What happened in between is that the Multi-Billion startup guys took over.
Now the web is the place for yet another pizza delivery startup with a super slick frontend. Websites are made industrially mainly to sell. All the big platforms took over. There is no place anymore for small self-hosted websites (or at least those are extremely rare)
Call me cynical, which is probably true, but I remember the time when the web was the playground of the geeks. Now it feels like it became the playground of business majors.
About 140,000 websites are added to the internet every day, though.
Are you sure it's actually true that most of those sites are multi-billion dollar startups with super-slick frontends and that almost no one makes self-hosted sites anymore, or is it more likely that the web has gotten large enough that non-commercial, non SEO-driven sites are simply harder to notice?
The "big platforms" are still a rounding error in terms of the total content on the web.
The web isn't like old network television where there are a limited number of channels and limited number of slots for content. It hasn't moved from being the playground of geeks to business majors, but the playground of geeks to everyone, including, yes, the business majors.
Now the web is the place for yet another pizza delivery startup with a super slick frontend. Websites are made industrially mainly to sell. All the big platforms took over. There is no place anymore for small self-hosted websites (or at least those are extremely rare)
Call me cynical, which is probably true, but I remember the time when the web was the playground of the geeks. Now it feels like it became the playground of business majors.