In the early days the internet was a free, egalitarian space for anyone to surf. Now, commercial interests rule – but users do still have some control.
Yes, selfhost most essential services like mail, messengers, web search, piped frontend, vpn, and other things like gitea/forgejo and jellyfin, web 3.0 will be federated network
Exactly. Blockchain is decentralized, so a lot of people have jumped to that, but it really doesn't have to be. I'm interested in distributed projects, which goes a step further than federation, and I think that is the gold standard for an open internet.
Web 4.0: I can actually safely tip every dude who made a useful video/website 0.01 cents and neither side will have to pay any extra fees so it is actually worth to tip, it will just be p2p money using the processing power of the sender and the receiver without buttcoin vultures trying to fuck with it. That was what web 3.0 was supposed to have been 13 years ago, but between the technical limitations and those web3 shitasses' greed, we're left almost where we started...