It's nostalgia through and through, I go through that as well.

Finally, no one owned the internet. Sure, we can get into semantics of the DNS system and infrastructure, but the web - and specifically, content - quickly became decentralized after the early stages until the recent centralization of content.

I just miss being able to visit the web, find personal content from fellow internet explorers, and not spend the whole time avoiding the pitfalls of the modern web.

It was all new for us and it was "ours", finally we had a place to ourselves and then the "others" showed up. It's fine. There are still places on the net to mine that dopamine.

I remember switching ISPs on the regular, panic.net, akula.net, earthlink, etc to just get a better ping in Quake. Then my clan mate in Bensonhurst discovered that one could get a double ISDN line through Nynex for $80/m if you pretended to be a business and all was again well. T1 lines at the time were $1K or more IIRC.