Maybe this already exists. But couldn’t one theoretically create a world within a world that is like the Net we all knew and loved before it was enshittified? I know the wayback machine exists, but I was thinking something that is still alive. IRC chats, forums, flash games (maybe not, with security concerns…), video sites that didn’t suck absolute ass like Corptube, stuff like that.
If it does exist, I am sure this would be the place to find it! Or maybe is a matter of staying off of all modern corp sites. I don’t know. Maybe Lemmy is this fantasy world…
IRC still exists. Forums are somewhat hard to host nowadays because lots of governments have passed laws imposing more and more regulation, liability and duties of care on operators of web platforms. We would need to start movements to repeal those laws first, I’m certainly in favor of that! But I think the future of forums is nonetheless ActivityPub; it is a lot better to be able to read about all topics that interest me on one website rather than having to click through many different ones.
Flash games: why do you want those back? Flash is a proprietary platform and it’s a good thing we can now do the things we used to do with it directly in the browser with HTML5 and JS. You can still play Flash games with Ruffle, there are still websites out there that host them.
Video sites that aren’t YouTube: nowadays videos can be much more easily hosted elsewhere than YouTube than was the case in the 2000s. Many social media platforms allow direct upload of videos and any website operator can easily directly embed a video without needing either YouTube or something based on Flash Player. So I’m not sure what you’re nostalgic for when it comes to this topic.