Ask Lemmy

Zombo.com

Still fully operational and has kept alll the rich features that made it indispensable when it was new.

https://www.erowid.org/

This is a cultural milestone in humanities history.

https://serebii.net/

Joe Merrick, fucking legend, has been running this Pokémon database website for at least 15+ years. Basically the same layout, low/no ads, quality info for free. Got a Pokémon-related question? Serebii’s got the answer. Love it 💚

https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/

https://sheldonbrown.com/

About bicycle maintenance.

This is what the Internet looked like in 2004. I love this site for both it's stated purpose, and the nostalgia of the design. Click it if you dare.

https://www.ejectionsite.com/

Not super niche:

metal-archives

https://www.gutenberg.org/

gamecopyworld.com

It always looked like you would catch at least one Trojan per download, but it's the real deal if you are looking for cracked game.exes or at least it was back in the day.

https://www.heavensgate.com/

https://maddox.xmission.com/

I love the energy from this site.

When I started learning webdev this was all too close to home.

homestarrunner.com

Home stat runner dot net! It’s dot commmmmm!

https://www.spacejam.com/1996/jam.html

coolsig.com

It's where I got my cool sigs! Also, it looks pretty much identical to how I remember it. I only found out it was still running a month or two ago.

https://projecteuler.net/

Tough math problems meant to be solved by programming a solution. Nothing has taught me to optimize as well as this site.

WebHamster.com

It's not flash anymore and you have to start the music yourself but it's pretty literally the exact thing it was in like 2000.

https://www.webhamster.com/

https://kassiesa.net/uefa/

This used to be the only way you could view the UEFA club rankings. Billion dollar industry, and some random guy named Bert in the Netherlands was the only way you could learn which leagues were eligible for European football. Still superior to any official sites to this day

http://www.douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/LOCOLOCO/locoloco.htm

Most of Douglas Self is a time capsule to when the site was setup but the loco loco section has many of the most wild experimental locomotives you've never seen! Many are early iterations as nobody had yet figured out the meta for building a relatively efficient and successful steam locomotive but there's also diesel and electric designs as well buried in there, as well as late steam ideas that tried to outcompete diesels

Like seriously, what the heck is up with these? (And yes, all had at least one example built!)

https://theregister.co.uk/

Used to load pretty fast at 33.6kbps.

I have a few niche sites. Many of them are dying slowly because, well us denizens are dying one by one. And there is very few that will replace us. The times have changed. Few care about old steam engines anymore. And 3D printing has supplanted machining metal in home work shops. And 3D CAD has replaced the drafting board.

[https://www.modelenginemaker.com/] is an example were us old machinists design and build model steam engines just because.

https://www.webtender.com/

Folks this is what the web looked like in 1995 (with popup wackamole on about 50% of every site

But this simple website is damn near perfect for it's purpose

Whirlpool

Craigslist

Super niche, but water-data.com

It lists current and historical water levels, inflow and outflow data for all of the reservoirs in the upper Colorado River basin. It’s all html tables and graphs.

I’v been watching it for at least 20 years and I don’t think it has ever changed.

Demoscene stuff!

https://www.pouet.net/ and https://scenestream.net/demovibes/

Both are still kicking like it's 2000 even though there are modern alternatives like https://demozoo.org/ and https://hypr.website/

https://www.timecube.net/

It's not useful in the slightest but I still visit about once a year for a laugh.

https://slashdot.org/

Miniclip . Com ..? 😅

Not sure how long its been around, but you can learn about the dangers of Dihydrogen Monoxide here:

https://dhmo.org/facts.html

Stack Overflow which is almost 20 years old, and Experts Exchange.

https://www.giantitp.com/

Great comic that's been going since 2003. Kind of sort of heading towards the end, but it's been doing that for a while now.

So I'm going to toot my own horn here lmao but personally? Mine lol. Sure, technically doesn't precisely fit the bill for 20 years, given it's changed domains, content and the such while I was ironing out my interests in life and future expectations.

But I've had variations of the site for different projects, purposes, employment needs, and more recently the whole starting my own organization thing lol. All in all however, I'd compare it to those 3 generation soups that are a big selling point in family shops throughout the Asiatic, sure nothing of the original exists per se, but the spirit is there.

I do have such a soft spot for the old ascii and plaintext site design, I've never really left the scheme since I first learned html. To me, the more basic a site has made it's web design the more likely I am to trust it. Something about corporate web design just never sits right with me.