Email is still completely open. Even Usenet still exists. There may be more people on it now than there were in the 80s, just because it was so tiny then. (The entirety of Usenet before Eternal September fits on a thumb drive.)

I believe that what has changed is less about technology or even money, but about people. In your time frame, everyone on the Internet was an academic techie. You could bump into a random person on IRC and have something to talk about.

You can connect with vastly more people today, but they are less likely to be of interest to you. You're spoiled for choice: there are now a trillion chat rooms instead of a thousand. It's harder to find your people.

> Email is still completely open.

Yes, fortunately. Email should always be used, at least as an available option, because it is the only truly open way to communicate electronically.

Recently I bought something and had some hiccups getting it to work and found that the vendor only provides support in one single place: discord. A proprietary platform I can't get access to.

> Even Usenet still exists. There may be more people on it now than there were in the 80s, just because it was so tiny then.

I still read usenet most days ;-)

But no, it is very small compared to the good times. It would take me hours to read through my list of newsgroups in 1990, now at most 10 minutes.