> Asking ever day users to create a site (buy a DNS and all that) and create a FOAF file and host it is kind of ridiculous.

You're describing a 2nd order effect created by behavioral dynamics all underpinned by the same core concept: ownership.

Your experience of usability, discovery, security, performance,... is entirely determined by the affordances of the tools you're using. And your level of control over those affordances is pretty much determined by the extent of your ownership over those tools.

If you use social media, you don't own the tools & infrastructure that host your data, including your social graph. You're basically a tenant on the lands of a liege lord and you pay by disclosing every aspect of your behavior to your lord.

Relying on cloud services is marginally better. Freedom comes at a cost. Leasing a VPS or shared hosting space, you're not bound to the strict terms & conditions of social media platforms. However, you're still a tenant to your hosting provider. Some people still don't like that. For one, the provider could go dark (go out of business, etc.) and you lose control over your data.

You could take it up a notch and lease a physical server in a data center. But that would still make you a tenant. Owning the physical hardware would get you even more freedom and control over your machine. But you don't control the data center. That's when you start to enter the realm of purists among the self-hosted community: self-hosting a physical server at home and leasing an IP address from your ISP.

Of course, every day users aren't interested in creating a website. But the vast majority of humanity didn't have a significant footprint online some 15 years ago either.

Billions suddenly started using the Internet/Web in earnest because social media made it extremely easy to connect and publish to wide audience at virtually no financial expense.

However, there's no free lunch. Never was. Someone pays the bills to keep the lights on. And those who pay, well, they hold the governance of those tools. And this includes how everything ranging from advertising to the algorithm that selects the types of information it's going to push in your eyeballs.

You have the right to pursue freedom, privacy, security, performance,... but you're not entitled to them. They come at a price. Either by doing the effort and actually doing everything yourself; or by paying someone to do it for you.

The promise of semantic web technology is that it preserves interoperability between data sources without having the condition that you need to host your data on a platform you do not own.

However, semantic web technology did not promise to solve the overall problem of ownership over hosting and publishing tools. This actually being a compounded problem which consists of the problem of intellectual property (open source), knowledge (learning how to code takes time and effort), scarcity of resources (hardware, electricity, physical security,... all costs moneys).

By and large, over the past 30 years a ton has improved. Unless you're a self-hosting purist, anyone can host their own website for 50$-100$ a year using popular VPS providers; reducing the problem largely to a matter of lack of technological knowledge on the part of the average user.

Then again, the vast majority of humanity uses social media not because there's an actual need to do so; but simply because it's there. Consider that asserting that people using social media equates "progress", may actually also just be hindsight bias. But that's another discussion.