How hard could that be? And is it still possible (with the TOS of many providers now stating flat out that you can't run any servers on your line).
Over time we got geocities and various CMSs and such to fill that, but the function of what most of those people were putting up is just their facebook wall these days, only it's a bit more transitory.
I remember one old gentleman, a WW2 vet, who spent hours every day building a page about his dog so that he could share it with his friends and family. It was a bit odd, but my FB wall is full of similar kinds of things.
So I guess it also comes down to "what's the end goal the person is trying to achieve?" if it's just to keep people updated on their dog, FB more or less fills that function. Most people actually weren't interested in building random webpages, it was in communicating something to people.
If FB added some kind of "archive this post" so people could save particularly great posts or conversations, it would fill this gap. But I have a feeling somebody else will get to it first.
That should have been the thing that google+ aimed at rather than doing the same thing all over again. The content would eventually achieve critical mass all by itself.
The technology would not be relevant.
The massive asymmetry between producers and consumers is a repeated pattern across many domains regardless of technology.
-- of wikipedia readers, less than 1% write articles
-- in web forums, most are lurkers and less than 1% write posts
-- movies: millions watch them, less than 1% produce their own movies
-- books: millions of readers, relatively few authors
-- cars: most drive them, very few build/rebuild them (as a hobby)
, etc.
Another example is blogging. Today, for a novice, it's more friction-free than the 1990s Geocities days to set up a blog and share one's thoughts. However, the vast majority are not interested. It seems like an imbalance that we'll always have.
So it's not like we conspired to have everyone be dumb consumers. Perhaps the internet evolved that way because it is a reflection of what we are.