(If we hit the stretch goal, we can upgrade to a raspberry pi!)
Said little sites may run for a bit and die, and the massive monolith remains, at least until another monolith replaces them.
I suspect in just a few more decades, we shall reinvent the 90s and 2000s p2p networks from first principles.
(EDIT: to clarify, I don't mean to build an alternative monopoly, I mean to build alternatives that are big enough to survive as a business, and big enough to be useful; A few million users as opposed to the few billions Facebook and Youtube (allegedly) have)
The reason it's hard to imagine such a thing today is because the tech giants have illegally suppressed competition for so long. If Google or Meta were ordered to break up, and Facebook/Youtube forced to try and survive as standalone businesses, all the weaknesses in their products would manifest as actual market consequences, creating opportunity for competitors to win market share. Anybody with basic coding skills or money to invest would be tripping over themselves to build competing products which actually focus on the things people want or need, because consumers will be able to choose the ones they like.
Even ignoring the adverse selection of who'd subscribe, their ARPU is higher than that in North America: https://www.statista.com/statistics/251328/facebooks-average...
We've tied our incentives to a structure which is not in alignment with continued survival. The real question is how can we incentivize ourselves to continue to exist?
The "the incentive structure says we should all destroy our brains" thing is just a small aspect of that.
> We've tied our incentives to a structure which is not in alignment with continued survival. The real question is how can we incentivize ourselves to continue to exist?
The continued survival of individuals or humanity as a whole? The individuals seem to survive OK, and arguably there's nothing that could convince them to prefer the survival of the amorphous group, save for some kind of brainwashing.
We shouldn't be optimizing for quarterly returns, but for the next ten thousand years.
The incentives would be those which have motivated people throughout history: to create something which benefits humanity.
Next, text only platforms are nice, but niche on the modern internet. People seem to love multimedia which takes tons of bandwidth/cpu.
Paid for services don't mean spam free either. If it's worth people to pay for, it's worth spammers paying to get in and spam.
Then you have all the questions on what happens if you grow, how do you deal with working with all the laws around the world, how do you deal with other legal issues.
Having a site/service of any size can quickly become an expensive mess.