ActivityPub and the fediverse were started specifically to deal with the kind of centralization that has lead to the shit state of the Internet today, so I’d say the fact that you’ve made it here means you’ve kinda found what you’re looking for already. Find and read/write WriteFreely/Ghost/Plume blogs (and shitposts) instead of Substack or Medium, use Lemmy for threaded conversations (and shitposts) instead of Reddit, and Mastodon for microblogs (and shitposts) instead of Twitter. Peertube is not a drop-in replacement for Youtube, but also 90% of the new content on Youtube is garbage today anyway, and there’s nothing stopping you from browsing older videos (with Freetube or similar to block a good portion of Youtube’s enshittified UI).

Plus if you do stick to these off-the-beaten-path alternatives, it’s still a fun time to be a content creator since you’re not focused on maximizing engagement or monetization – which is the true source of the godawful state of the Internet today.

Start off with a different search engine:

• https://marginalia-search.com/

Or explore some webrings:

• https://brisray.com/utils/webrings.htm

A weblog with the best of the web (no idea how those cats got wedged into scanners, though)

• https://www.metafilter.com/

A /c (with links to more /cs):

• https://lemsha.re/lemmy.ca/c/webrevival@lemm.ee

And as others have mentioned:

• http://neocities.org/
• http://indieweb.org/

And once you’ve found an interesting website, follow its feed in a feedreader / newsreader / news aggregator:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS

http://wiby.me/ is nice. I hit the “surprise me” a couple of times every morning 👴🏻☕️

There are efforts to do just that, neocities comes to mind. Problem is that it takes a lot more active participation.

see here:

• !internetisbeautiful@lemm.ee
• !smolweb@slrpnk.net
• !retronet@lemmy.sdf.org

also, as you kinda hint at, the fediverse in general is aimed at giving us a space away from corporate social media.