content: Why would people do that when Facebook or Twitter serves all their needs?  They don't necessarily do so.  Twitter's imploding financially. There may be a chance for some of this stuff yet.  But I think there's a real problem in the way of resources.  Simply put, running a small server with a few hundred users off of a 10 year old machine in your closet does not have the resource requirements (particularly bandwidth, but also storage, computation, and energy) of hundreds of thousands of individuals.  This effectively negates much of what the advantage of open source is - there are a lot of people who can teach themselves to hack a piece of open source desktop software and make it work.  There aren't so many that can make bandwidth and servers appear for a negligible cost.  While automatically scaling servers do exist these days, they may also be too expensive to an individual, and even if they automatically scale, that doesn't mean that you have the ability to deal with many thousands of users, nor can you necessarily afford it.  As such, the open source appeal fades, because there will be very few people who can manage to put one of these things together and make it work.  Plus, those who do will have to distinguish themselves to attract users. However, there is an upside to this that you have alluded to.  Arguably a large portion of how the Internet was "ruined" was because a lot of the "normals" managed to find their way onto it and demand by sheer numbers that things bend to their will.  Perhaps I'm a weirdo, but I look rather fondly upon the days where Netscape was still a real browser and most of the good pages were in single frames, and multi-frame pages were the province of hipsters and the insane.  I can't imagine I'm the only one.  The Internet is still versatile enough to accommodate both, but there is little infrastructure in the way of supporting the geeks, such as it is.  This sort of thing may help to alleviate that.