'The internet you grew up on isn't dying. A commercial veneer glued on top of it is.'

This is so, so, good: "“The places you spent your younger years are gone or unrecognizable, and the places you use now are visibly straining under a flood of machine-generated text nobody asked for. There is a low ambient grief about it, and a faint guilt, something like: “I should be doing something. I should be somewhere else. I want the old thing back.” I want to tell you a thing that I think is true, and that I think will make you feel better. The internet is not dying. A commercial veneer glued on top of it is dying. The layer where every human activity became a venture-backed destination, every destination became a feed, every feed became ad inventory, and every ad market became a machine for producing more things to interrupt you with. Underneath that layer is another internet: older, slower, less polished, harder to monetize, and much harder to kill. It is not utopia. It is full of spam, abandoned servers, broken clients, hostile nodes, strange old commands, half-maintained software, and people arguing in plain text about things no normal person should care about. But it has one enormous advantage over the platforms that replaced it in your imagination. No one owns it.”" The Boring Internet, Terry Godier