[sengork]

I think that what you're experiencing is pretty common. Internet itself has changed but perhaps more crucially people with whom you've interacted with changed their habits or simply lack the time they used to have (their age groups are different so there's insufficient critical mass to maintain the old community).

There's an added problem of general noise on the Internet which limits the 90s early 00s type of 'signal'. Another aspect is that services used to be quite often hosted by or aimed at the technical/enthusiastic audience, nowadays it is predominantly aimed towards commercial general public.

The internet suffers from centralisation which for the early(ish) adopters creates overall noise.

I'd also like to add that abundance of bandwidth and endless content easily take the aim and focus on doing the cherry picked and well curated things that you used to do. Bandwith has also contributed to ease of bloat, for example today I can't imagine surfing the net without an adblocker, back then ads were fine and served their purpose without impacting the client side.

More generally I believe that larger populations, whether they be large cities or large online communities, will paradoxically make it harder to find others with very specific non-majority interests.