The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

I feel like this article doesn't address the reason why people moved away from the "old" Internet --- most people only care about their _content_ not the particular technology that backs it.

In the old times, you could only host content if you were really good with the technology. The people who had websites were people who knew how to set up and run a web server, and to compose the HTML content that was being served. Similarly, communities who ran BBS forums, mailing lists, IRC, etc. all needed at least some people who could set up and manage the technology for them.

Centralized services (Web 2.0) changed that. Now all of a sudden you didn't need to run your server --- you could just type some text and click some buttons to put up a blog on a shared service (myspace? blogger? wordpress.com?). You didn't need to run your own forum or mailing list or chat rooms, you could just put your community on an existing service that provided that (Google groups, FB/Whatsapp/<insert your IM> Chat). Need a forum? You have reddit. What is Twitter if not just a collection of mailing lists that you can openly subscribe to but not post on? Centralization allowed the vast majority of people to do what they wanted to do while "outsourcing" the technology part to somebody else, because most people don't care about the technology they care about their content.

The problem with the modern decentralized web (3.0?) is that we haven't focused on solving the real problem --- making it easy to manipulate _content_. If anything, setting up a Web 3.0 presence is _harder_ than it was on a centralized service, and as long as it remains harder, the new "old" Internet will always be a niche.

I fully agree. Technical people often get lost in the weeds. I recall someone trying to extoll the virtues of a self-hosted YouTube alternative (the name escapes me). To him it was clearly superior to YouTube. So I installed the solution, and spent an hour trying to set up and subscribe to the required indexing services. I gave up and went back to this person and explained that no one is going to spend even 10 minutes messing around if they just want to see funny cat videos.

I've built my career on trying to explain this human element to technical people, and if anything, my job security only improves year over year. I see this same attitude in the Linux community: a willingness to work around UX issues because of perceived benefits in other areas. This is why Linux remains such a niche OS for consumers. No user should ever, for any reason ever, have to open a CLI to install a program. But try arguing that on any distro forum and expect a world of hurt.

Whilst we can debate whether open source is better or worse code, noone debates whether open source has better or worse ux/ui. Clunky UI is what we expect from open source projects...if web 3.0 could create incentives for this phenomena to change.. It would be a lot more interesting