the same way, despite it being written 3 minutes or 3 years ago, and every other form of internet "communication" follows this principal.. even the so called "instant" methods, like irc, skype, etc, still are snapshots of what the other person was thinking for a few seconds to a minute, and you can still look back on that snapshot years from now (if youre not on a platform that deletes messages automatically). it really is all just reading the past and sending your own message out to be read.

[Dreamwings]

I don't have as many crazy philosophical thoughts like you do but I have kinda pondered this sort of thing at night when I was trying to go to sleep.
Maybe this is just a thing in general with time, and could be relevant with other pieces of media, but I think it is very interesting how unchanging certain places on the web are with time. Film will degrade, books pages will turn yellow, paint will fade, cels will melt, buildings will weather down as seasons come and go, bodies crumble into dust and ash, but the interesting thing about the internet and the web is as long as the server is on, even if it's moved around a bit, if nothing changes you could visit a site a decade later and it would be exactly the same as it was the decade prior, or a decade before that. It's sort of fascinating when you think about it. I know of course out here we complain about how ephemeral digital media is but it is probably one of the more stable of all preservation methods for that reason.
As it says on the top bar sometimes, forum posts can last for a long time. In my explorations, I've actually seen quite a few forums and sites that have lasted decades outside of just this web-revival space (some still quite active) and it's amazing to see the cultures and things of those far older time periods (and how in a lot of ways, not that much has changed); games and movies that have now been out for 20 years talked about as though they were the new thing because they were the new thing, slang we don't use anymore, friends made long ago and all of their interactions and drama before they disappeared, etcetera. Perfectly preserved, names and all. And again, in some cases, completely as it was from back in the day.
Despite how easy it is to destroy or uproot, it is quite cool to see how there really is not as much of a concept of time and wear in the digital space, besides of course physical machine's failing which can easy be replaced or compensated for with backups: A file made in 1998 would be exactly the same in 2024 and onward (restrictions, compression, bitswapping, and cosmic rays not withstanding but you know what I mean  )
In a sense, time on the internet is just as wishy-washy as the data itself is in the physical world.

[nihil0]

I think time can be a lot of things on the internet, it can be a little widget on someones homepage, maybe a calendar they update or a blogpost they write, in a sense time is kind of what you make of it online.

Time in a more overall sense, to me just seems like your seeing a living thing, just on a screen; websites change and develop, evolve, lose parts of itself if something it's linking goes down, etc. Sites can grow with the people that make them, no matter how corporate or indie they are because there's someone somewhere maintaining them and making changes that we can't even see sometimes! Time in real life and to a real living thing is abstract, and thus time on the net is about as abstract as it is away from the screen. The only difference is that it's not an organic thing and can stand the test of time and act as a time capsule of the period and the people who influenced it.

I'm an advocate for keeping records of your site, no matter how redundant or meaningless it might seem! Then you have a little timelapse of not only your site but yourself and your own influences :]

[nuclearblues]

I've spent a fair bit of time (haha) thinking about this topic, specifically in regard to preservation. in my mind, there's something inherently transient about the internet, and yet also beautifully concrete. whenever I visit personal oddity sites from before my birth, archived through the work of the lovely folks at the internet archive, it's as if no time has passed at all. the first iteration of my own personal site still exists in the annals of the web, untouched except for the occasion I visit in memorial. as such, the internet has the unique ability to freeze things in place; a snapshot of a webmaster's life at a point in time. and yet, it also feels completely separate from the concept of time in a way. on the rare occasion I venture onto tumblr or some similar somewhat mainstream social media, I notice an odd phenomenon where posts from a decade ago sometimes circulate the same as posts from yesterday. but in that more mainstream webspace, the sands of time are ever-shifting, perhaps at a degree even faster than the real world. the discord client I begrudgingly use to talk to friends is almost unrecognizable from the discord client I more excitedly used to talk to friends as recent as 4 years ago. it's an interesting phenomenon; these particular webspaces simultaneously serve as an archive of moments past and change so often that those moments in time feel completely disparate from the current stream of moments.

[Cobra!]

i feel like the concept of "time" online is just looking at snapshots of the past that people left, and leaving your own as a response. nothing more and nothing less. like, any post on this forum is presented the same way, despite it being written 3 minutes or 3 years ago, and every other form of internet "communication" follows this principal.. even the so called "instant" methods, like irc, skype, etc, still are snapshots of what the other person was thinking for a few seconds to a minute, and you can still look back on that snapshot years from now (if youre not on a platform that deletes messages automatically). it really is all just reading the past and sending your own message out to be read.

This is exactly how I view the internet. Sometimes I would stumble across an old forum thread, and just sit there, thinking about the context and time in which they were posted. Almost like I’m back there myself, though while I could reply to them, they wouldn’t get it, because so much time has passed. I guess I wish I was at the time that thread was active.
I’m on forums that have been around since the 90s, that are still active to this day. Whenever I post on them, I’m joining those people in the forum’s history. Perhaps years later, people will see my posts and think the exact same thing? That idea brings me comfort.