Now, I've been on the internet for years, possibly longer than I really should have. Been surfing the 'net since 2007 at the age of 6 and really haven't stopped since. I have a life outside of the 'net, but I spend a lot of time on here due to multiple IRL factors. This is related, stick with me.
Something I've noticed as of late on the modern internet is that the focus on genuine human interactions via personal websites, forums and blogs is slowly dying. This has been inevitable for years now, but it's starting to flare up more with the rise of domain squatters buying out old sites as a means of turning them into scam websites and AI content farms/engagement bait/bot accounts flooding various social media platforms. You used to be able to find tons of different sites, ranging from personal sites made for one to express themselves or post about their interests and hobbies, to forums with their own niches that had their own odd cultures and folklore within. The free alternatives for website creation are slowly dying out or being moved to a subscription model (don't get me started on that shit or we'll be here all day!), with sites like Neocities and the like being monuments to an era gone by. The personal side of the web is all but niche nowadays, what with most people not wanting to take the time out of their day to learn basic programming that could actually benefit them in today's tech-heavy society.
The sense of community on the more untamed wilds of the old internet from the 90s to about 2015 or so has been ditched in favor of sanitized social media platforms that feed you a never-ending supply of temporary dopamine hits and adrenaline rushes via bot-run algorithms running off a data center in a west coast silicon-lined shithole. These sites don't even allow you to express yourself in any meaningful way and bar you from saying things their advertisers and upper management doesn't find profitable. In place of personalized HTML and CSS code the personal web had, we have flat themes with zero options for customization outside of whether or not you'd like to turn a light switch off or on and occasionally (if the corporate overlords allow) a selection of a few drab, flat colors. Corpos also decided to kill useful tools like Flash (everywhere outside of China of course) and other such things with the excuse of "oh, but it makes your site less safe". Of course you have free alternatives like Ruffle, but Ruffle can't run every single piece of flash content, especially if it uses off-site hosting for its files.
I've seen tons of sites I used to frequent as a lad be bought out by scammers as a means of pushing bullshit scams onto people or domain squatters waiting to sell the name. Some sites also get bought out and turned into AI-driven news aggregators (see Xfire for example). A site I used to love using back in the day, FilePlanet, became a malware-infested download site because it was bought out by some random company. Hell, most of the Planet sites that used to exist under the GameSpy banner are either dead or barely clinging to life, with quite a few now redirecting to IGN's dogshit wikis that have barely any useful info on them. The Planet sites as a whole, while I didn't experience them in their hayday during the early 2000s, I saw the sites towards the end of Gamespy's life and read a lot of the forum stuff via the Wayback Machine. Sites like that had a sense of actual community to them, with people sharing their own stories, game mods, in-jokes, etc, all preserved on the Internet Archive.
The corporatization and sanitization of the internet, as well as the reliance on convenience are trying to kill the old internet and genuine human interactions with one another. My advice? Backup everything you can, whether it be lore documents, writings, etc onto your hard drives (or if you have the money to do so, run an external server PC). Continue to make your sites and grow your communities outside of the normal social media platforms, don't be afraid to openly express yourself and say whatever you wanna say, because these corpos don't like the idea of you doing so. It's not profitable for you to be expressing yourself for free without paying for a monthly or yearly subscription after all.
