I agree with the sentiment of the writer. Unfortunately I don't see much of a solution offered in the statement.
The biggest obstacle is not only eas of use. Companies as FB, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google etc solve also other problems, they also select and filter information for you. They don't do it flawlessly, but still do quit a good job. One so far nobody else offers, because they are first movers in the space and now own the biggest networks.
Unfortunately their big centralized systems also creates the danger that comes with any big centralized source of information. There are always people that want it to put to good use for noble goals. And as it the human condition all power corrupts.
So in my opinion it is never good to concentrate too much power in the hands of too few people. It does not really matter if it is big government or big business. It will always start working for conformity and limit free speech.
We already see this totalitarian nature in the censorship around Covid information. It started as a way to surpress legitimate misinformation. But it is now actually preventing and surpressing new research that challanges current medical dogmas. Big tech, is like big government. It just does not work that well, is risk averse and is favouring stability over inovation.
The question then is, how can we revitalize the old decentralized web ideal, with all it's free information published for all individuals? The old web only solved standardization of content with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. It did not solve relationships and privacy between people.
Now has the time come to work on standards that connect people. To build networks of friends and to build trust networks like all social media now already does.
Technology is also still improving. While all people can't type more stories, they only have each aimited amount of time for doing that, computers keep getting faster and faster, storage is keep getting cheaper and cheaper. So computer power is becoming a commodity with less and less value. Every day, it gets easier and cheaper to host data and search it.
Web space is cheap, so take Twitter, is it really that hard to publish a Twitter feed in a JSON file, use encryption to allow friends access to your feed data and publish that all on your own rented space that you fully control? Is it that hard to rank your own friends tweets in your own feed that runs on your rented computer power?
Advertisment as financing the computer rent is an option as well. Third parties can build services on top of the standardized data sets. Except that they can not lock you in, as it is your data. They just unlock it by providing search and filtering services while also include ads to make some bucks.
This open technology could also benefit existing alternative social networks, because it creates the needed network effect they need. Because by letting smaller parties work together without even knowing or agreeing with each other. Nobody controlls the network as everybody owns his own dataset. But can still connect to all other people who use the same data standard.
What is keeping us from building something like this? What am I missing?