What Happened to the Internet?

This is something I've been pondering lately, especially due to the fact that I've recently finished shutting down every form of social media I could that I used to thrive on.

There are a number of areas where I've already been told that the internet has always been toxic to some extent, so if I'm somehow thinking that it's just a recent thing, I'm definitely mistaken. And I would have to agree with that assessment, especially since... there are some areas where, when I really look back, I actually feel that the internet made some of my problems worse over time, even if it helped make some things better by letting me use my imagination, seek out knowledge, and meet a wide variety of wonderful people.

It just seems like, over time, the internet has become something where it's incredibly difficult to find anything anymore that might bring the same "magic" I once knew from about two decades ago.

Back in the day, all I had to do to make a few great friends who were interested in talking to me and doing collaborations with me was to post a fanfic within a fandom community, thus showing what I was capable of doing, and a few people would come. And this led to a lot of fun times RPing, fanfic writing, and just talking about life and anything else we wanted to talk about.

Over the course of time, though, it just seems like the world at large has changed to the point where... well, it's almost like people have had the kind of carefree fun I remember having during my younger days bred out of them.

At one time, you could post on someone's profile wall on Deviantart and for the most part, people didn't bat an eye... at least in my experience. In more recent years, I tried that with someone and sorta got treated like I was trespassing on their lawn or something.

At one time, you could seek out an RP partner and just have whatever random and wild fun you felt like doing when you felt like doing it, and nobody batted an eye if you chose to abandon it in favor of something else instead. These days, it seems more like potential RP partners are a lot more serious, they almost want to treat it like a professional project, and act like you are wasting their time if you just want to be carefree or drop it after a while when you get bored.

Plus it also just seems like the various definitions and parameters have changed. Maybe part of it is just due to the fact that technology has evolved so much, and we now have an entire generation of people who grew up with it (and some who were born into it), and I'm just a bit different because I was born in the 80's, and I'm one of the peeps who remembers the final years of time just before the internet became mainstream.

I mean, I didn't even have my first fancy cell phone until I was nearly thirty. And I didn't really have a need for one, and still kinda don't apart from texting one or two people. *shrug*

It also just seems like, while the internet used to have convenient niches where you could easily find your home away from home, (and if it wasn't working out for you anymore after a while, you could leave and find another one) it has changed over the course of time to where... it feels like you can try searching the internet, but...

I'm often left feeling like, instead of finding homey niches anymore, it's become a vast ocean. It's become full of big cities and overwhelming communities rather than welcoming or homey little nooks.

I guess I was just wondering if anyone else has felt this way or experienced similar things, or if anyone else has any thoughts or insights on the matter. ^^;