> I'm still not convinced that would have helped maintain a decentralized web. For one thing, such tools existed very early on.
HTML editors with FTP support were quite common, yes. As well as free hosting, though my memory is spotty regarding how user friendly ISP hosting was specifically. I came online in the late 90s, so I missed this early era, and I don't remember my ISP offering this service.
Regardless, these services and software came after the functionality of the web was already established (Prodigy, 1994; Geocities, 1994; FrontPage, 1995; Dreamweaver, 1997). They were essentially a response to a demand for features the web didn't natively have. By that point Mosaic was the most popular browser, and Netscape and IE were starting to dominate. The idea that the web was a read-only medium meant for consumption had already gained momentum. Even back then relatively few people bothered to figure out how to build their own site. Many non-technical people did, and these services and software did help, but by and large most users were consumers.
> I simply think the number of people who are interested in typing more than a paragraph or two at a time is quite limited.
The current state of the web negates this opinion. Most people do indeed want to share their thoughts and ideas. Social media platforms were created essentially to enable everyone to communicate, to publish and discover content, regardless of their technical knowledge. A _ton_ of content is created by non-technical users, which now vastly dominates the content available on the web. Think only of the millions of hours of video uploaded to YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, etc.
So it's not that people aren't interested in creating content, but that the only places they can easily do so is on platforms created and maintained by large companies.
I'm not saying that we might not have needed centralized services of this kind even if we had native web publishing from the start. But imagine if the software used to access the web had the same simple UI as Twitter or Facebook, but instead of being a centralized service, it was available locally directly in the browser (or "publisher", or however we would've called it). That would've certainly reduced the friction to contribute, lowering the need for 3rd party services and software to be created for filling that void, and the web would've evolved much differently.
Perhaps we would've invented P2P protocols like BitTorrent much earlier, to address the need of sharing large volumes of data. Perhaps the demand for higher connection speeds would've accelerated the migration to broadband. Who knows, and we can only speculate at this point.
> Aside from reliability, security, dynamic IPs, and cranky ISPs, there are no barriers to self-hosting today.
I disagree. It's still largely a task for technical users. A non-technical person would still struggle to setup their own web server that serves their own content, despite how ubiquitous cloud hosting providers are, and how user friendly web servers have become (Caddy et al.). Doing that on their home networks is even more challenging, because of the issues you mentioned. User friendly web serving software and network infrastructure is uncommon precisely because there's no demand for it, because the problem is solved by large companies. It's a chicken and egg scenario.
> While a simple tool would revolutionize the lives for those people, I'm going to stick by my doubts about it revolutionizing the web.
Yeah, I don't think there's a chance anything will change now. That ship has already sailed. The decentralized movement is much larger today than it's ever been, yet decentralized services are only used by a very niche group of internet users. I don't think that architecture will ever replace the existing web. I just wish we would've enabled and educated users from the start that the web is a collaborative medium, not one controlled by corporate interest. At least I think that was TBL's vision, which he's now trying to realize with Solid. I wish them and projects like it the best of luck, but I think it's too little and too late to undo the mistake.
Cheers for the discussion! :)