The old internet has never left, it's just the vast majority of people went to the corporatized internet instead. You can still find small communities of a few dozen or hundred people posting on forums that aren't reddit or facebook.
You aren't going to find them because Google does not care about discovery they care about ads.
Webrings are one trick to find your people, but it's hard and most webrings don't point to "gathering spots."
>You aren't going to find them because Google does not care about discovery they care about ads.
I frequently post to two very small, hobby-specific phpBB forums with old-internet-style communities that I found by googling the hobby. The forums themselves were listed at the top of Google's results when looking for the broader hobby, and I regularly find specific posts in Google results when searching for very specific subject matter.
They're only going to get harder to find as they disable unauthenticated access to topics due to being swamped with thousands of LLM company scrapers, if the user-owned-and-run forum I've been a member of for more than 20 years is anything to go by.
You aren't going to find them because Google does not care about discovery they care about ads.
Webrings are one trick to find your people, but it's hard and most webrings don't point to "gathering spots."