Static content, sure. But what about a dynamic site that gains a lot of popularity? Think someone making a reddit knockoff back when the reddit's main source code was open. It could be set up and maintained in a single person's spare time, but if the site got popular, the server power needed to maintain it would get astronomical for a single person.
> Nah, I just remember what it used to be like.
A lot of "what it used to be like" worked because the Internet had a much smaller audience. In the late '90s and early '00s, social media barely existed at all. There was a time when most of the people online were techies, now everyone with a phone made within the last 10 years has access to the Internet.
Each site doesn't need to be all sites if you're not trying to capture an audience for moat-building and data collection. A lot of stuff that's not popular now, like federation or identity services not tied to advertisers (that one Mozilla had, for instance) providing unified multi-site login would be more popular, necessarily, without ads subsidizing free-but-spying options.
Just speculating, but reddit would probably be replaced by several sites (hundreds of popular ones, perhaps, thousands of less popular ones), many of which might permit login or shared feeds or something via the aforementioned means. RSS is still a thing, for that matter. You can also get by with much leaner sites even without going as far into old-school territory as HN and Craigslist, when you're not chasing marketing fads and adding tons of tracking JS and all kinds of other junk, so payload sizes don't need to be as large as they are.
And again, protocols could evolve. Something new similar to IPFS (though probably not actually IPFS) might reach production-ready status fast if there were a real need to distribute load. There are half-formed solutions to a lot of this waiting in the wings, just without much interest outside people who are into them for their own sake, because there's no audience for a somewhat-worse, much-less-addictive, spyware-free Facebook or Twitter, for instance. Community-driven alternatives have a nigh-hopeless battle while they're up against a money-spigot of ad dollars. Lots of developers who might help out with them don't, for that reason.
I mean hell chat was pretty decent and kinda mostly open for a while, but now it's fragmented into private services again, driven largely by the data-hoarders. Less open than even the AIM/ICQ days. Google's trying to do the same thing to email and the Web itself, largely in the name of "saving" them. Take away the ad dollars, the demand will shift away as those services shutter or start charging money, and open standards and enthusiast sites will take back over. Governments, in some cases, maybe (maps/navigation seems like a good one). No apocalypse, just a hiccup. Except for the dragnet spying companies.
> Nah, I just remember what it used to be like.
A lot of "what it used to be like" worked because the Internet had a much smaller audience. In the late '90s and early '00s, social media barely existed at all. There was a time when most of the people online were techies, now everyone with a phone made within the last 10 years has access to the Internet.