> That sense of ownership has been lost. Now corporations own everything. Nobody wants a domain, they want a @name on some social media platform. Nobody wants their own website, they want to post on social media.
I don't think the self-hosting people with their own domains ever went away. They're all still out there.
The difference is that the internet isn't just for those people any more. Everyone is online, and the average person has no intention of learning how to host and maintain and design their own website when they can just as easily post the same content on an easy to use platform.
A lot of the nostalgia in this thread isn't so much for the technologies of years past. It's for an internet that was just for us nerds, without the regular people participating.