If this predates you, imagine the content of your favorite subreddit or HN, where membership itself was curated by people credible in a topic, where you could read sincere conversations and arguments between knowledgable (or perhaps just enthusiastic) indviduals, with a defacto Chatham House rule around opinions and pseudonymity, and read it at your leisure without the risk of missing anything, without ads, cookies, popups, or PII hoovering, and with a real-time responsive threading interface (via mutt or even pine) where you could use simple / or vi-like commands, where you could index and pile the whole thing into a database if you wanted to.
What made the old internet good was it was mostly a privilege to be a part of it, granted and revoked by the communities themselves, and not by a back end layer of unskilled governance activists.
I managed news servers back in the day, and I'm tempted to just spin up an NNTP server again with my own damn cabal (TINC!LLTC!) and to hell with everyone else. The main change I would make is limit the binaries hierarchy, strip any and all markup for anything that isn't code, provide support only for an open pyCurses client, provide a robust killfile interface for filtering low energy shitposts, facilitate reasonable pseudonymity, no idiotic picture profiles, and probably apply some modern ML moderation tools.
HN already does about 40% of this today, but the idea of starting something that emmulates the platforms today only with a different political flavour is predicated on the same fundamental problem that it is for the public instead of being for people who can pass a basic skills and literacy bar.
The fediverse is based on real time addictive interaction, whereas time in news threads was measured in days and weeks. Discord seems to be for people who really want to talk to you, but you don't really want to talk to them. Blockchains appear mainly to be a market for matching money launderers with people nurturing untreated mental illness. (together at last!), and one-off radical political sites are just honeypots for patsies to get set up to justify law enforcement budgets.
As far as I can tell, an influencer on a social platform is just someone who shares pictures of their butt, and twitter seems to have found their sweet spot as a broadcast system for people united in their shared predicament of having nothing challenging to say.
The text based internet solved a lot of problems platforms struggle with today using simple rules, because the platforms have scaled beyond their use cases, and their future looks a lot like that of AOL/Compuserve. The good internet is still ahead of us, and probably using tools we have neglected.