I think the Internet hasn't significantly changed since those days. I think the difference is that now it's on the publisher to get things in lots of places, vs

I think the Internet hasn't significantly changed since those days. I think the difference is that now it's on the publisher to get things in lots of places, vs before it was on the reader to aggregate all the sources that they cared about. You still have decentralized publishing, and you still have lots of disparate reading applications. News Aggregators like Something Awful, Slashdot and Fark have been superseded (for me) by Reddit and HN. IRC has been somewhat replaced by Slack, Gitter, Discord. AIM/MSN/ICQ has been replaced by a dozen other non-interoperable IM systems. BBS systems running on phpBB and other similar self-hosted tools are still massively popular. Email still chugs on, almost completely unchanged. I feel like Facebook solves the issue of a single, curated application platform that a user isn't expected to leave - what AOL/Prodigy/CompuServe used to do. I agree, I preferred some of the old technologies, as they seemed more open with a lower barrier to entry, but I don't think the future is particularly bleak.