If what you desire is a tiny, curated web full of like minded skilled technologists, like it was before Usenet eternal September, that exists today. You work hard to get 20 people to respond. You can do that now.

I’m perplexed by these “the internet is a piece of shit now” arguments. If you want to run your own email server to email other people who run their own email servers, that’s totally doable. Your addressable market is even bigger than it was in 1990. You just have to mentally accept that the size of and types of people will be similar to 1990.