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 networks are still here. Grab an IRC client, connect to Undernet or whatever network you like. Fewer people, but not gone.
You’re talking on one!
You can probably run Flash stuff — I had some difficulty the last time I tried getting old Flash stuff running on Linux — but frankly, I’d rather run open stuff like HTML5’s Canvas and Javascript. It was one company’s attempt to establish a proprietary platform on the Web for multimedia. I’m really not sad to see it vanish into the past.
I think that YouTube in 2025 is substantially better than the streaming video situation in 2003, but there are YouTube alternatives available today.
https://eonvpn.com/blog/youtube-alternative/
That includes the Fediverse’s PeerTube. I’m skeptical that the numbers are going to work out there for it to scale up due to bandwidth costs of video, but if you like the Threadiverse, it’s probably the closest video analog.