The Old Web also happened on someone else's platform, back in the day hosting your site on Geocities, Angelfire, Tripod and their likes where huge. The old web was to me about people publishing whatever for whatever reason, especially amateurs and persons. That web has to me been pushed aside for the benefit of the gain-market-and-profit-from-everything crowd.
I graduated from Geocities/Angelfire in a year or less, learned HTML, and designed my first website on a traditional shared hosting plan with hypermart.net. From there, obv. I could easily go anywhere, as there wasn’t anything particularly special or proprietary keeping me there. I wrote HTML in notepad, and FTP’d those files to my host. There’s nothing to stop people from doing this today.
> The Old Web also happened on someone else's platform, back in the day hosting your site on Geocities, Angelfire, Tripod and their likes where huge.
Let's not forget ISPs and schools offering hosting. Universities even used to let students and faculty have routable IPs and DNS entries on the school's domain.
Why did the old web die?
I'm a HN Heretic. HN says dark patterns, money, power, corporate interests.
I think it was very simple: Proprietary platforms solve real-world problems the more "open" web doesn't and did not effectively solve: discoverability, spam filtering, content filtering, community. Regular people don't want the open web, and never have. They only tolerated it when it was given to them without alternatives.
Proprietary platform solve all the problems you cite for exactly as long as it remains profitable to do so, and not a nanosecond longer. Once you’ve been captured, say goodbye to every one of those things.
That's not new; it's been happening all the way back since AOL. AOL was basically an abstraction layer over the whole internet that we tolerated (remember when every show had both a URL and an AOL keyword?), but it broke like anything can.
For that matter, your maxim also applies to the open internet, and watch what's happening. It's not profitable, so sites are packing up.
In a nutshell, content costs money. People make content anticipating money. Doesn't matter if it's on Discord, on YouTube, or a private blog. No money, no investment.
Also it is easier to publish to a walled platform than the open web.