That's just the Web at this point. Like IRC has it's bit of toxic, but there aren't Ads, and the niche stuff is fairly good. Gemini and gopher are seeing a pretty healthy resurgence, but clearly there's just dozens of us. Oh and there's always telnet MUDs out there, those are fun every so often.

The Internet is a lot more than just the web. Though the web is mostly the internet at this point. I think the upshot though is all this Fediverse stuff looks really promising. But we ought to support our instances otherwise they'll just start adding ads.

Also as an aside, I'd love for NNTP to make a comeback, but I also understand why it hasn't.