Everything about the internet for the last 10 years seems to have exclusively boiled down to building tools to control and ban people.
Reddit used to just, at worst, ban you from a single community. Then the power moderators began expanding bans to their entire 'network'. Automoderator tools to ban people for having accounts that are 'too new'. "You are doing that too much, try again in 9 minutes". Messaging the moderators used to get you a 72 hour mute, now it's 28 days. And now every time you get banned from a community, you almost always get a site-wide ban at the same time, when 10 years ago, the admins never did anything, and the admin team was actually relatively small and 'known'.
We used to have mIRC for chat, running independent chat servers unrelated to each other. Then Discord centralized it, and then added phone number verifications. I've seen channels where they literally require you to link you Google and Steam accounts to 'verify'. There's times where Discord would ban an entire server and literally ban everybody who ever used it, because I got caught up in one that I think I was just a member of and never even chatted in.
Can't use Twitter or anything without a phone number, so they can more permanently ban you. Photo identification, face ID.
You used to actually have to get banned by a real community manager or something. Now everything is about "safety teams" who have no names, no identities, and you can only issue appeals to an empty void that likely never gets answered. The identities of all employees on these "safety teams" is always 100% anonymous and unknown. Reddit even has many subs where all bans are issued by a 'moderator account' so you can never know who did it or why.
Now they're rolling out AI tools to monitor everything in real time and "interpret" TOS violations to automatically issue unappealable bans.
This change is 100% so they can ban your entire PSN account for 'TOS violations', since they can't ban your entire Steam account.
You are lamenting the relatively free and open internet you remember from 10 years ago. I lament the absolutely wild west internet I remember from the early 2000s, when there was no social media, no smart phones, and Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory was in its infancy.
You can still do this now. Setting up an IRC server is not hard, and mIRC is still around (historically I preferred Trillian since I could do other im services with it, but now that those are all turned off, mIRC works just as well)
To be clear, the old, free internet still exists, in a fashion, but the problem is, no one is there any more. Big Tech has sucked all the oxygen out of the room by enticing them all to their services.
I've seen some old school web forums that are still very active. The AR-15 forums come to mind. They're still probably only one troon complaint to the web host away from getting shut down.
Its already happened. They got kicked off their hosting about four years ago and nearly died, and when they came back they had to start banning "muh hate speech" to stay online.
Arfcom was kicked offline a few years back because the fools were using godaddy for a domain registrar, but that didnt last long. Once they got a new one, they were good.
ICQ
Shockingly, ICQ still exists and still has your buddy list from 20-25 years ago.
Wat
I'm serious, you can still go to icq.com and if you remember your old ID number and password your account still works just like it did 20 years ago.
Yes, that still works, but none of the people I knew that used it still do, so while nice that it still works, see my previous argument about users being sucked into social media.
Would recommend running https://matrix.org over IRC.