You know this and the fediverse give me hope. I think the beauty of the early internet was actually that there was a bit of a barrier to entry. I don't want to be elitist, and you never needed to be "elite" to access it, but you did need some money or luck to be able to get online back then... more importantly though, you needed the motivation.

That barrier was a powerful filter that meant that a lot of people on the internet just happened to be a certain kind of person, who made certain kinds of things, and did it without a commercial interest. Then the internet got cheaper, more vital for everything, so everyone had it, and so those enthusiasts were swamped by everyone else and, with them, commercial interests pursuing their cash.

I used to despair that the old internet was permanently gone, but actually it's not that hard to capture that self-selection (and, bonus: now the external barriers to entry are much lower) through these projects: who is on the Fediverse? Only people weird enough to care that reddit sucks. Who is on gemini? Only people weird enough to care that the mainstream web sucks. Yeah, the normal internet is never going back, and will only get more commercialised and more regulated and censored. But we don't actually need the great mass of people that are on the normal internet to have something worthwhile and functional. Sure, it's a shame that I have to go back on the bad site to ask a question about anything other than Linux, but it could be worse.