The downfall of the Public Internet and its cause

The Public internet essentially died due to the uprising of "modern" social media(the likes of Twitter)

Social media mostly has driven down the "need" for your own website; where you previously had a website to make yourself known on the internet, you could now just make a social media profile and that is all.

Heck, if you look at neocities now, most of the people who make sites on it either have good knowledge of htmlcss AND/OR are artsy people. By the way, NEOCITIES IS GOOD!!! This is moreso a comment on how while the public web DOES get a "place to return", it's mostly utilized by people who already know how to make websites, which not everyone does.

The average joe doesn't particularly feel the need to make their own website, considering you can much easier make a social media profile to put yourself on the map, like Facebook, LinkedIn etc.

Social media is also why topsites and webrings died; on social media, you can just search a topic (say, trains), and you could find other people interested in the thing posting about it(trains). You don't need to sign your site up to a webring/topsite anymore for others to find it, or inversely, you did not need to find a webring anymore to find sites of people interested in the topic. 

As a result, those types of sites have largely been gutted from their original purpose and most if not all of the original ones have gone; it all depends on if their host is still paying the hosting of these sites, somehow, or if it's running on Angelfire or Tripod. 

TLDR: the early "public" web and webrings/topsites have largely died thanks to the rise of social media making online contact with people that like the same topic much easier.

Same goes for a surplus of fanpages.

For example, if i'd run a fanpage of, say, a specific character from, lets take a random thing and say i have a fanpage about Father Smurf or something. 

On social media, I can just make a Father Smurf fanpage/fan account and use that. I wouldn't need to meddle with filesize limits nearly as much as say, Geocities, i don't have to meddle with CSS/HTML... i can just put stuff in my username, upload a picture just fine, put descriptions and post easily with the click of a button. No need to know scripting.

In other words, I wouldn't need to meddle with a LOT of stuff; social media is simply easier to use to put yourself out on, and you know people will go for the easier option over the one you'd actively have to learn about to use longterm.

And that's why the early internet essentially would have a hard time coming back; social media kind of became its successor AND murderer in that sense.

This is a semi-rant i initially made on Discord, that's why this will feel a little off topic.