I’ve been exploring the fediverse and subbing and posting all over the damn place. Realizing lemmy can federate with kbin blew my mind. Not to mention the possibility of turning my old laptop into a personal server to host my own instance. Is this what it felt like to discover how the internet worked in the 90s?
As far as I can see it existed and still exists though, it’s just that there is less incentive to produce this kind of content and leave it open. I can find pieces of it still remaining, but the environment that favored this kind of content is gone. It’s a natural result of how the system changes as people learn to game it and find ways to gain power or make it profitable. I hope the advent and growth of places such as this one gives it some fresh air, though.
There are modern websites that still bring those feelings to me. For example, this blog has impressed me with its content and creative visualizations: https://ciechanow.ski/ Personal websites and web forums just don’t surface anymore when searching the web or browsing large communities/aggregators, but I can find them on places such as https://curlie.org/ (A modern-day web directory) and https://search.marginalia.nu/ (a search engine that focuses on non-commercial websites).