While I don't disagree with the general sentiment the old Internet (late 90s to first half of the 00s) was very different topologically from the Internet of tod

While I don't disagree with the general sentiment the old Internet (late 90s to first half of the 00s) was very different topologically from the Internet of today. Colleges especially were lousy with IP addresses. They'd assign a routable IP to every computer on their campus, including the ResNets. They also handed out shared disk space on servers because that was new and novel. If you knew the right people you could even get a vanity subdomain on the school's domain. A significant amount of "wild" Internet content was found on those servers that lived on college campuses. Another significant source of "wild" content was ISP-provided web space. Most ISPs offered a few tens of megabytes of web hosting easily accessed via FTP. A lot of HTML authoring software of the era could publish directly to an FTP account. While the likes of GeoCities and AngelFire get a lot of the nostalgia today, they were far from the only source of garish web pages filled with questionable content. In the early 00s colleges stopped giving out routable IPs to everything with a NIC and started cracking down on closet servers and web space. Besides the network security angle the MPAA and RIAA were on a tear suing colleges for "hosting" pirated content. ISPs also dropped their shared hosting around the same time. By 2010 all the major free web hosting services had shut down or enshittified to uselessness. Without those places a lot of "wild" content just died out. People did move to hosted blogs like LiveJournal, Wordpress, or Tumblr but even those weren't the same type of "wild" sites that came before. The "wild" content has been further hurt by Google's algorithms' insistence that only content published in the past ten seconds is worthwhile and even then its only worthwhile if its SEOed to death and has Google Ads running on it. For the most part people just moved to social media. There's zero need for administration, bandwidth is a non-issue, and publishing is pushing "Post". The downside is its social media and discoverability or even availability outside the platform is challenging or non-existent. For non-technical people it's extremely difficult to set up a "wild" site on the Internet anymore. Even for the technically inclined it's a thankless pain in the ass to administer and keep up. If you do set something up it becomes a constant battle against spammers and script kiddies. Even just something going viral can get your account suspended or rack up huge egress fees on a cloud provider. I love the idea of re-wilding the Internet we shouldn't pretend the Internet of today is the same as the Internet of the last century. Edit: I a word.