>I remember when I first went online in the 90’s the vision of the internet was decentralized content, where information would never go away once it was pushed online.
This is incredibly bizarre, I can't imagine where this "vision" came from. Storage was extremely limited and bandwidth was expensive back then; things were being deleted constantly. The first web forum I participated in (in 1996) only had the last week's worth of messages available, the older ones were permanently deleted. Back then if you were using Yahoo Mail or Hotmail you had to constantly delete your old emails because you'd run out of space. I would download stuff and then run out of hard drive space, so it would just be deleted and lost forever - nobody could afford more hard drive space.
This is incredibly bizarre, I can't imagine where this "vision" came from. Storage was extremely limited and bandwidth was expensive back then; things were being deleted constantly. The first web forum I participated in (in 1996) only had the last week's worth of messages available, the older ones were permanently deleted. Back then if you were using Yahoo Mail or Hotmail you had to constantly delete your old emails because you'd run out of space. I would download stuff and then run out of hard drive space, so it would just be deleted and lost forever - nobody could afford more hard drive space.