This reads to me like a rant. Good material for a blog post but I don't think there is anything particularly profound going on. The internet is not a static place, and parts are always being born and dying. Maybe today is going to be Google search.
There was an interesting question early on in the internet of whether content would be aggregated by corporate entities or whether people would self-host and communicate peer-to-peer. The question has been answered - corporate entities (points at the Y logo at the top of the page) do a much better job of curating spaces. This has implications that a lot of content will be lost sooner or later, but at least the big repositories like Wikipedia make copying data out easy.
I don't even think communities retreating to Discord is a bad thing. The public internet is too small; we can't all fit in it. Private spaces might be a big net win. It'd be a win if someone figured out how to force OSS to win at the protocol level so interoperability is easier; that is a major Achilles heel in the whole setup right now. But that problem has never really been solved (unless you're the sort of person who doesn't understand why IRC got marginalised).
There was an interesting question early on in the internet of whether content would be aggregated by corporate entities or whether people would self-host and communicate peer-to-peer. The question has been answered - corporate entities (points at the Y logo at the top of the page) do a much better job of curating spaces. This has implications that a lot of content will be lost sooner or later, but at least the big repositories like Wikipedia make copying data out easy.
I don't even think communities retreating to Discord is a bad thing. The public internet is too small; we can't all fit in it. Private spaces might be a big net win. It'd be a win if someone figured out how to force OSS to win at the protocol level so interoperability is easier; that is a major Achilles heel in the whole setup right now. But that problem has never really been solved (unless you're the sort of person who doesn't understand why IRC got marginalised).