Precisely this. The Internet was born out of the dreams and efforts of many nerdy people who had no reason to do it other than it could be done, and nobody had done it before.

That reasoning drove the majority of computer technology progress during the 1980s and 1990s. It wasn't until AFTER the birth of the World Wide Web did mainstream businesses start to really look at monetizing this new market, and in a symbiotic way hackers and nerds and geeks started crowing about altruistic philosophies like decentralization and how information "wants" to be free.