network performance + battery consumption make phones an impossible choice for distributed web. The decline of the PC is a bad thing for the distributed web. It's the only box that can stay online with a stable connection 24/7. I believe we re not going to see distributed services like good old torrents or kazaa until PCs (or at least home routers with a lot of storage) start dominating again

> It's the only box that can stay online with a stable connection 24/7.

My router stays online 24/7. It already has a web server built in. I could hack it to make it serve a public website.

But there’s absolutely no way I’m going to do that. The security and maintenance requirements are just too much of a PITA.

It’s much easier, more secure and more reliable (and likely cheaper once you figure in depreciation and opportunity costs) to set up and maintain an instance in the cloud, or a serverless site.

And if you don’t like the big cloud providers, there are many smaller outfits that can do the basics - compute and object storage are all you really need for a small site.

Consumer hardware and software are not really well suited to running publicly faceing websites.

> The security and maintenance requirements

thats why you need one of the sharing protocols, like IPFS that make security everyone's responsibility, not just yours.

I don't get why you think cloud solution is so much better. Glorified CDNs are a clumsy intermediate solution until internet connections get fast enough for everyone, that running a sharing node will have negligible impact. E.g. no cloud provider can compete with Popcorn Time in speed, despite billions of dollars of effort.

> thats why you need one of the sharing protocols, like IPFS that make security everyone's responsibility, not just yours.

Everyone responsability = No one responsability.

If your data is lost by IPFS you don't have anyone to sue.

You could always pay a host to host your files for you and distribute them to IPFS. nobody argues that (e.g.) IPFS is replacing all the functions of the cloud. but it certainly decentralizes things, gives less power to The Man, and allows competitors to emerge.

I do like to imagine a future where the modem/router becomes a place people can host their own data. A formally verified Deno-like web-server on seL4. The actual modem/router software running in a separate VM.

I wouldn't say it's a "decline". Most people just don't need an upgrade. You can use a PC from ~7 years ago for most stuff today. Gamers are not the majority here. The best performance boost you get from an older machine is a SSD.

Desktop sales were already declining 7 years ago. A lot of people just don't care to have a desktop PC any more, and when their old computers finally break or stop working, will replace them with laptops or tablets, which can't do the sorts of always-on distributed things that we might hope.

I would count Laptop to the PC category. Same year span - have a Laptop/PC from 2012 and you are good to go.

But the key difference remains: there aren't many personal computers that we leave plugged in and turned on 24/7 anymore.

This was never the case.

That was and still is the case. We just have forgotten about it. In the past it was SETI/napster/torrents/kazaa etc. Someone else mentioned minecraft servers. There are also lots of people running similar opensimulator servers at their home. Unfortunately laptops/tablets have thinned that crowd and the possibility of having such arrangements is smaller overall now.

I presume you mean "never the case for many people". As in "most people never left their PC on 24/7". That may well be true.

I used to run a couple of minecraft servers for my kids. Judging by how amazing their friends thought that was... I don't think there were many other people in the town doing that.

On the other hand, I still have a raspberry pi running 24/7 to this day.

Yes, but in this case your PC is doing something. It has a purpose. 24/7 without doing anything is a waste of energy.

Of course it was the case. What do you think things like Seti@Home were running on? People who owned computers had so many idle processor cycles that they were desperate to find something to do with them.

If 24/7 home computers were never a thing, what did BBSes run on?

Same answer: Yes, but in this case your PC is doing something. It has a purpose. 24/7 without doing anything is a waste of energy.

This has somehow turned into your opinion on energy use (yes, it's good that desktop PCs can now decrease their energy use significantly while idle, which was not the case in the 90s).

But you made a claim that "this was never the case", when clearly there was an era of home desktop computing when your desktop could act as a hobbyist server. This era gave rise to BBSes, then MUDs, then Minecraft servers (and many things in between).

>when clearly there was an era of home desktop computing when your desktop could act as a hobbyist server

Yes, but again, you have used your PC for something. This has shifted to smaller (Raspberry Pis) or dedicated servers (or "cloud" stuff), so you could run this stuff there.

unfortunately people dont use them. The best replacement would be is if someone made a popular home router that permantently runs an IPFS node or sth.

Super late to the game here, but we're (https://textile.photos/) seeing pretty great results on mobile running a 'lite' IPFS peer. Battery consumption is not bad compared to other network-driven apps, and with intelligent swam on/off optimizations, mobile peers can share and pin files quite nicely. It helps if you have a network of 'always on' peers to back them up of course :)

This seems implausible. Moore's law is over and phones are limited by size and power. There's no reason to believe progress will continue until a phone is the same speed as a typical desktop machine, let alone a server rack.

Interestingly it's the centralized network that will grow radically more powerful, while the home devices continue to stagnate.

The total capacity of infrastructure entities like AWS will increase by 10x at a minimum over the next decade. By comparison, your phone or laptop will modestly nudge forward. Consumers are not going to buy 10x the number of laptops, desktops and smartphones that they do today, ten years out. Most likely, those figures will barely move (the smartphone industry is already stagnating). Most of the incremental spending and investment will go into the centralized infrastructure by the giants.

Network speeds will continue to increase relatively rapidly. We can easily go from routine 50-100mbps home lines to 1gbps over the next decade. We're not going to see a 10x increase in the power of the average laptop (lucky if it doubles in ten years). It's primarily going to be useful for streaming/consuming very large amounts of data from epic scale central systems for gaming, 4K+, VR, etc. Decentralized systems owned by consumers will be far too weak to fill that role.

The AI future isn't going to be decentralized. The very expensive infrastructure that will demand, and its need to run 24/7, will be centralized and owned by extraordinarily large corporations.

It's precisely the typical consumer's home hardware that will act as the ultimate bottleneck guaranteeing decentralized can never take off. This has always been obvious, it won't prevent the fantasy from maintaining its allure of course. That will perpetually draw headlines and hype in tech, for decades to come, with no mass adoption breakthrough.

That sounds very plausible to me, but I still think decentralized server-side infrastructure has some potential. Sandstorm didn't take off and maybe Mastodon isn't it, either, but it seems like someone's going to have consumer-friendly, <$10/year, general-purpose server accounts for running apps. Maybe some game will make it popular?

Especially if you consider how much of a lead apple had over ARM and the custom designs of SoC vendors like qualcom then you will realize that the easy growth is already gone. 2 years for a 50% increase in performance just to catch up with the strongest competitor is very far away from doubling performance every year.

True. Companies are hitting a lot of friction getting node sizes down to 7nm when compared to sizes from years or decades ago.

True but you don't need much of a server to run many of the "server side" things a single user needs.

Until we find ways to add more bloat to the user requirements that will require a server-of-the-future to be more than a server-of-the-present.