I think most common people are accustomed to "being fed", rather than exploring for themselves. That's why most of the original platforms were just getting copy pastes from other platforms. Originality requires effort.

I personally have been looking at lemmy thinking what's new... Only to realise that maybe it's time "I" create that new. ~:=~

that's a common problem. kids don't know how to use computers because they're so used to using apps.

I am a former senior web developer and head of a web-based software company, I know how to use the internet. That is not why I use apps. I use apps because they fit into my phone's ecosystem much better than websites. The flow I've illustrated is the most commonly adopted, as others in the reply thread have pointed out.

As a backend developer I know that it's all servers under the hood, but that's not what the internet is. It hurts to say it, but the frontend matters more in that regard. Probably the most used frontend these days is apps, so the internet is apps. Websites are still widely used and indispensable so they are also the internet. Apps and websites are both the internet, just on different usecases.