> The decentralized web isn't using non-web projects or web abstraction layers. The decentralized web is everyone hosting their own webserver from home. It's easy, everyone has a fast enough connection, and without the motives and requirements of a business it's safe.
This attitude is IMO exactly why the decentralized web movement outside of the blockchain/crypto space has not come further than it has in the last two decades. I run my own website out of a VPS and even that is nontrivial: occasional outages due to SSL certificates expiring, the VPS getting shut down because my credit card expires so the auto-payments stop working, troubles with the server software itself, etc etc. Meanwhile, if you just dump stuff onto one of these decentralized layers or even just a blockchain, you publish once, it's easy and it's there forever.
I truly believe that for "fully decentralized" to be viable, it must mean "serverless" (as in no servers, meaning no single computers whose IP addresses or DNS names or equivalents are explicitly referenced in a line of client-side code, not meaning that AWS lambda stuff). That does mean you're making significant efficiency tradeoffs for the foreseeable future; for some types of applications it's worth it and for others it's not.
See, that's your problem. You use a VPS. You use centralized SSL certs (instead of self-signing for a decade), you don't pay for the totally not required VPS. All that stuff if absolutely unneeded complexity and cost. This isn't a business you don't need 2 TB of bandwidth/month and all the nines uptime. There's no need for paying someone to host for you it just makes it harder.
self-host. Don't have someone else "self"-host for you.
You can't tell me that $5 a month for a VPS is more expensive than the administrative overhead of self-hosting in your own house. The average person on this website probably earns that in less than 10 minutes. On the other hand, it'll cost you $25 to get a Raspberry Pi and at least a few hours to get your Linux distribution of choice flashed and running so that it's project-ready. That's before you even get httpd installed, start stuffing around with port forwarding and firewall rules, configure dynamic DNS, etc. Of course, most VPS providers will also give you PaaS, so you don't need to do any sort of system or application configuration whatsoever - you can just actually run your website.
I personally self-host because it's neat and interesting to me, but not because it's simple and cheap - if you want to actually get a website or some other service running on the WWW going, VPSs are a god-send. Also, consider the fact that unless I do actually use a Raspberry Pi, which is very flexible but underpowered, I'm going to be paying for potentially quite expensive new hardware and electricity if I self-host, as well as bandwidth. These are all non-issues with a VPS.
Also, SSL certs are necessarily centralised, because they operate on a web of trust in a world where we don't know who to trust or not. If you have a website using a certificate which is self-signed, I'm not going to trust it unless I know you personally, because if I don't know you personally I have no way of determining that you are who you say you are - only a trusted CA is going to do that. That's why a green-padlock in your browser means 'One of a limited number of root CAs trusted by the distributors of this browser says this site is owned by who it says its owned by', not just 'this site is owned by who it says its owned by'.
This attitude is IMO exactly why the decentralized web movement outside of the blockchain/crypto space has not come further than it has in the last two decades. I run my own website out of a VPS and even that is nontrivial: occasional outages due to SSL certificates expiring, the VPS getting shut down because my credit card expires so the auto-payments stop working, troubles with the server software itself, etc etc. Meanwhile, if you just dump stuff onto one of these decentralized layers or even just a blockchain, you publish once, it's easy and it's there forever.
I truly believe that for "fully decentralized" to be viable, it must mean "serverless" (as in no servers, meaning no single computers whose IP addresses or DNS names or equivalents are explicitly referenced in a line of client-side code, not meaning that AWS lambda stuff). That does mean you're making significant efficiency tradeoffs for the foreseeable future; for some types of applications it's worth it and for others it's not.