Yes, but here's the realization I had some time ago: no one cares. The billions of people online don't care. The internet is overwhelmingly accessed from mobile devices and accessed chiefly for the purpose of shopping, scrolling through TikTok, swiping on Tinder, and so on. More importantly, we don't care, not really. We pay lip service to it, but what have we done to foster the open / small web today?

Many of us work at companies that aren't moving the needle in the right direction, and in our free time, we seem to be content debating AI-generated think pieces and press releases from AI vendors. As I write this, in the top ten HN stories, I see press releases from Deepmind, Cursor, Tailscale, and Qwen. Even when commercial stories don't dominate and someone's passion project makes it to the top, how often do we drop the author a personal note or offer meaningful words of encouragement?

The "old web" is something we like as an abstract idea, but in reality, we don't lift a finger to preserve it. By the way, I'm guilty too. When I'm done writing this comment, I'll probably doomscroll social media for a while.