When I was growing up the internet was a place to be liberated from the world say what you want to say, be whoever you want and form genuine communities with shared interests. Now the internet feels like a tool to enslave the mind with identity echo chambers and any deviation leads you to being banned and blocked shunned and silenced within a void that is inescapable. Novel unique websites coded manually by hobbyists running servers for free in the commons allowing people access to the free flow of information under the banner of “information should be free” has largely gone away with corpratisation. I miss the days when the internet was populated largely by nerds aiming to make a better world not this controlled censored hell hole of profiteering.
You should try lemmy, it’s almost everything what you describe you are missing. Jokes aside, I think that what you refer is mainstream internet, which like music is usually shitty if it’s mainstream, to find the good stuff you have to take your time to dig deeper. Internet is an incredible tool and it’s being used both to enslave and to free people.
Funny, yeah years ago it was easier to find interesting unique content. To quote slavoj zizek “when you think you escape it into your dreams, that is when you are within ideology”.