Re-decentralizing the Web, for good this time
I think the part ignored by so many is the need to decentralize the computers into the home. I'm not talking meshes or shared resources. For the majority of use cases, we don't need distributed storage, compute, etc. Just start making these self-hosted "servers", "data pods", etc as easy to install as desktop software and make it clear that they are inaccessible when the computer is off. People that aren't already will gravitate towards at least one always-on machine in their house. Modern societies have reasonable upload speeds and electricity/network uptime to support it. Sure, things like ISP firewall/NAT and dynamic IPs are a bit of a barrier, but you can have volunteers help with relays.For example, I can easily fire up a Tor onion service on my never-turns-off home desktop computer and reach my stuff from anywhere. Why can't I reach my friends' stuff the same way? Because, to use business-speak, there's nothing "turnkey". It's something I've been pondering and working on. Sure, the bigger players may have to be in DCs, have more stringent uptime requirements, and distribute their bandwidth/workload more. But for most of us, desktop software and web-of-trust style connections could go a long way so long as the front of the software has a FB feel (e.g. a feed, messages, etc). We can tackle discovery, searching, aggregation, offloading, etc later.