I do not feel sad about lost online communities. When i was at my early 20s (early 2010s) FIDO of my university was still running and i had amazing time with some oldschool hackers there. I was too young for that community and always had a feeling that I have lost or , rather, missed something great... you know, like i was born 20 years later than i would had liked to. Now this echo conference is dead. That 486 machine was probably disconnected and thrown away somewhere. Everything dies at some point. Ask yourself : do you need the tech that gives that community vibe or do you need the people behind. I try to stick to people. As for me, i would rather have an in blood-and-flesh nerd friend instead of a whole human-driven reddit. He probably knows the answer, he is happy to help. There was an article here at HN long ago, that in average we have around 150 close contacts at a time. Some drop in, some fall out and get unconciously replaced. Going beyond that number would imply exponential increase of management costs. Those oldschool guys from FIDO, they disappeared for me without a trace. Partially because quite soon I ended up in the community of radio-engineers. Honestly, i am grateful to all people that helped me online, those who were there, who actively participated and, for some reason, cared.
This is a hard subject. I have lost a lot because of covid 2019 money-wise, familly-wise and health-wise right in the middle of my twenties. It literally destroyed me making me impared. Life was never worse as in 2021 for me. These days I feel that my life will turn out to be shorter than i thought before.
But i would like to share something that keeps me alive: if i see an opportunity to make someone happy, I do that. If i see someone feeling lost, i try to give them a bit of confidence : will everything around break but they can rely at least on me. A human being needs a human being. Although it is hard, i forgive more. There is so much suffering in the world these days, so many people lost their relatives, got injured, lost homes because of wars, that feeling any comfort these days, feeling "happy" just hurts. It just does not feel right.
After COVID six years ago I kind of lost my ability to write concisely and clear. I always loved to compose, to fantasize, but now I feel like an impared one. Now writing any text is a painful process to me: I grab one paper, do freewriting (when one writes w/o stop everything that comes to ones mind) , then mark the bulletpoints and nice formulations (if present, of course). Sometimes, when I want to sharpen the text, I ask questions to it, I critisize it violently. Then I close the original, and rewrite everything from scratch by hand. Handwriting enforces human, naturally lazy creatures, to be concise in their formulations. After 3-4 iterations, I get a text of asatisfactory quality.
It is very unfortunate that we start value creativity and imagination only when we lose them. Although a good pill for creativity in my case is ... boredom and routine. I cant stand doing the same thing again and again in the same fashion. Maybe you might give it a try :)
If I gonna face an apocalypse, I would choose Panasonic Toughbook 55 with NetBSD + printed manual for OS. I will have an eternity to compile everything they provide in pkg archive from scratch :)