I think about this constantly. I’m constantly very upset about it. I’ve lost friends to cancer and freak accidents, and the loss of the internet is still genuinely the greatest tragedy in my life. The internet is, in large part, nothing more than a series of very customizable and semi-niche subscription packages and big box stores now. VR, particularly VR Chat, is close to/reminiscent of what it used to be like, so I cling to that, Lemmy, piracy, archive.org, and a few other things very tightly, but VR is starting to enter an era comparable to when cable internet started to become commonly available (and full of obnoxious unsupervised children), so it’s on its way out; not to mention the continued attempts to ruin the internet archive, which will be, not hyperbolically, the greatest loss to our species since the destruction of Alexandria.
We had it all, and it got bought out from under us, and there’s nothing to be done about it. People en masse don’t even know what we’re missing. I hate it. I’ll never get over the obsolescence of specialized forums in favor of social media, in particular.
I pirate. I don’t justify pirating. I just do it, because I want things and have the ability to get them for free, so I do that.