Recommended listening: https://masterbootrecord.bandcamp.com/track/cpu

Stop defining your corner of the net in terms of what you hate, what you oppose, what is 'old school', or 'how things were'. Nearly every small site I come across is bitching about the mainstream web, whining that things are not like the old days, or slobbing the the indie web's (read: their own) knob. If you want to do something, just do it. If you want to build the counter culture to mainstream garbage, go do that. Create a space outside of the default space.

Based on reading hundreds of smaller sites folks are leaving the mainstream for the following exhaustive reasons: sick of the culture war, exhausted by the bad netiquette practiced there, and are sick of mining through shit to get the odd gem of a post. I suspect that you reading this right now would agree with that. When you whinge about mainstream internet unprompted in your own space you're tracking in the garbage from those places into your own homes, and the digital-3rd places you occupy. This discourse has been done to death and what you have to say on your site, forums, and chats you occupy is not original, contributes nothing to The Culture™ of the space you occupy, and only serves to shit it up.

Often times when reading the posts or in discussion with people who do this I get an odd feeling. It's that of a hollow. Someone who likes the idea of a small web but does not actually like it. You run into these folks a lot in music scenes. They haven't heard many of the bands, they don't go to shows, and their background doesn't match their peers; however, they drape themselves in the aesthetics of the scene. They dress the right way, talk the right way, occupy the right spaces (online and off), while not getting it. Think wealthy assholes dressing as poor punks.

Defining yourself in terms of what's old is another common pitfall. The old internet sucked ass. If you want something different than The Now don't reach for The Was. It's a recipe for embitterment. The past died and was buried. You can no longer reach it, as it has ceased to be. You can contribute to something new. The internet is billions at this point, it is a vast place. There's tens of millions of communities, hundreds of thousands of cultures to draw from and integrate into. There is almost certainly something better suited to you than what was. Go find it, contribute, and evolve it.