> It is hard, though, to build and maintain the structures of the old, “smaller” internet.
I agree. Even just setting up an RSS reader and finding a little community of blogs to follow can take a lot of work. Interact with those blogs, whether that's by submitting comments to individual posts, posting responses on your own blog, or doing something fancier with IndieWeb protocols [0], takes time and know-how. Hacker News, subreddits, etc. can remove some of that friction, at the cost of less personalization and more spam.
There are so so many cool ideas in the small internet. Project Gemini [1] comes to mind, as do linkrolls and the Marginalia search engine [2]. There have been a lot of folks finding meaningful communities in the fediverse recently too. I think the small internet both benefits and suffers from this fractal of different tools and communities: among so much diversity, it's simultaneously difficult and rewarding to find your place. I hope that over time, we'll be able to reduce the difficulty and increase the reward by building better tools for discovering and participating in these communities.
Anyways, even if we're hard to find sometimes, there are a lot of us who feel at-home reading our RSS readers, posting to a blog from time-to-time, and maybe even making new tools to make these activities easier. I feel certain that over time, we'll be better connected in ways that make us happy.