> That sense of ownership has been lost. Now corporations own everything. Nobody wants a domain, they want a @name on some social media platform. Nobody wants their own website, they want to post on social media.

I don't think the self-hosting people with their own domains ever went away. They're all still out there.

The difference is that the internet isn't just for those people any more. Everyone is online, and the average person has no intention of learning how to host and maintain and design their own website when they can just as easily post the same content on an easy to use platform.

A lot of the nostalgia in this thread isn't so much for the technologies of years past. It's for an internet that was just for us nerds, without the regular people participating.

> A lot of the nostalgia in this thread isn't so much for the technologies of years past. It's for an internet that was just for us nerds, without the regular people participating.

Pretty much. It’s painful to watch the mass commodification of a technology you love, but that’s how the world advances.

A lot of what used to happen was a form of altruism. You had to be willing to give up time, money, and hardware to dedicate running many of these tings. That works if you are getting along with everyone. But once you get a 'troll', or some demanding person, or need money because lost job, etc that altruism wears extremely thin. So outsourcing it to some other company to pay, for and keep the software up to date is extremely alluring. There are still people willing to do it. But they will come and go but mostly 'go'. But if you think about it, it makes sense. Someone new coming in is not going to pick up 20+ year old BBS software unless they really want that. They are going to rock onto existing platform and start there. Then in 10 years their members will realize 'if you dont own it you are renting it, if you are renting it you are at the whim of the owner'.

A mix of both. When I see a Medium post by a programmer I feel sad.

I am pretty sure a lot of people want their own website and domain.

It's just that a lot more inconvenient to have and manage one for most people.

The subjective reward has gone down though: back in the days of webrings and the visit counter gif cgi, writing some content and then maybe fill in one or two "under construction" placeholders some months later you could easily delude yourself that you were on track to an amazing future. Perhaps not altavista.digital.com amazing, but maybe becoming something like a respected resource in your niche of a niche. Today there are so many lower hanging fruits luring from inside the walled gardens...

cgNAT is going to go away, even for the rare ISPs that use it, as more connections become IPv6-only.