[mindcrime]

What's the "early promise of the internet" to you?

That should probably be a whole separate post of its own! In fact, I'd encourage you, if you're interested, to consider writing up something on the topic and submit it as a new post. I think there's a lot to dig into with regards to what we all thought the "early promise of the Internet" was, and analyze it in terms of where we were wrong, where we've fallen short of the ideas, and - maybe most importantly - where there's room to take specific action(s) to get "back on the rails" so to speak.

[UweSchmidt]

It's not possible to go back though, so I wouldn't want to dwell on the past too much. There is probably a really good reason why everything is run by companies, why we have Discord instead of connecting with a variety of clients to an open protocoll. Probably because it's too difficult to make everything run smooth everywhere, so you need a team, so you need monetization. People like the reach and impact they can have on Twitter and Youtube, it's just so much louder than a little, undiscovered self-hosted blog could ever be, so what's the point?

Maybe tech will eventually be commodizided enough to give key infrastructure applications back to the "people". Or maybe the cloud providers will control it all? We'll see.

[Melatonic]

I agree - this could make an excellent discussion on its own. I bet we would see a large variety of opinions - the internet enabled all kinds of new methods of communication which in turn inspired different dreams in different people.