The internet we remember never went anywhere, not really. We just all got sucked in by these conmen and sellouts who started “new and exciting” websites like Google and Facebook and Youtube then trapped people there and turned them into free infinite money generators with an ever-growing audience of captive eyeballs they could sell ads to.

The same old internet is still there and it’s still free to join and contribute to: the indie web, the cozy web, the smol web, whatever you want to call it. We just forgot how to find it and join it and traverse it, and the ways of finding it are no longer common knowledge. Google and Bing are the only search engines that still exist, and they don’t want to show it to us. Social media is the only place we really have to share things with each other, and until we had Fediverse options they didn’t really want to let us see each other’s work and creations either, making it a cultural faux pas in many contexts and even going so far as to imply that it’s “spam” like Reddit’s infamous no-self-promotion rule. “How dare you try to create something you want us to show to anyone for free without being a company paying for ad space?” was the vibe I always got from that.

It really won’t take much to get the old internet back. It’s not far away. It’s all drifting around out there in the ether, the content creators are still creating their content and they probably always will be, we just need to start putting the pieces back together again and figure out what sort of glue we need to put them all back together into a platform we can all stand on together once again.