Podcasts aren't exactly a pre-Web aspect, but they're a non-Web form of online content. Some quite good.

Torrents?

I think most of these things still exist, but as a tiny proportion of traffic, because total traffic grew so much while these old protocols shrank somewhat, but they are certainly still there.

The focus is now on applications rather than protocols, that's the bigger difference. One uses Discord, or Slack, not IRC, because their centralised nature enables them to iterate much more rapidly (IRC has barely changed in 30 years while Slack has emojis) and this leads to them simply being much better products. Email still isn't reliably encrypted.

Back in the 80s you didn't have a choice - you couldn't create a worldwide app network, so you had to design a distributed protocol that could be operated independently by the sysadmin at each site. In 2026 (really 2005+) we can do global centralised systems and we mostly don't have independent sites (as in locations) with sysadmins, so it worked out differently. There are a few "digital cooperatives" that try to bring the old model back - nonprofits that host services for their members - but there aren't many and there isn't really a good reason for a layperson to join a digital cooperative and use IRC instead of using Discord, which is where all their friends are anyway.

Gopher is still kinda active, usenet has a few holdouts, email is as alive as ever, gemini is niche but there, IRC refuses to die, atproto is just getting off the ground, activitypub is a thing in some circles, matrix is around in some circles, xmpp is the only non-shit messaging standard, and I'd argue the "platforms" of today (facebook, twitter, instagram, tiktok, youtube, etc.) aren't really the web despite being web based