This stuff is never free anywhere but the scale of Big Tech insulates you from it somewhat.

I actually think it’s good to be reminded that our ability to communicate comes with a cost – in terms of resources, environmental impact, etc., not just money.

But, equally, it also makes the case that a system optimised to host hundreds of thousands of people on a single instance is not also somehow magically optimised to host just one person.

The latter is the problem I’m exploring with #SmallWeb.

@gert @aral An interesting question. What would a more distributed framework look like? What would it require?

For example, to make something like Youtube without that centralization would be *extremely* difficult, it demands hierarchical caching.

@gert @aral I agree about the protocols bit. I managed some of the infrastructure and I work with some of the other infrastructure that makes Youtube. The amount of bandwidth required to do youtube (or netflix if we go back a few years) would crush the internet. P2P increases this problem dramatically.

Peertube is cool for what it is, but it fundamentally cannot handle a substantial fraction of YT's volume. We'd need to leverage caching more.

@gert @aral IDK if it exists. What makes youtube work is a series of expensive hierarchical caches distributed globally. There are parts of the world where this network is thin and youtube is really a suboptimal experience.

I dunno if folks really realize how much geography affects their internet. Odds are, most Americans have participating caches peered with their provider's hardware.