Hacker News Reader

Those criteria are so vague that they could apply to all technologies; or none of them. What separates a tech from another, who's considered to be a enthusiast and who isn't, what is traction and when is it mainstream, at what point does a pile of money stop being insignificant, ...

The Web & Netscape? At least, this is the pattern we're trying to copy with Matrix & New Vector. (Minus the AOL bit :/)

I think you could argue that the is the story of many popular open source projects that were developed first by employees of large companies: React, Go, JavaScript, TensorFlow come to mind.

WordPress itself.

The internet itself?