There's a nameclash here: internet of the 90s which the OP pines for, and the current internet which is weaponized and truly has all the problems the OP calls e

There's a nameclash here: internet of the 90s which the OP pines for, and the current internet which is weaponized and truly has all the problems the OP calls exaggerations. It's fine to pine for the 90s internet when nobody knew about your subculture much less tried to monetize it through advertising. But to actually get the spirit of obscure 90s internet on the current weaponized internet is a hard problem. The danger is that you implement some kind of nostalgic 90s interface and simply hope that nobody on the internet hates your subculture sufficiently to destroy it. After all, that's exactly what you did in the 90s and it seemed to work. The problem is that now a) a plethora of attackers know exactly how brittle and easily gamed these services are, and b) all your users know it, too. And that includes knowledge about how certain types of speech can attract the ire of people with bot armies, exploits, etc. So your userbase either self-censors in order to keep under the increasingly automated radar, or it doesn't and raises the likelihood of attacks. And that's assuming nobody ddos'd you to oblivion in the first place. Anyhow, I think it's correct to characterize online communities as dangerous and unhealthy places, because at present their brittle designs make them hazardous to use. Until programmers actually solve some of the deep problems of designing a social networking for use over a weaponized internet (in the same way that git has largely solved that problem wrt source code management), I don't see any reason to change that characterization. People with nowhere else to turn and no money to physically move to a safer location will certainly still use these messaging services. But the best of a series of bad options is still a bad option.