Genuinely, the answer is kind of.
The indie web exists, neocities and nekoweb and melonland and such. Everything that used to work on the internet still works, its fully backwards compatible.
Just like back in the day, few people will ever see your page, and fewer will read it. Its an art project for yourself, which is great, but every diy in every medium will eventually bore you.
Frankly, even those have become a mess of JavaScript. We want web pages to do cool things, and the natural conclusion we reach is just web apps, the future we're living in.
Theres also Gemini (not Google's shit AI), an alternative protocol which focuses on direct links to files and otherwise text-oriented pages. But still, no one will ever see your work. It's a network of you. A diary.
The more I reflect on the nature of the web, the more I reach the conclusion that all of this is inevitable. Its not "the divine right of kings", a social construct pretending to be natural law, it's the real deal.
The internet is a failure in every possible use case. Its only actual value is shitposting, the rise of informal written communication.
I would like to return to BBS, frankly, I am an active user of traditional forums, I am like the top 0.01% of indie web readers. But even if we went back, we'd still end up here.
I also think that a big problem with the modern web is the ratio of creation and consumption. I find that even corporate platforms centered around creation (like itch.io) are really not so bad. I like them, they're good. Consumption-forward platforms (tumblr, twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.), most of the modern web, are where you run into problems.
