The only caveat I usually have with this is that this idea of "owning" your content by publishing it on your own site is the domain name, which you rent, rather than own.
Not really. There have been a lot of proposals, but it's not possible to do without tradeoffs (Zooko's Triangle). And in practice, most of the proposed alternatives are worse — not only do they not provide one or more of the desired features, they are also unacceptably complex, fragile, or resource-intensive.
Not to my knowledge at this point in time, though I wish there was. Gopher and other small web tech seem closer to the owned platform idea.
I would love not having to rent my platform from anyone, but our current system does not support owned domains for a non-technical user who does not have the tens of thousands of dollars to apply for owning their own TLD.
