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Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
Start off with a different search engine:
Or explore some webrings:
A weblog with the best of the web (no idea how those cats got wedged into scanners, though)
A /c (with links to more /cs):
And as others have mentioned:
And once you've found an interesting website, follow its feed in a feedreader / newsreader / news aggregator:
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.
IRC still exists. Forums are somewhat hard to host nowadays because lots of governments have passed laws imposing more and more regulation, liability and duties of care on operators of web platforms. We would need to start movements to repeal those laws first, I'm certainly in favor of that! But I think the future of forums is nonetheless ActivityPub; it is a lot better to be able to read about all topics that interest me on one website rather than having to click through many different ones.
Flash games: why do you want those back? Flash is a proprietary platform and it's a good thing we can now do the things we used to do with it directly in the browser with HTML5 and JS. You can still play Flash games with Ruffle, there are still websites out there that host them.
Video sites that aren't YouTube: nowadays videos can be much more easily hosted elsewhere than YouTube than was the case in the 2000s. Many social media platforms allow direct upload of videos and any website operator can easily directly embed a video without needing either YouTube or something based on Flash Player. So I'm not sure what you're nostalgic for when it comes to this topic.
IRC is still alive and somewhat kicking on places like freenode, obviously a lot of that kind of culture lives in discord today, but you've also got matrix as an alternative to that style, but I can't say I've really clicked with it myself.
A few forums have managed to hang around (not that I recommend it, but I discovered somethingawful is still around recently), and the software to run one is still out there being maintained. Reddit really did a number on these sites though so Lemmy, etc is probably a good tool in the box for this too.
Flash games are dead for a pretty valid reason (security, etc), but sites like newgrounds still have a presence for the kind of stuff you're thinking of. I can't say I've browsed it in a very long time though. You've also got the indie game scene that blew up in the 2010s—I personally feel like that's scratching the same kind of itch for me at least. Places like humble and itch.io are good sources.
There are efforts to do just that, neocities comes to mind. Problem is that it takes a lot more active participation.
I mean that is why I am here. Even with reddit what sorta drew me in compared to slashdot was the way it was a bit more like the alt. newsgroup type thing.
