95% of Americans had shitty upload bandwidth until very recently, since coaxial broadband is all they have at home. It still probably sucks for most.
There was no choice but to use someone else’s computers for moving around large files. Plus CGNAT and whatnot making people have to use dynamic DNS. If a turnkey solution could have existed 20 years ago, maybe a market for it would have developed before the big companies locked it down.
Does the performance of individual data ownership hosted at home actually change very much when people have gigabit upload speeds? Since applications can already make multiple asynchronous requests, if we’re imagining that applications would need to request user data from each user’s house, the upload speeds would primarily affect latency and not necessarily throughput. If this does affect throughput, and it certainly might, then I’d guess that everyone having gigabit upload speeds doesn’t fix the problem. If we’re talking about something like Reddit and Facebook needing to make external requests for every comment in a long thread, I’d wager that it wouldn’t matter if every single request could upload at 100GB/s, it would still be hundreds of times slower than what we have today.
Even if I’m wildly in favor of user control over data, I’d venture to say that there still is no choice but to use someone else’s computers, and not just for performance reasons. If applications have to gather every individual user’s data that gets shown to another user from somewhere outside their servers every time, won’t reliability and consistency and UX likely become nonexistent, in addition to the unusable performance?
I don't know why you're imagining such ridiculously bad infrastructure that it has to access every person's house every page load.
Decentralized does not need to be slow like that. And very limited upload does get to be a problem if you want more than a couple people/servers to be able to access your media posts at the same time.
I replied to a comment that was talking about user upload speed. They replied to a comment about other people’s computers. Did I misunderstand? How do you get good infrastructure without using other people’s computers?
If you think such a system would need to load every comment from a different computer when you visit a page and be hundreds of times slower because of that, then yes you did misunderstand something.
The person you replied to is assuming a reasonable distributed system.
Please elaborate. If true, and they were imagining some unstated infrastructure, then what is it and what does home upload speed have to do with anything? What exactly did I misunderstand?
The self-hosting machines are plenty to avoid the problem you described, where there's massive slowdowns getting anything at all, including tiny little text comments. I hope you don't need me to walk through every detail of how a distributed system can do comments in a reasonable way?
But self-hosting machines are susceptible to the "I can only upload pictures and videos at 5-10mbps" problem. That requires more difficult peer-to-peer systems.
The first problem only requires getting small bits of data onto the same machine. The second problem requires getting large amounts of data onto many machines. Or reasonably symmetrical upload speeds.