Or just let the whole middleman as a service industry keep rotting, and direct your technical energy towards rebuilding services on distributed technologies that won't succumb to the whims of the status quo power structure. What made the Internet great was being an unregulated frontier, and we can see that everywhere the legacy system jams its tentacles ends up turning to commercialized milquetoast shit.

Power is important, but without economics, it's just an academic research project/network.

Yeah, that made the Internet great in the beginning, and there are projects that don't depend on being "monetized", such as the OG hardcore F/OSS ones (GNU, Debian, KDE/Gnome, CCC, Wikipedia) and their ideological offspring (peertube, mastodon, matrix.org, blender).

But the average user doesn't care and doesn't understand the importance of having a free as in "as independent from the powers that be as possible" platforms.

The "average user" of 20 years ago was watching TV news, TV entertainment, and choosing their goods from what their local stores decided to carry. Similar arguments were made about how they wouldn't want to do a bunch of technical stuff, yet today digital technology is just part of everyday life. If the middleman as a service industry could have held itself to ~2010 levels of intrusiveness, then I'd say perhaps there might not be enough of an advantage to pull people into newer technologies. Alas, every bit of top-down meddling seems to beget even more top-down meddling, as the powermongers discover that the nouveau middlemen can be pressured just as easily as the old set.

> ... yet today digital technology is just part of everyday life.

In the dumbed down form. TV 2.0 (Netflix), grocery 2.0 (Amazon), news 2.0 (whatever YouTube/FB/twitter recommends).

The same people who did not care about stepping outside their comfort zone to get a bit more out of those aspects of life still don't do. (And sure, on one hand it's completely understandable, many people don't have the need, ability, resources and time (the good old privilege) to even do so; and ... there's no other hand, even if we know long term being closed in a walled garden will lead to problems, it's hard to make people understand it when they are inside.)