Small forums where everybody knew everybody (there's still some kicking around). Personal websites/blogs were fun. I think they could make a comeback now that it's easier than ever to host and big social media is going to poo.

Being part of a smaller community.

I had even stopped reading usernames. No subreddit has ever felt like a community to me. The only online places that did were my WoW guild, some other guild-based games, a brief period on Crunchyroll a long time ago, and more recently a Discord anime group which is all but inactive now.

The internet has changed in such a way. But so have I. Making friends online used to be super easy (talking 15-20 years ago). Nowadays, I can only do it in person.

I always miss many of the online friends I used to have and regret deeply how I didn't put more effort into keeping them. I see a lot of people make the same mistake. I suppose friendship loss is something most of us need to go through to learn to value it.

Going outside

USENET. Actually useful USENET.

I miss the mostly text-based content that was replaced by low effort memes

forum games and community events

pre-reddit? smaller niche communities where people actually knew each other. once social media got centralized on a few big platforms (namely reddit) most subs got so ridiculously popular that everyone was basically anonymous. it'd be nice to see actually communities form.

feature phones

I miss (at least some aspects of) Slashdot's moderation system, especially:

• the ability to provide reasons for the moderation (e.g. expressing the difference between +1, funny and +1, insightful), and
• metamoderation (voting on whether moderation actions were justified).

(It's worth noting that other important aspects of Slashdot's moderation system were that the range of comment scores was bounded to the range [-1, 5] and that users only had a limited number of modpoints that they were awarded occasionally based on karma, so the aspects I liked may or may not transfer well to different contexts like Reddit or Lemmy-style upvoting/downvoting.)

I think the only 'problem' I have is that the content is relatively scarce. I too need to put more effort into commenting and posting, like every one else should too.

That being said, I do like the idea of not using reddit anymore. I swear I am way more productive, even with the time spent on Lemmy. The community seems (at least generally speaking) more wholesome.

There are subreddits that I do miss, I am checking every week if they migrated, hoping they will make it!