> How do you put this genie back in the bottle?

You don't. It's over and done with. It started with Microsoft shipping Windows with Internet Explorer. And it probably ended with Facebook buying Instagram and WhatsApp.

Long gone are silly, goofy, pointless GeoCities sites, webrings, and phpBB forums for just about every topic you can think of. I mean, just think about how ridiculous it is that WikiLeaks has a Facebook page or that Snowden has a Twitter account. The final nail in that coffin is that a significant portion of the web is accessed these days via phones: which, by Google or Apple mandate, are extremely locked down ecosystems. You've still got a couple of crazy idealists out there like Stallman, but they're far and few in between.

The open web is dead. Long live the open web.

Google and Apple have web browsers, and they can be used to build quite a bit. Presumably, Apple and Google browsers won't block a website. The Web is probably the most open and permission-less ecosystem there is, among the widely deployed ones. And it supports more and more features that let you replace native apps:

  Push Notifications (engagement)
  Web Payments (monetization)
  Contact Picker API (virality)
  WebRTC (peer to peer data, files and video)
  ServiceWorkers (caching and more)
  Crypto (peer to peer encryption, auth)
  PWAs (add to home screen)

Wordpress has been a smashing success for indie Web 1.0 (with tons of hosts and their one-click install). We also have Drupal, Joomla etc.

But what about Web 2.0? There has to be a sort of "operating system" of reusable components the same way that MacOS did buttons and menus and windows.

We have amazing hardware. But we rent our software from Zoom, Facebook, Telegram. Why? Because it's very hard to replicate everything we've come to expect from Facebook today, and not in 2004.

Well, there are projects out there on the front lines doing it. Like Inrupt (née SoLiD) from Tim Berners-Lee. I met most of these guys and teams over the years. We started before everybody, in 2011, so we have had a bit of a head start. Nearly 10 years and over $700K spent from our revenues. I'm not proud of how long it took. But it has been a long slog. But yes, we want our platform to be the next Wordpress and liberate the Web from Feudalism to a free market:

https://github.com/Qbix/Platform

(Here is the larger vision, not realized yet: https://qbix.com/QBUX/whitepaper.html#Distributed-Operating-...)