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I hit high school right around the time that online networks (not even the internet yet, just garbage like AOL) were growing like mad, and the sharper adults had figured out that most kids now basically had unfettered access to anything that could be encoded as a text or image file. My chemistry teacher begged to help any of us who might actually try an Anarchist Cookbook explosives recipe, also based on the proposition that too many of its recipes were suicidal if followed as-written. I don't think anyone took her up on it, though; the wildest homebrew reaction I ever ended up seeing was a friend's thermite in college.
From what I've read, even modern powder isn't too hard ... though some of the precursors are supposedly in the "legal, but bulk purchase will bring men with badges to your door for a friendly chat" category. The tricky chemicals to manufacture without killing yourself are primers.
I was reading about this in the course of post-apocalyptic-fiction background research, though, looking at the context of a setting where people would eventually have to redevelop manufacturing capacity for everything. In the modern US, reloaders can buy a box of 1000 primers online for under $100. Chris Rock's bullet control routine was hilarious, but essentially impossible. Even if we focus on the difficulty of making your own primers, there's no way to effectively ban something that's been sold in billion-unit-per-year quantities and can be shelf-stable indefinitely.
This makes me slightly envious, I would have certainly taken him or her up on it. The fanciest thing I ever got do synthesize in school was nitrocellulose. I can still feel the disappointment like it was yesterday when a teacher who had promised to synthesize any ether compound we wanted reneged on that when I picked an ester of nitric acid and glycerin.
Nor did I ever try that on my own, my balls to brains ratio is apparently low enough that I still have all my fingers. I did thermite on my own though, it is reasonably safe when done outside with some eye protection and plenty of sand so you don't start a big fire.
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Cathode_G had DIY guncotton pretty much solved, DIY gunpowder as difficult but doable, and (corrosive) primer as viable (cw: guy is also an exhibitionist furry, so link is safe but be warned if you follow him). The traditional mercury fulminate solution is both messy, chemically nasty, and extremely dangerous without the right tools and experience, and pretty much any traditional primer is going to be dangerous by definition.
There's been some interesting efforts in electrically-ignited primers that look safer and even harder to block, though they're weird enough that it's been difficult to adapt modern tools to them.
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Regarding online networks, I was roughly in the same space as you age-wise (you sound like someone possibly in my bracket) and remember AOL very well. There was a site that was very popular among us and I can’t recall the fucking name, because it was awesome. Something like rotteneggs.com; but something “egg” related for sure. What it was, was basically an open forum of posts for registered users to post all sorts of malicious recipes for things. And I’m not talking just making stink bombs, or using krazy glue and toothpicks and breaking them off inside school doors so they’re inaccessible and have to be replaced; I mean full on bomb manuals by teenagers and young adults, who were just experimenting with shit. Some of them were probably really bad people too, but that was the milieu and environment of the time for people like us. And granted they were written in this sort of amateurish tutorial style format, and some users didn’t have great grammar, but there were a lot of pearls of wisdom on that site to be mined, and I loved reading it.
In my self-study and also from my father, I learned a lot about black powder and compounds with energetic properties, etc. He actually taught me a lot from books like this, specifically. I didn’t have the technical know how at the time to independently understand much of it, but as he taught me more it became very comprehensible. It’s ironic you mention thermite too, my best friend and I also made thermite around this time. We used it to destroy an old hard drive (a very bad idea to do as a young kid and highly dangerous). Modern powders as you say actually aren’t too hard to come by, and it’s been known for a long time that large quantities of certain OTC items will immediately get you flagged. That was known even when I was a kid. Today you’re practically Osama if you go shopping at a Costco with such intentions. I’m sure regulations have tightened even further, but I’m not going back to that anymore. I’ve had my fun and more than my fill of that stuff. One of the last time’s I visited my younger cousin and her young kids, we were talking about stories of things we did in the past and they all wanted to go do the same things we did and asked if we could teach them how. I said “absolutely, not.” Unfortunately today’s a different day and age. Funny I was actually thinking of that exact Chris Rock clip while reading the rest of your post.
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