i think where The Web started to go wrong was when your ISP stopped offering 5 megabytes of free space on their servers, where you uploaded files to public_html on their FTP server, and they would show up on http://members.example.org/~atax1a. rather than closing that off, things should have gone towards allowing you to upload small CGIs under cgi-bin and have them show up under /~atax1a/cgi-bin
So much of the blame for the de-liberation of the web has been placed at the feet of social media and the startup economy, and certainly much of that has been deserved.
But not enough fingers have been pointed at the sheer greed of ISPs, which have consistently cut off every single method for practical self-hosting, so they could extract extra rent on your connection.
Which is to say, ditto, but also the point where you stopped being able to plug your old tower into the wall and fire up Apache.
We've lost so much and we didn't even notice.
this is part of why I've been thinking about wireless mesh networks and peer to peer stuff lately. you can't route all of the traffic on the 'net over it, not with today's hardware, but you could route personal stuff.
both subfields of it seem 5y away at fastest, but maybe there just aren't enough people thinking about ways to reuse past things we now have the hardware for
