4 Nostalgic Millennial Websites You Forgot About

Pointelle cardigans, photobooths, and an impending MySpace revival — everything feels a lot like the 2000s lately.

It’s not just nostalgia for skinny jeans and ballet flats, though: it seems like there is something deeper driving this reflective look back. Young people, intuitively aware that their own generation is sorely lacking in subculture, are looking to the past for alternatives, and they’re finding it in our abandoned Flickr accounts from 2006.

You might be a millennial feeling sentimental, or a modern college student simply wondering what life was like before Instagram. Here are five nostalgic-tinged websites from the 2000s that will instantly make you want to go analog.

Orisinal

These games were a pleasant, pastel alternative to Neopets, and remain criminally underrated despite their aesthetic appeal. Whether you were playing as a dog in the autumn leaves or a white rabbit catching winterbells, this was one of the coziest places on the mid-aughts Internet and is still a lot of fun to revisit. There’s an app now, but it isn’t really the same. Ferry Halim’s visual style is best experienced distraction-free on desktop.

PostSecret

It was mostly fun to read people’s confessions about their exes, but every so often something truly shocking would appear when you refreshed the website on Sunday morning. PostSecret actually hasn’t gone anywhere; updates are still posted every Sunday and a digital archive is available to browse. Plus, there are virtual exhibits now. It’s still a safe, sometimes uncomfortably vulnerable space, a relic of the old Internet that allows us to glimpse into other people’s realities in total anonymity.

A Softer World

Launched in 2003, this series of absurdist comic strips ran for twelve years but maintained an impressively low profile, probably destined to remain a cult classic for the LiveJournal generation. Darkly funny, surrealist, and at times vaguely unsettling, each strip combined visual and literary poetry to evoke feelings of loneliness, displacement, and longing.

PureVolume

The coolest place to source new music in the 2000s, PureVolume attracted a slightly different crowd than MySpace. If you had an account, you were probably pretty serious about music, messaging new artists and organizing street teams to promote them. This was the place where artists and fans truly began connecting in a meaningful way, and where indie labels found new artists to sign.