[dwd]

Early on, people (in the US) signed up to companies like Compuserve or AOL which were walled gardens much like Facebook with a "there be dragons" type warning if you chose to venture out into the "real" Internet.

At this point communities sprung up, and were (if lucky) found and hand-indexed by Yahoo or they banded together via web-links.

We then got communities of communities beginning with GeoCities and then MySpace.

It wasn't until Facebook that everyone's personal page looked identical to everyone else's, and surprisingly everyone seemed to like that.

At some point, maybe we'll go back to rolling own own communities, but I doubt it. Security considerations and the constant attacks by scripts/botnets, not to mention data loss and privacy breach legislation, have made the Internet very unfriendly to non-corporates: Ttoo much work and stress.

As far as corporates railroading us: Government legislation is the biggest bar to entry and only necessary because corporates forced everyone to use real identities: where back in the good old days "On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog".