Except now if you say things that a group doesn’t like you just get ddosed out of existence.

That's me in a nutshell. I've built a regular audience for my writing over the years. As the author suggests though, it might be a good idea to have a mirror.

Paying helps, but even then, they are usually terms against abusive behavior. It seems that what constitutes abuse reduces as you go up the chain (for example: perhaps a social network forbids false information and worse, perhaps a hosted CMS forbids hate speech and worse, perhaps a VPS/colo/residential forbids only very illegal activity) but it's always there to some extent. Maybe it's about human abuse and maybe it's about technical/network abuse, but there is something forbidden.

Is it possible (not feasible, but possible) to put something on the internet that relies on nobody else at all?

But most of them are easily replaced if they go bad. Even domains are of course technically rented, but your own domain is among the most stable identifiers we have on the internet - people owning domains over decades is commonplace.

If my domain registrar, my DNS provider, my hosting company, ... go "bad" I can just move and my readers won't notice. Even if you are on hosted wordpress etc, you can archive your site as is and move, preserving the URLs. That's not the case with Medium etc where your content lives under their domain.

It always comes back to capital, sure. Technically your ISP could disappear tomorrow, or your region's power could go out. _Then what?_ There's always some bit of internet infrastructure you don't own or that necessitates money. But infrastructure is different. As long as you pay (and aren't doing anything particularly illegal), your server will probably continue to exist. And if not, you just buy or rent a computer in a different data center, or even set up a server on a spare computer at home. But you're much less likely to have your hosting provider pull sketchy Medium-style nonsense than, well, Medium.