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As always, "the internet" here means "the six biggest websites".

The small web still exists, largely exactly the same as it always has. It's just not linked on reddit/Facebook/google/etc.

The old internet is still there, it's just buried by miles of corporate excrement. If you go looking you'll find neat weird blogs, message boards and forums, honest-to-god webrings, and more.

The internet as a whole isn't shit, the six biggest websites owned by rich megalomaniacal assholes are shit. Those same assholes would also really like you to believe that the entire internet consists of their six websites and literally nothing else.

No, the small web is not the same as it was. It used to be that a decent amount of people documenting certain hobbies were documenting it on the small web, but the generation that aged out was never replaced; all the younger people are on corporate social media. It used to be that independent MovableType or Wordpress blogs on polemic topics were substantially read, enough to make an impact in the real world on small-town politics or religious denominations, but today relatively few people would even visit independent websites or care for that kind of long-form text.

I would love to participate in a small-web ecosystem, both as reader and writer, on many of the subjects that interest me, but I know for a fact that that ecosystem just doesn’t exist any more.