@xgranade@wandering.shop So I have a couple of... thoughts on this.

To some degree, all of this still exists; free webhosting providers are still around, you can still rent cheap servers, and at the kind of scale that the old sites you're describing run at, it's still more-or-less viable. In some ways it has gotten a bit worse, in some ways a bit better (eg. nowadays banner ads are less common on free hosts).

I'd say that there are three main things that changed, or at least created a *perception* of change, two of which you already mentioned:
1. People's tendencies to *default* to cloudycloud services like AWS, under the impression that that's necessary to make a useful site, but they are indeed much more expensive in ways that aren't obvious.
2. Increased moderation cost, as the scale of abuse has increased, though that relates to the third point below as well.

And finally:

3. Generally, bigger scale of everything. More users. More companies trying to exploit things harder. Issues like cryptocurrency miners jumping on any free CPU cycles. Where you used to be able to satisfy demand of a community by paying for a server out of pocket, nowadays anything free is likely to immediately attract a torrent of both legitimate and illegitimate use. There's simply much more demand.

That means that if you try to run something that doesn't pay for itself 1:1, and you don't account for the scale of demand, it's *very easy* to become overwhelmed with interest, to a point where you can't pay the bills. This is made worse by people having become accustomed to services just being Magically There without asking who pays for it.

This is preventable, though it's probably going to require reintroducing some old tricks; resource use quotas, limited invites per user, daily signup restrictions, and so on.

If you're willing to do that, I feel that the 'silly web' is still viable - but by definition it means that you will offer a more limited service at a more limited scale, and so any one such service will only ever a very small percentage of the demand, it won't be "something everyone knows and uses" because "everyone" has simply become too big. The only way I see out of that is for many people to do the same thing at small scale.

Basically, it'll always look insignificant and small, and much of that is just a matter of relative perception.