Na I get what you mean. The novelty of the internet is pretty warn thin at this point. Used to be things to tinker with, but APIs worth their time are dried up because of AI. That Web2 promise of open data to build cool things with is gone.

Small projects get quickly overrun with attention that it can cripple them or they instantly become shit with ads and paywalls.

You're not hanging out in WoW barons chat anymore because that game has jumped 100 sharks at this point. You used to get into a Wailing Caverns run for 4 hours with 5 people and end up a member of a guild with a Mumble server that you could join at any hour of the day and find someone online.

Web comics and sites would have attached PHPBB forms with their own communities. The authors are in there sometimes and its cozy and fun. But those people host gaming conventions for multi billion dollar mega corporations now and you can't afford or don't have the time to go to anymore. Any site opening now already has a subreddit likely run by "fans" and its a little nightmare place that gets either to little traction or the site its about doesn't even know it exists.

You'd join an art site to post silly drawings on and consume others drawings. Get in a little drama with some furry who was just trying to be themselves online because at home they can't. Now that furry is a highly paid independent tech contractor with a $30,000 fur suit and you both would probably vibe now, but the art site is basically dead and over run with AI nonsense.

No one is hanging out and doing weird shit on second life any more. The meta verse killed any remaining interest in virtual escapism and you realize now second life was just rife with capitalist demands and property ownership, and didn't dare to imagen a world any differently then our own. Sure people made cool stuff but the best stuff was owned by someone else and they commissioned it from a designer, and it was all off limits to you because of private property existing in our little VR game.

You don't put something online anymore you open a small business and run small business ads and hope your little site gets bought out so you can build a little bigger site and move up to being a medium business doing medium business ads.

Everyone has a podcast but half of them are dead feeds that haven't been updated in over a year. If you download an episode it'll bake in current targeted ads.

You used to check dozens of sites every day, now you close your tabs from the one website you visit regularly and instinctually open a new tab to the same site only to realize nothing has changed because its only been 5 minutes since you ran the feed dry.

You and your extended family would share photos with each other and catch up on each others lives through innocuous social feed, but those feeds cooked their brains and you don't use those sites anymore and haven't really talked to your extended family in a while as a result.

Everything is just incredibly siloed now, the basic niche existence was destroyed by the gigantic generalization and consolidation of those niches. Everything has a subreddit for better or for worse. Half of them are dead. Search is a wasteland of sponsored links. Discovery means less traction on the core services. Dead internet theory is at it's highest stage yet. Nothing is new or novel. Every service is trying to be a one stop platform. All the platforms are becoming homogeneous. Its monopoly capitalism at it's finest.

At least we have Hexbear.

My take is that patreon and crowdfunded projects caused everyone with creative skill that used to just make shit and put it on the web for free to instead chase whatever they can get money for.

Even videogame modding has taken a turn for the worse as a result of this, with simple mods gated behind patreon or other platforms that would always have been free previously.

What used to be a maker culture of everyone doing shit and releasing shit became a grifter culture of everyone chasing various passive incomes for various projects they only initially put time and effort into that is all collected through patreon donors that have long forgotten their donation is still running.

Capital realised people were making stuff for free and it moved in to create a model where those people making stuff for free could be convinced to gate it for payments. The tinkerer culture of the internet died because of it.

If this site goes away I am going to lose most of my connection to reality.

there are 5 websites and most of their content is screenshots of the other 4

suburbification of the internet?

Websites as they existed in the 90s and 00s are no longer being created in any significant quantity. All of that creative energy still exists, but it's being more effectively siphoned off and monetized in the various walled gardens that make up the pastiche of the Internet that currently exists.

There are in fact a lot of really, really cool places still out there, but they've become occluded from search engine, and you can typically only find them through direct interaction with people. So the annoying answer is that you have to just keep doing what you're doing, and ask what's cool.

I miss stumble upon. It was great for finding new shit.

Basically all community building has moved on to discord. If you wanna talk crap in chatroom at all hours of the day like IRC was still ubiquitous, that's your best bet. If you really liked PHPbb forums I've got nothing for you.

There's less. Especially forum type stuff. I can list a few interesting sites though.

https://cs.rin.ru/ - Site for peg legged discussions about games basically.

https://www.shiey.com/videos - guy who does like urbex and stuff who made his own site because youtube kept taking his videos down. Also has a blog on there.

Substacks too. This is more of a category. A lot of independent reporters have their own substack pages where they'll post articles.

Matrix is another one. It's like a fediverse chat alternative. Similar to discord but structured like lemmy.

https://archiveofourown.org/ - website for community made written works. Fan fictions, or original stuff. Has a pretty good search function so you can find anything that interests you, and has some discussion methods like comments on works. Altho most of that will probably be done on secondary sites.

Another category is Linux forums. Probably one of the largest still existing types of forums. Places where people go to discuss issues with their Linux distros, and share fixes. Aswell as software development in general for Linux.

One thing i like to do too is explore the Chinese internet. Places like BilliBilli, QQ, Weibo. It's similar, but also different to the big sites in the west, and can be fun to explore.

Also while its not done as much, and traffic to them is lower now hosting your own small site is easier than it's ever been. So if theres a site you'd like to see you could always make it yourself. You can rent cloud hosting, or use an old pc or something. Then all you need is a few like minded people to get on there with you.

Newgrounds still exists. It's far from its heyday but there's still new games and animations being made over there.

to add to what other commenters have said, so many sites that used to regularly post funny or informative articles have fired most of the long-time employees and replaced them with independent contractors (if they haven't replaced them with ai, or just gone out of business entirely).

There's lots of free roguelikes and other ASCII graphics games that I like to play. 🤷‍♀️

Also, fanfiction (and amateur publishing in general)

This guy is kind of annoying and I don't agree with everything here, but I do think about this article a lot these days.

In the future—not the distant future, but ten years, five—people will remember the internet as a brief dumb enthusiasm, like phrenology or the dirigible. They might still use computer networks to send an email or manage their bank accounts, but those networks will not be where culture or politics happens. The idea of spending all day online will seem as ridiculous as sitting down in front of a nice fire to read the phone book.

I looked through my bookmarks and some cool sites that I found are the following:

1. Music:

• https://vgmdb.net/
• https://tlmc.pf-n.co/tlmc
• https://everynoise.com/engenremap.html
• https://www.whosampled.com/
• https://chiptune.app/

2. Computers:

• https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Main_page
• https://learnxinyminutes.com/
• https://unsplash.com/t/wallpapers
• https://terminal.sexy/

3. Random fun things:

• https://www.playphrase.me/#/search
• https://strobe.cool/
• https://poyopoyo.gifanimaker.com/

well there's neocities.org for starters

This post made me look in my bookmarks folder. Here are some interesting sites OP:

• Make your own music: https://musiclab.chromeexperiments.com/Experiments

• Explore A LOT of music genres: https://everynoise.com/engenremap.html

• Interactive scale of the universe: https://www.htwins.net/scale2/

• Watch CCTV Cams in real time: https://www.earthcamtv.com/index.php

• Make cool drawings: http://weavesilk.com/

• Watch Twitch streamers that no one else is watching: https://nobody.live/

• Statistics on the world that update in real time: https://www.worldometers.info/

• Subnormality web comics: https://www.viruscomix.com/subnormality.html

• Geoguesser: https://www.geoguessr.com/

It exists. Just have to look in the right places.

https://theuselessweb.com/

It's dead, there is no fun in just browsing anymore. You are going to encounter some chud's bloodthirsty take or a piece of doomer news that is going to sour the mood really quickly into a session. You aren't going to have the pure-hearted fun you could have had even in 2019 (although things were obviously worse than before both in the digital and IRL space already). Even now you are consuming more and more AI slop without even knowing it is slop, in a few years time it is probably going to drown everything genuine out.

I miss having something relatively "easy" to do during the downtime between other stuff, now I just sit on the computer for 1 hour and then just stop in order to avoid doomscrolling when I could spend hours and hours into exciting new things on the web before. It was my home more than my real hometown or country ever was, and it probably shaped me into a better person than I would have been if I had only gotten my right-wing parents' upbringing, and I will forever hate the capitalists for destroying it and depriving the next generations of it.

Well there's https://zombo.com/

There are a few old-school BBSes still about. I have one, but I'm not confident in my ability to moderate it, so it has no users but me currently. I don't know if there're many explicitly leftist ones, though.

Check out this dope ass website that a hexbear posted before.

Well you're already on the Fediverse, so there's cool stuff there to check out.

There's Marginalia Search, which is designed for searching small, independent, websites.

You can also check out The Gemini Protocol, if the http web is still too much of a normie corporate hellscape for you

Check out neocities. It's like being on the old internet again, handcrafted blogs and websites coded by their owners. I have wasted a lot of time just exploring new random sites there with melonland.net!