We also had curated directories, DMOZ being the most common. Starting a bunch of DMOZ-like, federating (i.e. sharing and trusting one another to provide high-quality links, semi-comprehensive directories might be the quickest and most effective way of bringing "the old Internet" back to life. This might even become an acknowledged part of the Fediverse, if it leveraged the existing Web standards wrt. structured "third-party annotation" of outside Web resources, as issued e.g. by the W3C WebAnnotation Working Group. https://www.w3.org/annotation