I feel like the tail-end of Web 1.0 (generally decentralised protocols/processes) with broadband speeds was really a golden age, peaking around the early to mid 2000s. Once the Web 2.0 train arrived, centralisation into large corps that could do arbitrary cancellations (whether it's locking you out of your Google or Oculus accounts, or getting removed from Twitter or Spotify) really just made the web a lot less interesting for information discovery and sharing.
Blockchain aside, I do find it amusing that we can basically go back to 2005 tools to avoid some of this accelerating authoritarianism. Rip podcasts to MP3s, torrent or email them around. Same with movies, video clips, etc. Sure, mass distribution becomes less instant, but nobody can argue that Doom wasn't popular when it was released just because it wasn't on Steam or whatever.
Blockchain aside, I do find it amusing that we can basically go back to 2005 tools to avoid some of this accelerating authoritarianism. Rip podcasts to MP3s, torrent or email them around. Same with movies, video clips, etc. Sure, mass distribution becomes less instant, but nobody can argue that Doom wasn't popular when it was released just because it wasn't on Steam or whatever.