> I had hoped that the continual advancement in electronics would mean the marginal cost of simply "putting something out there" on the internet would drop to n

> I had hoped that the continual advancement in electronics would mean the marginal cost of simply "putting something out there" on the internet would drop to near zero. This has happened even if you're excluding the usual ad-funded crowd. The difference is that supporting a billion users will obviously never be near zero cost, so any platforms with that level of usage are the ones with monetization streams (or are venture funded and will be monetized in the future, looking at you Discord). With that in mind you can actually self host at a near-zero cost, entry tier VPS instances are dirt cheap, and there's even cheaper choices if your content is simple enough (e.g. just a static HTML site). If you want to store a few GB of content, you can get that on a major cloud for very cheap. All of this together, you can get a significant amount of data hosted with many 9s of uptime on a large cloud for a scant few dollars a month. If you want to use your own hardware, you can buy a raspberry pi and get hosting ridiculously cheap. All that said, these options require technical expertise, which I think is the real failure. Lots of people have content but not the technical expertise to put it anywhere other than youtube/instagram/reddit/facebook/twitter