friend of mine told me this exactly : going on telegram feels like being back to the original internet. But that's probably because of all the illegal/uncensored content you can find there

ever go to onion sites? They're pretty great. No javascript, social media share buttons, ad-tech or click-jacking or videos popping up or walls in front of the content. No liking or subscribing or logging in with your facebook account... it's ironic how tor is the clean internet.

While all of what you said is technically true, you left out the fact that Tor sites are majority about illegal activity, such as hiring assassins, ordering forged identity documents, and buying and selling controlled substances. I'm afraid that kind of kills the nostalgia for me.

Half the fun is trying to guess which 40% of those are just larping, which 40% are feds, and which 20% are actually real.

The Internet, where the women are men, the men are boys, and the boys are FBI agents.

Which onions sites do you find interesting or useful?

>Then there's telegram and discord, full of all kinds of strange stuff

I was just about to say this. The new pockets of internet communities are filled with interesting and fun things again. It’s just that a lot of them are for and run by teenagers. As adults, we either feel immediately out of place or just get banned outright.

The ones run by adults are incredibly niche focusing on “non-mainstream” interests.

Discovery is a little harder, yes. And it feels more ephemeral than the static sites of yore. But they’re out there. And they thrive.

And 4chan still exists.

The kids will be alright.

yeah, click around the spacehey site. It's a bunch of kids 13-18 or so. I had initially thought this site was going to be mostly nostalgic people in their 30s and 40s.*

It's fascinating how people born after the decline of myspace has found a clone and helped bring it to life.

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* maybe it is and a bunch of people are just playing a character ... unlikely though.

sad thing is that you need to provide a phone number just to read those telegram and discord groups. 4chan is nothing like it used to be. it is run over by bot posts and shills from various interest groups. the amount of genuine anon posts is quite low.

Sorry for the offtopicness, but trollish usernames aren't allowed on HN, so we've banned this account.

If you want to pick a different username, we can rename it for you and unban the account, as long as the username is genuinely neutral.

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

I was just about to post neocities, but then got distracted by all the cool sites.

Not to disparage spaces like NeoCities, but to quote the great American singer/songwriter David Berman:

  Punk rock died when the first kid said
  "Punk's not dead, punk's not dead"

That is - these spaces will never quite be the same as what we once had, because they're fundamentally nostalgic. The "wild" internet was also once the vanguard, the future, and that excitement won't be recaptured by going back.

Is it going back or picking up where the other left off?

I think these have inspirational historical bases as opposed to being renfairs.

They are in the hands of a younger generation.