@aw pretty common in the BBS era to have similar policies, sometimes outright questionnaires, if more 1337: sometimes listing scene affiliations was a prerequisite to being granted certain kinds of access.

That stuff never went away, but there was a marked difference in the intention and design of the web. View Source was not an afterthought, it was an ethos. The intention was that WWW was supposedly going to be open from the get go.

That didn't last long, we didn't even make it through the 1990s without the so-called "browser wars" and commerical vendors trying to lock people into things.

Ironically, it could be argued (I think rather successfully) that the 1960s era RFC driven nature of the Internet was even more open than the World Wide Web. Unfortunately, the Web came after Micro$oft and other nare do well technocrat robber barons were plundering and commercializing technology. Few today know of the underpinnings spearheaded by Doug Engelbart with NLS (oNline System, earlier than even RFC-1 or UCLA joining) even within academia these days. Whereas Doug was a personal friend of mine.

To be honest, while I've seen lovely levels of BBS era fine grained permissions and close knit communities since the web, I've rarely, perhaps never, seen them on the web.

Too many, particularly in recent years, sword rattle about so-called "gatekeeping" when, at least from my vantage it's always been a bit more: "you must be this tall to ride" and most people, aren't.