Mistaking the order of this causality is a common error. The community of people developed secondarily to an overarching economic process -- money being spent to build websites. Now, Wix and Squarespace and Facebook are &quot;good enough,&quot; so that huge middle market market doesn&#x27;t exist anymore.<p>They imagine that it was the other way around, that the economic process is secondary to the community, that the community <i>created</i> the economic process of web development, and can now control the economics of that.<p>This is backwards. The web dev community only ever existed because there was a large and distributed economic need for lots of custom websites. Now that there is no economic motivation -- no outside money flowing into that community -- the community cannot sustain itself, except in greatly reduced form among a few hobbyists and high-end specialists.<p>You might compare it to the community of horse saddle manufacturers. It was a huge industry 150 years ago. Today, only a few hobbyist and specialist shops still make saddles, because there is not much economic need for them now as compared to the previous period. It wouldn&#x27;t have made any difference if all horse saddle manufacturers organized their community in 1910 or so -- most of them would still have gone out of business anyway, because cars took over the economic niche that drove their industry. They were disrupted, in startup-speak.<p>No amount of wishful thinking or movement-building on the part of the community can change the underlying economics. The broad middle market for custom websites simply no longer exists. The best way to help the community of middle market web developers is to help each other retrain on other skillsets.