For me instantly evoked the memory of using the internet from when I first got to access it (~92) until 2012..2014ish, years I could describe as “the party is emptying, not as big as earlier”, vs 2014..2016 which I’d describe as having definite “okay there’s only 3 people left on the dancefloor” vibes (and the downslope started being felt 2008..2009 already, but slowly, only later more pronounced).

It was a time when you truly could just randomly browse search results and find all kinds of interesting things. It’s hard to convey, in today’s ecosystem, what that felt like. The fedi scratches a similar itch, but it feels (and I don’t mean this as criticism) more “a diamond in the muck”, a glimmer of hope in a sea of awful. A general optimism was quite prevalent among the internet of then, even despite it also having its awful aspects

I have years of irc logs in multiple channels, filled with the shared experiences of years of people delighting and gaping and pointing at all kinds of stuff like this. And things rarely feel the same.

I will never forgive the walled gardens for what they took from all of us, for what they destroyed

You can use a search engine to explore the world wide web and find curious little pages made by real human beings. Google et al. and the SEO twats have made that mostly impossible without drastic measures.