Yeah. From a hacker&#x27;s perspective, a business model is just some way to keep a thing up and running. If it doesn&#x27;t create a bunch of jobs at some office somewhere or lead to an IPO, well, that&#x27;s just worldly affairs, right?<p>The distributed&#x2F;federated stuff is still alive, maybe more than ever. Git is a fantastic example. I push and pull repositories between computers all the time. Often over ad-hoc WiFi, even.<p>Usenet and all that stuff is beautiful to reminisce about, but we should keep in mind also that it was largely sponsored by universities, corporations, militaries, and internet service providers...<p>IRC is a great inspiration too. Nowadays people look at it and think &quot;ew, no Unicode&quot; or &quot;duh, it&#x27;s not even JSON,&quot; but considering its resilience, its simplicity, its adoption, it&#x27;s an enormous, staggering success.<p>These beautiful projects that started as tiny little seeds by clever obscure Scandinavian hackers...<p>It&#x27;s just all about starting a little thing, getting your friends in on it, and keepin&#x27; it hella real.