Yo, a couple years ago I had become fed up with the state of the modern Internet, and I started looking for alternatives. This is what I have found so far:

• Gopher protocol (sdf.org is pretty active)
• Gemini protocol (Modern version of gopher)
• Shared UNIX systems (also called tildes) sdf.org is great!
• RSS
• IRC/Matrix to chat with people
• Session messenger to chat with family
• BBSes via syncterm
• wiby.me and marginalia.nu search engines to find personal web sites
• oldavista.com to browse the 'Old Net'
• Web forums
• Neocities
• Webrings (They still exist!)
• Lemmy (This is a new one)

The next step for me will be to build my own personal site. The only way to keep the independent web alive is to participate in it.

Have a look at Neocities (a successor to Geocities). My website is here.

You can also have a look at the rest of the Fediverse. There are some cool accounts on Mastodon and PeerTube.

For that true "old web" thing, have you ever heard of gemini? Take a look. My capsule on gemini is here, but you will need a gemini browser in order to see it.

Hope this helps!

I use the best search engine on the internet: https://search.marginalia.nu/

The 'random' page is especially good to start off with.

There's wiby, a search engine indexing older style pages. I sometimes go there, just hit the random button and explore wherever I end up.

gamecopyworld.com still looks as awesome as ever since the times I used diskettes to transfer a No-CD crack from the local library's Internet-enabled PC to my offline PC at home, ca. 25 years ago.

If you are interested in technology and or programming, you might want to have a look at Hacker News. It's a news aggregator for everything that involves technology and there are many interesting sites linked there on a daily basis.

I didn't run in exactly the same internet circles that you did, but I do still crave the sense of discovery of the early web. A few months ago, I put together a list of "old web" on-ramps to sate the hunger.

Neocities is a big hub for weird web sites that aren't trying to make a buck. For me, that's the key. What's the motivation for this web site? Is someone trying to sell me something, or do they love this thing they're talking about so much, their enthusiasm has spilled out onto the internet?

If you want old school and quirky, check out https://www.windows93.net/ A little less quirkier version of this is https://windows96.net/

I like Hacker News for technology and programming news.

The Tildeverse! https://tildeverse.org/ Check it out. A bunch of multiuser systems, with services ranging from IRC to Usenet and Mastodon. Many Tildes support Gopher and Gemini homepages, there's Tildeverse Radio, and all sorts of things.

No specific recommendation from myself, but I've found a lot of the more "personal" feel of the internet has gone underground, ie, off search engines. A lot in discord, some in matrix, and some showing up here. Odd one still on IRC, but that's slowly shifting to discord/matrix

vimm.net is really cool for older game ROMs and just has a classy feel to it :)

Metafilter is very old school in a good way! http://metafilter.com/

Something Awful is still alive and kicking

There's many reasons why the old web nearly disappeared, but I think the main two are cell phones and social media. Combine those two things with giant corporations trying to monetize everything and this is where we end up. The old internet was awesome.

I use reddit mostly because it's a link aggregator for the non-gaming stuff that interests me. Apart from that it's Ars Technica, Slashdot, or Techmeme.

wasn't failblog like really really dumb, like a worse 9gag?

Honestly, some of my favourite sites are niche interest groups. One I've contributed at lot to (even creating a magazine for) has between 5 and 10 active users in total. They're just so comfy.

And yes, some of my favourite sites are the ones you may look at and declare dead :)

There are places that embrace the old. For instance, I discovered micro.blog not too long and and I'm loving it. Not to mention the federation and all of their instances (micro.blog works with mastodon)

@Xer0
I don't agree that chat rooms abd forums are dead. On the conruary, I would say that they are very much alive ij open source communities.

Usernet is still around but the only active ones I can think of involve book or game piracy.

Ever since Tickld went to shite, the internet hasn't been the same for me. Oh how I miss those days.

4chan. I know it's a shit hole, but it's the shit hole I grew up in and it's chaotic nature is nostalgic.