There was a brief moment in the internet during this time, not the wild west age of unmoderated forums and ascaii memes but the budding frontier town of rage comics and early social media. There was an exact point, just before the year Facebook became the defacto social network, where the internet could have taken a different path and lead to something great. You still see the chipped paint of that mural in places like Reddit before the premium and Lemmy before the shill accounts. The hangers on from the old world that catch the scraps the mega corps drop. Gaiaonline is still propped up by a dedicated community. Small forums grow like weeds in the cracked pavement.
If we could find those places, sure up their crumbling palisades against the endless effort to advertise, breathe life into them in our own quite ways. Create the internet we wanted instead of sulking in the one we were given.