Hunter Thompson said something about what you seem to be feeling
"So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back"
It's human nature to ascribe this to a moment in an optimistic movement we remember fondly. When the world seemed smaller and everyone shared the same optimism and energy. Much like the era of the middle sixties, it didn't scale. The magical freedom of the early internet had as much to do with a tiny monoculture(and in fact some of the same people) that fell apart when the rest of the great unwashed masses signed up.
The lethal illusion was that being on the internet would turn the rest of the world into US, not the other way around. No version of a safe free and open community can survive without a protective bubble between it and instant communication with the rest of the world. Otherwise the constant din of the screaming and ravings of madmen drown out all other discussion.
We who were there in the early days misarchitected the foundation of the Internet. It wasn't designed to work in the real world. We don't get a do over, and the world we wanted will be harder to build even as a life-raft for us because of it.
I tap another Hunter line, also applied to the 60's summer of love and acid/drug culture, which would influence the titans of the early Internet in the SF bay area:
"without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him seriously" could be applied to Tim Berners Lee and most of his utopian bobble heads.
As it turns out building a giant megaphone that can howl at the population of the earth in real time has some terrible consequences. Like the disease and addiction that hounded the bright eyed seekers that thought they had unlocked a new world order of peace and love. The party was fun while it lasted but the hangover is a real bitch, and that bitch won't fit back in the bottle she came out of.