I disagree. All is not lost, not by a long shot. In fact I wrote an article about exactly how to do it last year: https://cointelegraph.com/news/how-a-web-that-lost-its-way-c...

This is just how things work in the early stages before open source alternatives. Look at videoconferencing. Zoom grew a lot in the past couple months. Facebook got in the game. Now Google.

Large corporations running the infrastructure to connect us and mediate our interactions. This is how it’s been from the beginning. It’s the first stage. Like we had with America Online / MSN / Compuserve.

But eventually organizations want to host their own software and own their own brand, database, relationships and so on. Maybe customize the experience and integrate it into their website.

In fact the Web itself came and replaced AOL and others with an open protocol (HTTP) where anyone can permissionlessly set up their own domain and host their own website.

The Feudalism of rentseeking corporations has been replaced with a free market of hosting companies, and trillions of dollars in wealth were unleashed.

Today, Wordpress plays that role for Web 1.0 (publishing) powering 34% of all websites. But what is out there that will power even Web 2.0 ... namely all the social networking and interactions we have come to expect from Facebook, Google, Telegram etc.?

Web browsers already have all the front end capabilities including Web Push notifications and WebRTC videoconferencing and even PaymentRequest for payments etc.

There just needs to be a platform that lets people take ready-made components, like wordpress plugins, but Web 2.0 (chatrooms, events, etc.) that are all based around the same standardized unified core (user accounts, permissions, etc.) and are user friendly enough.

That’s basically an operating system. For example before MacOS/Windows developers all built their own buttons/menus/windows etc. Before UNIX people built their own file management etc.

These OSes standardized the layer 1 so developers can just use standard buttons and reason on higher layers. Developers of Photoshop for Windows did not have to implement custom menus and buttons. And because of the standardized components, the users across apps were used to a common language, they knew what buttons and menus did, and even if the app used a custom version it had to be close enough to be recognizable.

So in this same way we need a social operating system for the web. Like Wordpress for Web 2.0 — open source and let anyone build their own Facebook or Google Meet out of reusable components. Ideally the core should be all designed together, like BSD, so the underlying OS is a good extensive foundation and not a hodgepodge of components.

Ok. Hopefully you take the below as a “Show HN”

We built it over the last 10 years and we’re giving it away:

https://github.com/Qbix/Platform

We are still working on updating the documentation tob be as cool as for Angular and React. But it’s more than those frameworks. It includes a PHP backend with MySQL (pluggable) database support, with Node.js optional for websockets realtime updates and offline notifications to apple/google/chrome/firefox/etc. On the front end it has integrations with Cordova for releasing native apps in the store, such as https://yang2020.app

Just as an example if you wanted to build videoconferencing into your website, you would just do:

Q.Streams.WebRTC.start(options)

It’s as simple as that. And if you want to have a secure user signup, forgot password, account management you just do:

Q.Users.login(options)

If you wanted to have events and schedule videoconferencing for various apps you build (eg group dating or collaboration) you would use

Q.Calendars.addToCalendar()

Reusable tools are placed like this:
Q.activate(
Q.Tool.setUpElement(
element,
“Streams/chat”,
options
);
);

or with jQuery:

$(element).tool(name)
.activate(options)

You can have tools and subtools and pass options similar to React etc. Our goal is to build a growing ecosystem of well tesed reusable components that anyone can use, even if they are not very technical.
Check out the GitHub link. And especially the videos there. It’s totally free and open source. You can build something like Yang2020 in a day. We are using it for our clients, who want custom work done.

If you run into a snag or want to ask anything, just hit me up at greg at the domain qbix.com

Finally... if you are a PHP or JS developer, and want to contribute to the project, please first try to install it yourself and play with with it. (We have tutorials but we are making more.) And email me. We have lots of clients who want these custom online communities right now, and we are looking to equip developers in diff countries to build them using this platform.

Oh and last thing... it’s interoperable with everything else so you’re not locked in. You can take a wordpress site that uses React and drop a chatroom or videoconference in there and gradually start to build community features, an app in the store and reward people for inviting others etc.