While I agree this is true today, people also didn't know they wanted cars or smartphones until good implementations were made. Smartphones existed for many years but were niche before the iPhone. We as an industry have thus far completely failed to show the value of self hosting.
People just don't need or want this. Facebook has a network effect and shows you all your friends' posts. Having to visit fifty personal sites would be a pain.
Which is why RSS (and Atom, but I’m just saying RSS because it’s less to type) was such a brilliant invention, and also why it was “killed.”
Everyone is talking about things like “ActivityPub” and “interoperability” and “personalized algorithms” nowadays but RSS supported many of those features twenty years ago.
Yeah, it didn’t solve the account portability problem (you’d still need a separate account for each forum and blog you wanted to comment on; OpenID almost solved this issue but was a nightmare to work with, Mozilla Persona (which is not the same thing as Mozilla Personas, wow that company is bad at naming things) would have definitely solved this issue if that company had spent more than twenty minutes promoting it), but it did solve the actual fundamental issue that most people seem to be getting at with these modern systems: it offered a way to collate and display updates from a wide variety of mutually incompatible Internet sources all together in one place.
It’s an incredible simple pitch, even to non-technical people: display your YouTube subscriptions, Twitter follows, blogs you’re interested in, and news sites that you read all in one place, in software that you control.
The problem is that operating a “platform” rather than a website got to be too profitable, and suddenly the goal shifted from serving useful content to make you want to come back to a site to serving enough content that you never want to leave to begin with. Many people believe that if Google had made Reader the center of their social strategy rather than killing it to pursue a short-sighted attempt to compete directly with Facebook, we could be looking at a much healthier Internet today (and Google probably could be earning a lot more money than they currently are, considering the abysmal adoption rate of modern Google services is often argued to be directly linked to fear of shutdown).[1]
Personal websites died for the mainstream because Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram offered a better interface for the average consumer. But they could be brought back by a system that made the good parts of those sites interoperable. Frankly, this is the kind of thing that I want to see Mozilla pursuing again, not...whatever the heck they’re doing now. (You go their website and they’re selling Pocket, which is basically a bad centralized version of what I’m talking about; a rebadged VPN service; an email alias service; and Firefox. What happened to the people who tried to do things like Persona?)
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/23778253/google-reader-death-2013-r...
RSS is read-only, ActivityPub allows back-and-forth interaction between servers. The two are not comparable.
Like if you ask a cashier at McDonald’s, will they have any clue what you’re talking about?
Walk into an office. Ask the receptionist, are they going to care at all?
Do commenters on hacker news ever have conversations with the bulk of humanity in order to have any perspective?