Thank you Manu for a great reasoning why the web as we know it is still alive and kicking!

The web is not dying. The web is huge. The web is ever-expanding. The fact that the web is just the same 5 big websites is a fucking lie. It’s like saying the restaurant industry is the same 5 fast food chains. It is not. It’s up to you to decide to stop visiting those 5 sites and stop ingesting their fast food content.

Add to that what danah boyd writes in her newsletter and the spot-on comment to it

Can someone help me unpack a puzzle? I keep hearing AI pundits talk about how this is like 1999 with the internet. They mean this positively, focusing on all of the startups and energy on the cusp before the population writ large really appreciates all of the value of the internet. The thing that has me scratching my head is that this comparison seems to ignore that there was a complete and utter economic collapse of the tech industry in 2000/2001. So why are the business types not dreaming of 1996?

[…]I think the reason why it’s not 1996 is because the mid-90s were about as much noncommercial expansion of the web as the commercial side, while the most easily-reachable parts of the web had become dominated by market interests a few years later.