Nostalgia for a better time

I think that when finding this site I was taken back to a long time ago, back when people were actually able to customize their profiles online and the internet was full of a lot of small but interesting websites.  Over time things centralized as everything got more expensive to run as well as people looking for more places to connect with both people they already knew and people they didn't. When I turn to the current day, now with the benefit of hindsight, while I feel there is a place for the "town center" style sites where theoretically everyone can meet everyone; these sites lack charm.  They lack real community.  Yes people will group together into niches on the site but it doesn't have the same comfort and level of welcome that a small site of no more than a few thousand really dedicated people coming together specifically for whatever interest the site was dedicated to.  Often I try to reign in this line of thinking by telling myself that everything didn't get much worse with time but looking over the past few years it really might be the case.  Maybe some sort of internet diaspora where people head back out onto smaller dedicated personalized websites will become more popular over time, and everyone can express the full breadth of their creativity more.  

(granted tumblr has existed for a while and though I've noticed activity actually picking up a little bit on it again, I think the population drop following the ban still left a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths)

I am a little curious as to how it feels to have these sorts of things coming back to people who weren't really able to experience them at the time.