Yes, this is exactly my hope too. Many hacker/cypherpunk ideas failed or never reached wide adoption because they were just too complicated for regular people: GPG/web of trust, self-hosting websites and email, having your own custom software for personal tasks…

Instead, everybody ended up using Gmail, iMessage/WhatsApp, and Facebook, and things are as centralized as they can be.

Agents could be a force in breaking that trend. Even if inference stays centralized, the artifacts agents create would not be. Basically the difference between everybody renting from one of a handful apartment building mega corps or being able to hire contractors to build your own things according to your ideas.

And just like there, it’ll probably help a lot to know a bit about how the sausage is made to not be taken advantage of. Also, many people will probably always continue to rent, which is fine. But the possibility of agent competition alone will hopefully keep centralized platforms and SaaS offerings on their toes, which is good for their users.

The problem is not website, the problem is discovery and discovery is on Instagram, TikTok, and social networks. You don't have any incentive to build a website for a regular audience. What you might do is build an audience on a social network and then try to move them to a website.

But at that point you're big enough to build it properly.

You can always follow the POSSE pattern [1] (except for platforms that actively punish links to your own site of course). That way you get both the reach and remain independent in terms of content moderation.

[1] https://www.citationneeded.news/posse/

> things are as centralized as they can be.

Interesting evolution:

1980s and before - Centralized computers, thin clients & terminals

1990s - Decentralized computing - rich clients running native code locally, data lives locally, making use of the network for necessary communication (e.g. email, IM)

Present day - Entirely centralized data, compute outsourced from companies to 'Public Clouds', bloated clients running JavaScript locally, but mostly without local storage besides cached copies of data.

I wonder what path the next phase will take.

I suppose it might be one of those things that just oscillate in society, since neither extreme is without frustrations. And as soon as the generation most familiar with the specific downsides of either extreme steps aside, the cycle of history repeats.