The web is still open and distributed. Its just that everyone decided to concentrate in a few areas (reddit, twitter, Facebook, etc) and the thing that excited us about the internet back in the day (the web) has become an ai generated, Chinese dropshipper ghost town or appified.

It doesn’t help that more popular websites all became the legacy ui for mobile apps.

I’m also saying this as someone who doesn’t really go to web forums or websites anymore and mostly uses apps for things since I’m on my phone a lot more than on a desktop or laptop when not at work.

I do go to web forums for my hobbies (brewing and growing things) but either those websites tried to optimize for mobile and became unusable on mobile or they haven’t optimized at all and its like reading text for ants.

And yes you can make your own website today but the signal to noise ratio of your single website among everything else out these makes the chances of anyone visiting you remarkably low.

It is what it is