Exactly. The days when people would run little community servers for IRC or shoutcast or whatever on spare laptops hooked up to cable modems, and would mess around doing stuff for their friends or whatever online community they were part of. When websites didn’t all look the same because they’re hosted on the same big tech platform, and if you wanted to publish something you’d put creativity into web design rather than just signing up for a Twitter account. When you didn’t have the constant Faustian deal of selling your activity data in exchange for free platforms. When talking to your gaming clan meant typing in the IP of whoever hosted the TeamSpeak/Ventrilo/Wilco server, rather than everybody all using Discord. When you didn’t have content policies for millions of people being made by one guy in California (IE Tumblr). When most websites were hosted on little $20/mo shared hosting accounts so nobody gave a shit about pandering to advertisers. When a ‘big forum’ was 10s of thousands of users, and forums had their own communities with their own culture.

I miss those days. But this feels a lot closer to that than anything else I’ve encountered in the last several years.