And my answer is that it’ll probably be pretty much the same as it is now.
Back in the late 1990s when a huge number of personal websites (like this one) were being created the whole landscape of the web was very different.
Obviously there were no real social networks back then that made it easy to have some sort of web presence, but I believe that one of the main reasons that people started building their own personal websites was that—in the UK at least—the early internet service providers such as Demon Internet gave their users their own webspace in the form of a subdomain of demon.co.uk - and that’s where this site was first hosted from 1996 to 2000.
I seem to remember it was about 5 or 10 MB of web space where you could host images and static HTML (there may have been a cgi-bin directory as well) so creating a minimal web presence just involved uploading a hand-crafted index.html file to your subdomain.
I think about this often when I read blog posts about how to encourage people to create their own website, frequently pointing at the perplexing number of hosting options that beginners are now faced with. While professional web-hosting services certainly existed back in the 1990s, the paradox of choice was effectively neutralised by the fact that you got your beginner’s web hosting space as part of the package from your internet provider.
Now, if today’s big providers started including some basic web space with their broadband packages then I think the IndieWeb/personal web could really take off again.
