A certain amount of people probably would have taken the time to learn how to do something like host a web page on shared hosting or even github pages, but don't because it's both easier to upload to a platform, and you get infinitely more reach - sometimes facilitated by the platform (e.g. TikTok often promotes <10 view videos to gauge them, and will skyrocket a post from an otherwise new account if enough viewers interact with the video).
However, if these platforms exist, there's no telling how many multitudes more people wouldn't even attempt to put stuff online. Life is busy and spending even an hour setting up an online presence on the "open web" is too much for most people.
Yep. Most of the non-developers probably couldn't set up a HTML page. And the developers can also be too busy.
Many years ago, I wrote my own homepage in PHP. With every version of PHP it needed to be fixed again, so after a few years I gave up. I tried to install some existing software, but you need to update that regularly, too often. So now I am happy that there is Substack I can write on (despite complaining about its functionality all the time), because otherwise I wouldn't have a blog.
