I’d venture to say we never did need companies to do this stuff. The big companies you think of, Reddit, Facebook, YouTube, all started out as small startups running on a server stack in a basement. The golden age of the Internet was founded on passion projects running on used enterprise hardware. We have always had the capability to run social media sites or video streaming platforms, but as popular sites grew into the companies we know today we centralized and outsourced web management to them. Additionally, as the internet’s userbase expanded to the general public there was a loss of tech-savvy that used to be a prerequisite to being online. Folks don’t need to know a lick of code or even basics of how an operating system works to browse the internet, so naturally these masses think that the internet has somehow always been dominated by a few mega-corporations.

Decentralization, development of FOSS alternatives, and making alternative web platforms is not an evolution for the internet, but rather we are returning to our roots.