The old internet is still there, people just choose to use the modern services of the internet instead. I was around in the 90's and remember very well usenet,irc and gopher sites. FTP'ing text files to a remote folder and then running weird perl scripts via telnet to refresh a website.

You can still go down memory lane but you quickly realize you are romanticizing a past that did its time. I pretty much stay away from the worst of social media and the internet is a fairly calm place for me and a tool I wouldn't give back.

The structure is there, but the community is not. There will always be some holdouts (thus the age old trope of the older generations longing for the golden days).

Essentially the internet as we once knew it is a proxy for the world as we once knew it. We older folks can't go back in time to it, any more than someone in the 1950s could go back to their youth in the 1920s.

Yeah, consuming corporate internet you'll get corporate results. The internet of yore is still out there, it's drastically smaller and requires more effort to find but worth it.

Have to put in that effort tho.