I don't understand why people talk about "the internet" as if it was a static thing. The internet when I grew up using it prior to the dotcom bust in the late nineties and early two thousands was a set of GeoCities websites where people made their own content. I remember reading the green "great websites" HTML book with examples of beautiful websites (with backgrounds that looked liked notebooks etc).

The modern internet has just become privacy scraping and adverts if you visit websites that do such things and serve such content, but that doesn't stop anyone setting up and running their own domain, which is what the old internet was? If anything, it's easier than ever to "be on the Internet" with your own VPS or Pi at home. Far easier than it ever was. Just stop putting all your content into someone else's locker.

The lack of discoverability has always been a problem on the internet, which is why Yahoo had their category pages and why search engines exist.

People keep talking as if "the internet" is a thing that came and suddenly disappeared. But it hasn't. The only thing that has appeared are apps that use specific domains, where the services behind those domains are colossal vacuums of data. A lot of people use those apps, but it doesn't mean I need to. And it doesn't mean I can't go and search for some specific website holding specific data about a given topic. People keep talking as if that was lost? Am I missing something?

As for it "tearing society apart", society has always been fractured. It just means more people can speak now, and more people can listen; if they're not choosing who they listen to or weighing concepts in their own mind, that isn't the "internet's" fault - that's their own, any more than someone writing a newspaper article in the 1980s would be held responsible for "tearing society apart"?