I wouldn't say "less populated". This phrasing yields vast green pastures and the odd pioneer who could just drive a stake anywhere and claim acres upon an acres for themselves.

I don't think that's a correct comparison. The Web isn't a physical commons that suddenly got crowded. It's a mesh of hypertext and interlinked pages that just keeps expanding infinitely in all directions.

How information gets linked is a reflection of our collective mental model. The crux then is to control or influence where links are pointing to. Creating a hyperlink is arguably the most powerful thing you can do on the Web.

Hence why true walled gardens such Facebook, Twitter, Instagram,... discourage adding links to your content. The shoddy way to add a link in a comment (if possible) is totally intentional.

Then there's the fact that in the past decade billions have started using social media to publish their thoughts. But then you have to consider that those same billions never truly left those walled gardens. It's like they entered the theater but keep lingering forever in the foyer.

This isn't bad in itself... unless you start to consider that all content is equal and turn this into a zero sum game: you either move towards social media, or you publish your content on your own domain.

If you're a small commercial venture, arguably there's little point in investing in a 200k$ website and you're better off starting a FB page. There's nothing wrong with that. Conversely, you might derive a lot of value from publishing on your own self-hosted personal blog if that's what you're into.

Which brings me to this:

> So you start a self-owned blog in 2020. The only way to direct traffic to it is to also post on all the other walled gardens, because that's where the people are. That sounds like a lot of addtional work just to get eyeballs on a page.

This depends entirely on how you define your own success parameters and why you want to start a blog in the first place. If your blog is meant to promote products or services, then it stands to reason that you want to drive as much traffic as possible. A blog might not be the right channel for you.

If your only interested in modestly sharing a creative streak, driving traffic likely won't be your primary goal. You might already be content if 10 people see that picture you posted and 1 person makes a nice comment.

The strategy you describe is called POSSE: https://indieweb.org/POSSE

It worked out well for a while, but those same walled gardens have gradually closed their API's over time. For instance, it used to be that WordPress allowed you to cross post links of your blogposts to your personal profile. This isn't possible anymore. (https://jetpack.com/support/publicize/facebook/)

Such actions tell us a whole lot about those walled gardens and how their policies create a divide between the Web of hyperlinked pages at a large; and the limited "small web" they have created between their own walls.

The irony is that the walled gardens are build on Large Web technologies. Sure enough, they detest the open nature of URL's and hyperlinking, but they can't easily get rid of them because they are foundational to how everything works.

That's where you see how Google is leveraging it's dominance in the browser market and search market. For instance, by stopping to show the http and www prefix in the address bar. Or by not showing a proper URL in the search results. Or by pushing it's AMP technology. The goal then isn't directly to get rid of URL's immediately, but to play the long game and see they can assert control over how content gets published and linked in the long run.

My point then is that self hosting your content and curating your own links is the most powerful act you can do on the Web in 2020. Because that's a token of your own independence or freedom which you can never really have when you relegate yourself to a walled garden.

(Also, I think Reddit has been an outlier for a very long time because they actually make it very easy to post links and use links in content. However, their walled garden nature is asserted when you're on a mobile platform, as they aggressively push the use of their own app over a mobile browser.)