Some initial thoughts: no pay walls, no ads, no pop ups and transparent identities.
In what ways is the current path deviating or coalescing to the ideal vision?
We would have powerful APIs built in for things like distributed hash tables, and talking to certificate and domainless devices by their public key instead of a URL, like what FlyWeb would have been.
We would have a standardised and very easy to work with abstraction for what "An account" looks like, which to a user would probably be something like a WebDAV storage space plus a SyncThing-like replication protocol for redundancy plus a distributed MQTT-like messaging system.
Content wise:
You can keep the ads, the tracking, and whatever, just please make endless scrolling and algorithm curation go away.
It's fine for social media news feeds I guess but horrible elsewhere.
We need to be looking at old forums and what they did right, and looking at how we can capture what made old personal sites special without having to actually run a site.
I'm imagining a forum where everyone's initial post has rich theming possibilities, Wiki style linking to your other posts, tagging and heirarchal organization so you can easily browse everything a specific user did, and easy zip file import/export so you can take your content elsewhere if needed.
There is probably an overall cultural problem with it but it feels more difficult today to actually be informed.
Part of it is that there is the power structures whom hold knowledge. Either in a classical sense (universities, libraries, journalism), or through more recent companies which own either knowledge communities themselves, or _access_ to knowledge.
The other part of it is individuals treating information as entertainment. This probably isn't inherently a problem (learning should be fun), but it becomes an echo chamber of popularity based on half truths and trust based on upvotes rather than content.
A better web would allow users to learn, engage, interact, and grow with others. It seems like the more content out there the less information is actually available.
The problem with the internet isn't the internet. It's the humans. You can't fix that by fixing the technology.