I've seen a few around on HN actually! Though they tend to be university systems, or pages hosted on https://tilde.club/

i think Apache sets this up by default or use to. Every user on Linux would get a www, or maybe it was htdocs, folder in their home directory when they were added to the system. Any file you put there is served by Apache at resource /~<username> which was reading from /home/<username>/www on the file system.

There use to be lots and lots of ISPs and so they were small enough to have a single webserver with all their customers setup as users and Apache serving content. They'd also setup FTP on the same server so you could get your html files into your www folder. Software like Dreamweaver had a ftp client built in, so you'd click like a "publish" button and it wold login to FTP and transfer your files.

i would imagine this went away because it got expensive as the customer base grew and ISPs consolidated and it made no money. Other options with php, mysql, and other services cropped up and could offer more and charge for it so I think ISPs just preferred to concentrate on network access and not hosting websites.

Universities still have this--well, ok, at least for Faculty :)

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~btitzer/riff.html

I actually haven't had a homepage for a long time because of the lack of the easy "put my home directory on the web", but I'd like to go back now to doing that.

Think it had more to do with the consolidation of the ISP space.

I used to have my choice of dozens of ISP's. Now if I am lucky I might have 2 or 3 from very large companies that did the math on keeping that going. It mostly happened when ADSL and cable took over. In most areas that meant only 2 or 3 companies could actually provide anything at speeds their customers wanted. Think at the time they always said it was cost cutting.

Likely demand dropped and when the infra hosting it was needing replacement it just never got replaced