by stego-tech | 2025-06-27 17:36:49+00:00
It's not dead, but it is changing in a way I both vehemently disagree with, but also feel is indicative of a wider societal upheaval that nobody seems to want to discuss here in any serious capacity.

The early internet (pre-1995 or so) required a lot of knowledge to utilize. You had to know how to configure your modem, which area codes were local calls, how to install and configure a web browser, how URLs worked, how connectivity to different services might function, etc. As a result, the early web was populated with societal "outcasts" of a sort, people who found a vast and empty digital space that, with some elbow grease and a bit of learning, could be turned into a garden of their own. This was a "peak" hobbyist cycle, before the dot-com bubble when experimentation was encouraged and affordable, albeit not fiscally rewarding in many cases. It was, in essence, a passion project.

Starting with Web 2.0, the movement toward centralization started in earnest. IRC networks and instant messengers with open client specs were replaced with social media sites and centralized messaging. This briefly fostered another "peak", with RSS feeds and self-hosting taking off as compute became cheap and bandwidth affordable. However, both of these are antithetical to the goal of Capital at the time, which was centralization through walled gardens, disconnected services, and user isolation, and thus were gradually stripped out by leadership or stakeholders as a means to boost their bottom lines.

Also around the time of Web 2.0 was the pinnacle of the Open Source movement. Thousands of projects reached maturity simultaneously, enabling fantastic new approaches to server architecture and software design. These were embraced by for-profit companies, and many (but not all) contributed back to the projects in code or capital to drive more innovation. This in turn drove more experimentation, more projects, and more hobbyist innovations.

Starting in the 2010s though, we begin to see the splintering of the web into two divisive camps: the world of entrenched megacorps and Big Tech, flush with capital from VCs or revenue and built atop Open Source; and the world of the "Natives", for lack of a better term, people who understood how the internet worked, who saw value in decentralization and open access. These two camps remained initial allies, but gradually developed hostilities as it became clear that one side wanted to extinguish the other outright and seize the digital territory for themselves alone.

That brings us to "web 3" and the modern era. Hobbyist technology isn't dead, but the outsized impact of Big Tech and captured Government Bodies has shoved such hobbyist efforts further and further into the dark. The "digital supply chain" garbage fabricated by Big Tech and Consultant companies has effectively forced all the blame for flaws onto the very same Open Source projects these companies created value from but never contributed back to, in an attempt to extinguish further development so that they can retain their moat over potential startups or competitors. The Open Source devs who supported these passion projects are leaving the field, either from burnout, the need for gainful employment, or just retiring in general, which narrows the field further. Young people aren't taking over not because they're addicted to social media (but make no mistake, social media is a problem), but because it's hard enough to find a job that can pay the rent, nevermind allow them the free time to contribute to Open Source regularly.

The internet of today is essentially a battlefield of monied interests attempting to kill off the very projects that enabled their success in the first place, and hobbyists are losing ground. AI slop infects and poisons search results, reducing onramps into Open Source projects or technology in general. A deluge of products and languages, each targeting specific use cases or paradigms, leads to choice paralysis when bootstrapping new projects (or infighting when new contributors want to change how things are done, e.g. Linux's Rust debate). Objectively good tools like Kubernetes are only really functional when managed by said corporate entity, and a PITA to run yourself - far harder and more complex than propping up ye olde Apache box and IRC daemon in the 2000s, and for minimal gains for hobbyists. Corporations refuse to contribute back their source code improvements, because that's their edge over the competition. And none of that really touches the social aspect of depressed wages, increased unemployment, longer working hours, higher costs of living, and employment precarity that further poisons the talent well for hobbyist tech, or government regulations that favor Capital interests over citizens.

Arriving back at where I started this post: the hobbyist internet and tech isn't dead yet. There's still really cool projects out there, made by passionate people who just want to share that neat thing they made and help others. Unfortunately, we're fighting a losing battle against entities that would rather see only those with money and acceptable speech/positions be allowed online at all, and that's not a fight we can win solely by being online.