"Keep the internet weird" is a difficult challenge.
I think Mastodon helps in that aspect, at least now. Having a communications channel that is not entirely centrally owned and controlled means that you can have parts of it that are quirky.
The world of obscure self-hosted software running in homelabs gives me encouragement. People can experiment in putting services together that don't inevitably have to have a monthly subscription price attached, just the cost of electricity for your devices.
The set of interesting things you can explore with a modern laptop + a pile of cheap home computers continues to grow. Home attics and basements and closets have more computing power than state-of-the art university departments used to have back in the day.
Retrocomputing forces us to understand that systems were not always like they are now (and often were more fun then).
One thing that is still very hard in keeping the internet weird is the long-distance communications aspects of it, which are hard to replicate at homelab scale. We would need more towers with radios pointed at the public library, at minimum. Overlay networks using Wireguard or derivatives let you build an over-the-top network using the Internet as bit transport but your own services instead of commercial ones - this needs some work at any scale but promises to be fun.
