After the dotcom bust 20 years ago, there was a shift away from attempts to turn the Internet into a portal owned by a single company (AOL, Yahoo, etc) using incompatible and proprietary tech, in favor of open standards.
This spawned a heydey for things like self-hosted blogs, RSS and XMPP powered by Linux. People rejected lock-in and embraced the benefits and freedom open standards brought. Even Big Tech embraced these standards.
@kyle Maybe an off-topic comment, or maybe not. We also thought that internet and all its openness was going to open, liberate the world to better human rights and democracy. It looked promising, but right now much of the sw is used to control and lock people from the state side (in addition to company lock-in). I primarily think of countries like China etc etc. So big part of the world that probably do not see same trends right now.
