I've been a part of this community in some form since late 2022. It has many names. The old web, web revival, indie web, and so on. There are differences in the meaning of these terms, but they all boil down to people tired of conventional social media trying to make their experience mirror how the internet used to be. At least, how they pictured it. I'm no different than most members of this community. My site looks straight out of the Geocities era, I collect tech from that same time, I absolutely hate most social media, but over the years I have grown to have a few problems with the old web movement. Mainly the extreme focus on nostalgia. A lot of the old web community members did not experience the internet in the era they are trying to bring back.
There are definitely good things about the internet from the 90's-2000's. There were less people constantly on it, your experience was based around your interests instead of everyone only using the same 5-10 websites, and people were generally more anonymous. However, it was very easy to have an awful experience. I recommend "The Most Cursed Section of GirlsGoGames" by Li Speaks on YouTube for an exploration of the dark side of the early internet. There's a short webcomic called Welcome to the Internet, Transvestite focusing on the early web that's worth reading. It's anachronistic, but it's one of the few pieces of media about the old web made by someone in my age group that isn't just "MySpace XD everything was so cool!11!!!!" A lot of people with independent websites are queer in some way. That would not be supported back then. There were definitely LGBT people on Geocities. There was an entire category for it, but the sites I've looked at still treated it like an underground thing. The culture of the time was not good for people who were different than the narrow standards of what was acceptable.
The main reason the old web movement has remained obscure is that participating is just not practical to most people. Most websites in this space are better used on computers, and most people would rather go on their phones. We can judge them all we want, but communicating the same was as the majority of the population is more convinient than waiting for hours for an email response, learning to use a flip phone, or using a "retro" social media platform made by a college student that no one around you knows about. It is extremely hard to convince people to do these things if they're not in the mindset already, especially if they don't care about internet privacy as much. It was difficult even for me, and I've always been a pretentious hipster. I haven't even fully switched over. It's also isolating. There are friendships I've missed out on because I've never had SnapChat. I'm probably going to miss out on more since I'm not using Instagram anymore. Ever since they suspended my account for no reason and asked for a photo ID to appeal it. I know that someone who's not willing to text me instead of communicating on whatever social media isn't a friend, but I still feel like I'm missing out when I hear of my classmates (who basically only communicate on SnapChat) doing things together.