> The Windows 7 logo looked like this and was also gay-themed in 2009. Don't question it! I need to stay immersed!
It's obviously not the Windows 7 logo. In fact, it's the Windows 95 logo, but with the colors tweaked a bit. It's not supposed to match anything, it's supposed to represent the server.
> The old internet communities they're trying to emulate were built by people who ran their own servers, wrote their own code, understood networking protocols, valued anonymity and pseudonymity, rejected corporate gatekeeping
I do all of those things, and I'm pretty certain a lot of other people in the community also do. Some examples: I run https://teknixstuff.com/ and https://chat.teknixstuff.com/, both of which were written by hand by me (no crappy frameworks or drag-and-drop site builders here). I very much understand networking protocols (how else am I going to manage to come up with a websockets-like protocol which works on IE 5.0?). I do value anonymity and pseudonymity, and I definitely have made efforts to reject corporate gatekeeping (what's ChatDot for? ah yes, it's an alternative to a corporate platform, discord!)
> Yes, actually, it does. You cannot be nostalgic for something you never experienced.
If it's better, you certainly can agree that it's a lot better than the modern stuff. Nostalgia might be the wrong term, but there's definitely a similar thing even if you never experienced it originally.
> The "Y2K" look they worship was mostly corporate branding and early social media platforms. The real independent web looked nothing like their glittery recreations.
Have you actually looked at any of it? Sure, not all of it did (plenty of it was just unstyled html), but a significant portion did look a lot like that.
> The tools to recreate the actual old internet still exist and work perfectly:
> XMPP has been around since 1999 and runs on every platform
> IRC still provides real-time chat without corporate oversight
> Self-hosting is easier than ever with modern tools
> RSS still delivers content without algorithmic manipulation
indeed, they do, but the convenience is often lost there, and many platforms depend on having a lot of users to make sense. XMPP I've barely heard of anybody using, IRC is missing numerous features that are rather important these days (eg: file uploads and being able to read previous messages). Self-hosting definitely does exist and work, thought depending on what you mean by modern tools, it doesn't always make it easier. RSS is useful and still commonplace on websites, even if not commonly used by users, but it doesn't require the same popularity that a chat platform does.
