I have the same sentiment, but think we might have been in the minority. You might have run PHP forums from your parents' houses, but most people don't have tha

I have the same sentiment, but think we might have been in the minority. You might have run PHP forums from your parents' houses, but most people don't have that experience. I think a lot of the more successful social media sites over the years essentially are offering a centralized, easy-to-use equivalent to some of those federated systems (for example, personal blog RSS feeds -> Twitter, PHP forum -> Reddit). People use them precisely because they couldn't set up PHP forums in their house. The centralized experience doesn't hurt either. It's just easier enough to search for a subreddit on Reddit, than it is to scour through Google search results for a forum topic. Having said that, by the same token I really don't quite understand why some modern decentralized or federated alternatives haven't taken off more. The tech is there, some of the options I've seen are pretty good or at least promising, but it feels like often there's some social angle that gets in the way (simple critical mass, branding/positioning, complete lack of enough moderation to at least get something off the ground, etc). It seems to me a decentralized or federated system is a good fit for Reddit-style network structures, with lots of smaller nodes and community membership patterns that are relatively circumscribed for most people.