I wonder if there is a way to combine the weird fun that was geocities/tripod/etc with the connections of a social network and modern ease of updating. Like how you use twitter, but for following webpages about butterflies or a shrine to the 6502 processor.
It's the underlying protocol that connects the various federated services in the "Fediverse", (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse) like Mastodon, PeerTube, NextCloud, etc. At root it's just a standardized way for nodes in a network to send messages to each other, though, so you could use it to get those "connections of a social network" you're looking for. And then Mastodon users, say, could get updates/notifications from your site/service/whatever right in their feed.
My first website was about about TNG and why DS9 sucked balls.
Ironic since I now consider DS9 the better series (but TNG still has the truly stand out episodes, I think young me was just oblivious to a lot of the subtler stuff but I digress), it was shockingly bad (and I'd been programming since the 80's, HTML was just weird).
I spent about five years hating the crap out of it and never even considered web development as a career, if you'd have asked me back then I'd have said you'd claw the compiler out of my cold dead hands.
20 odd-years later and I do enterprise web dev (and C#/WPF and Java)
I forked tt-rss back in 2005 for my personal use after I tried to submit a few patches that didn't "align well" w/ the developer. I wouldn't go so far as to say "massive asshole", but he did seem to be a challenge to deal with. I decided it wasn't worth the effort to try to contribute back my changes.
I was able to enjoy TNG from the get go. It's one of the few shows where the stories have any depth. Although I did start watching it when I was in my twenties, so that could have been a factor in being able to pick up on the subtler themes
Websites have had comments sections since well before social networks took off. Even in the Geocities days, you had "Sign my Guestbook/View my Guestbook". Some truly old-school websites, like Mark Prindle Reviews, included email responses from people who read his work.
Trying to shoehorn social media profile integration into this system will eventually end up influencing the content, and once more it'll be a race to the bottom, with everyone posting stuff only for other people's validation. It shouldn't work that way for the 'weird web'.
