Amateur radio strives as a niche hobby. Clubs are actives and while the average age of radio amateurs is well over 60, there is a steady stream of newcomers. States and international organizations recognize the importance of nourishing amateur radio communities and there are endless possibilities to excel in this space.
In contrast, none yet cares about the possible demise of the hobbyist internet. It all started with phasing out HTTP in favour of HTTPS for good reasons: ISPs and network providers in some places of the world were injecting ads into HTTP pages. Big content providers and the general public wanted to stop that. They could have gone the legislative route but a technical solution to force all websites to use HTTPS was easier to implement. It was enough for Google to hint that it will penalize HTTP websites over HTTPS in search results, and everyone started to happily switch over to HTTPS.
Things did not stop there, though.
Browsers show content served over HTTP as not secure, making HTTPS the "default" and HTTP the visibly dangerous option, they limit many web APIs to sites served over HTTPS, they block or upgrade mixed-content by default (HTTPS sites cannot request HTTP-only resources anymore), they require HTTPS for HTTP/2 and HTTP/3, they increasingly attempt HTTPS to a site first even if linked or typed as HTTP, they warn about downloads over HTTP, and they're continuing to ratchet up such measures over time.
Lately, WhatsApp completely stopped opening HTTP urls.
This is an old fart's rant but it is none the less true.
25 years ago, I have chosen my first rental apartment based on the availability of the ISP that provided sticky, almost fixed IP addresses to the residential customers. My plan was to host websites out of my closet and oh boy did it work! I hosted quite a few, and even turned one of them into a small business.
Fast forward to today, hosting websites from the comfort of one's home is increasingly difficult. For one, the first thing I have to do when setting up a website is to let a piece of complex software briefly take over my web server. Then, I am confronted with numerous complexities of today's Internet that make hosting a pain rather than joyful hobby: opaque packet filtering from the ISPs, blocking of residential IP ranges, blocking of ports and trottling of connections that are seemingly impossible to debug.
And I do not event talk about the pain of frequent updates of overbloated software. Or the risks of self-hosting an email server.