@Longicaudatus

Web 1.0 was definitely a different experience. If you're looking for something old school and in the same vein as Pixpet, my brother recently showed me Telefang.net, a site and community surrounding an obscure series of monster-collecting games for the GBC/GBA. I don't actually know what the community is like since I only glanced at the forums, but if you want to play the games themselves, you'll probably need an emulator. I've been meaning to try them myself. There's even a completed manga for the series.

As a kid in the early 2000s I used to play a lot of 2D multiplayer games on a site called BYOND, which looks the same as it ever did lol. All of the games there are free and user-made, so they vary in quality and completeness. As a result, the community consists mostly of hobbyist coders, pixel artists, and the people who follow their work. There's also a ton of fan games if you're into that. The only drawback about BYOND games is you have to download their client to play (desktop only).

I'll let you know if I think of any other ancient sites/communities that still exist XD

I mostly lurked through forums back in the early to mid 2000s.

What I frequently did besides being on virtual pet sites was browse through the many niche fansites and stuff created in the 90s and 00s through web hosts like geocities. I still remember some of the weirder things like Mr. T vs everything or this one site with weird games and sold equally weird gag gifts called stupid dot com. And thats just the tip of the iceberg.

I don’t use it these days but I recently discovered wolf-haven.com/ still exists.

The only other site that comes to mind is furaffinity and sadly the nsfw content is the only thing stopping me from recommending it freely, esp for artists sick of commercial art sites + social media.

dragcave.net/ is still active! Sure it received a very slight glow-up (mostly added functionality for the sake of quality of life improvements) in the recent 5 years, and the dragon sprite art has become gorgeous, but it still reminds me of that old energy I remember from my teen years (I've been using it since 2008, omg)

I've found that a lot of people who prefer the Web 1.0 use Neocities, and a lot of websites there have heavy Web 1.0 vibes as a result.