> The other reason the author misses - the internet was a much smaller place. A personal website or forum would be seen by a large percentage of the internet. The "indie" web was the web. (Drop the "indie".) Now you have to go live on a platform and be an ephemeral engagement sink.

Some of this might just be demographic shifts, i.e. "normal" people using the internet more. The people who are on the internet now would likely never have been interested in reading some indie blog, they just weren't online in 2000.

I could be wrong, but I suspect the absolute number of people who read this blog today is larger than it would have been in 2000, just in a smaller corner of the internet.