Terry Godier’s development work and his essays warrant attention (especially “Phantom Obligation” and “The Last Quiet Thing”). His most recent foray, “The Boring Internet”, makes the argument that the transformation of the web into a series of centralized platforms is fundamentally skin-deep and thus not only reversible in the future but can be ignored now. He writes:

But the actual internet — the protocols, the federated services, the plain-text commands, the open feeds, the small servers, the personal sites, the things people built when user and developer were sometimes the same word — is still right there.

It was not demolished.

It was buried under a louder layer for a while.

Now the louder layer is thinning out.

You do not have to wait for someone to rebuild what you lost.

You are standing in it.

RSS, HTTP, SMTP, etc. have not gone anywhere and indeed persist as humane alternatives to centralized algorithmic feeds. The sooner more people realize this, the better.