Eternal September is a thing. Over the past 15 years, billions of people became online. I use that number casual, but it's nothing short of a shift on par with the impact Gutenberg had with his printing press. Humanity's barely out of the gates in terms of assessing how this will play out in the long term.
The bar to publishing your thoughts, having an online presence,... is stupidly low. That's what big platforms and centralization have achieved. The vast majority of people who make a living online don't care about the details. They simply want to express a thought, share what they see, etc. And the proverbial smartphone and Instagram account are all you need to do exactly that.
Wishing to go back to Web 1.0 is a non sequitur because it would mean raising that same bar again. It would also run counter to the billion dollar cottage industries that have sprung up in the wake of the emergence of these platforms.
That doesn't mean using the core technologies that make up the Web and leveraging platforms are mutually exclusive. They aren't. Nothing stops you from breaking away with like minded people and building your own community. The openness and standardization of the specifications that define the technology allow you to do exactly that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect sometimes things that need some effort end up with more value in the eyes of their makers. That higher barrier might not be that bad, because I firmly believe one of the reasons what got us to the modern web is people not valuing what they had put into it.
The bar to publishing your thoughts, having an online presence,... is stupidly low. That's what big platforms and centralization have achieved. The vast majority of people who make a living online don't care about the details. They simply want to express a thought, share what they see, etc. And the proverbial smartphone and Instagram account are all you need to do exactly that.
Wishing to go back to Web 1.0 is a non sequitur because it would mean raising that same bar again. It would also run counter to the billion dollar cottage industries that have sprung up in the wake of the emergence of these platforms.
That doesn't mean using the core technologies that make up the Web and leveraging platforms are mutually exclusive. They aren't. Nothing stops you from breaking away with like minded people and building your own community. The openness and standardization of the specifications that define the technology allow you to do exactly that.