> The early web died. The problem was solved by killing it and replacing it with big institutions.

During the 80's and early 90's, there were tens of thousands of BBS systems. Those disappeared with the advent of the Web:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/11/the-l...

Most of the dominant platforms today have only existed for less then 20 years. That's... only yesteryear. There's absolutely zero guarantee that they will be around for another 10, 20 or 30 years.

Why? Because it's par for the course for empires to come and go. Ma Bell had an absolute monopoly on a telephone network in the U.S. until they got broken up in 1982. That happened. Few large corporations are over 100 years old, and even so, they aren't the same they were back in the day.

The Internet still consists of the same basic building blocks and technology as it did 10, 20 or 30 years ago. TCP/IP, UDP,... Beyond your wireless access point, it's all just fiber and UTP spanning the globe. Oh, and data centers with racks of computers to linked one another. Beyond computing power and other trappings, it's all conceptually not that different from what it has always been.

I've always found it a strange how we have been myopically staring at FAANG companies in the Valley over the past 20-30 years. You know how that has come to be? Damn excellent marketing on their part. That's all it ever was.We all know it, but we don't really admit to it. And so we laud them as these powers of nature that you can't get around. Even though they are anything but, really.

For all intents and purposes, large swathes of the Internet and the Web are dark, but they are very much there. For instance, there is more then just English in the world. The Web in Asia looks radically different, beyond what Baidu or Alibaba offer.

Sure, the early web has died. But neither do you find 19th century newspapers or obscure popular literature in modern bookstores. You'd got to a library or an archive for those. We have the Internet Archive for good reason.

What hasn't died is the technology and the basic ideas of that era. Those are very much alive in small communities all over the Internet. And that's totally valid and in no way inferior to what large platforms offer.

Yelling that "x has died" and "the problem was solved", well, no, that's a very simplistic take on reality. If something works perfectly for someone, well, why do you forcefully imply that what they want is without value and thus a waste of time? Por que no los dos, right?

As too FAANG, ask yourself this: When they publish reports about their numbers of users, how much of those represent actual use of those platforms? How many accounts are truly dead and unused? How many people are really using Twitter on a daily basis for hours on end and aren't just hopping all over the place? Why would we accept those reports at face value? Because they are valued billions of $?

Remember, it's all about keeping the music playing and the party going. And today's "big instutions" aren't the first DJ's at the decks, nor will they be the last. History always catches up in the end.

And meanwhile, others will always do their own thing, write code, build cool things and invent new ways of communicating.