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The reason the indi web hasn't taken off is because the masses don't care about that kind of content, and they never have. The people who are interested in home grown blogs are dwarfed by the masses that came online by way of billion dollar marketing budgets, driven by the business mechanics of dopamine farming. The indie web will always be relegated to nerds and eccentrics.

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Exactly this. And this is a good thing. Small communities have good properties that just don't scale.

And the people that want big communities generally want things that federated networkscan't offer (ie, no ability to be authoritive, gather enough attention to make money, transfer money). And because of government interference in such things no non-incorporated network will ever be able to provide those things. Attempts to cater to the masses is a waste of time.

The indieweb cannot, by definition, go mainstream.

I think, what is meant though, the generic Web has shifted the balance away from what once was diffuse to what is now consolidated. That personal connections could and would be monetised was not a given, but has become the norm rather than the exception. That people are retreating from the networks that enable that is not surprising.

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