When I was growing up the internet was a place to be liberated from the world say what you want to say, be whoever you want and form genuine communities with shared interests. Now the internet feels like a tool to enslave the mind with identity echo chambers and any deviation leads you to being banned and blocked shunned and silenced within a void that is inescapable. Novel unique websites coded manually by hobbyists running servers for free in the commons allowing people access to the free flow of information under the banner of “information should be free” has largely gone away with corpratisation. I miss the days when the internet was populated largely by nerds aiming to make a better world not this controlled censored hell hole of profiteering.
Cory Doctorow may have you covered; he just posted recently about his next book, which sounds like it deals with what you’re talking about, and tries to find ways to fix it: https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/110809535924735163
Thanks for this! Love his writing. Just pledged for the audiobook on Kickstarter.