It's pretty clear to me you all are just looking for closure. You do not want to live in the past. You can prove it to yourself by finding any old discussion archive and feeling the cringe. You do not want the values of the past either. You're chasing a feeling that is more related to your own aging than what things like the internet "are".

Things would have changed anyway. You might just be upset that it wasn't on your terms. You can try to revive old ideas, but that veers into art. Art is very hard and requires a much deeper perspective than nostalgia. The perspective required to create what you want will necessarily also ruin what you expected to feel from it.

A relevant quote: "Everything was better back when everything was worse" - David Sipress, The New Yorker, Nov 24, 2003