> I think the problem is entirely caused by the US having absolutely abysmal private internet speeds and capacity. Since you can’t then have your own server at

> I think the problem is entirely caused by the US having absolutely abysmal private internet speeds and capacity. Since you can’t then have your own server at home, you are forced to have it elsewhere with sensible internet connections. The trend definitely traces to the advent and eventual domination of asymmetric Internet connectivity. My first DSL connection was symmetric, so peer-to-peer networking and running servers ("self-hosting") were just natural. Since then, asymmetric bandwidth has ruled the US. It's not so much that connectivity technology in the US is strictly poor—many cities have options providing hundreds of megabits or a gigabit or more of aggregate bandwidth. It's that the capacity allocation of some shared delivery platforms (e.g., cable) is dramatically biased toward download/consumption, and against upload/share/host. And there's no way for consumers to opt for a different balance. I'd gladly take 500/500 versus 1000/50. Even business accounts, which for their greatly increased costs are a refuge of symmetric connectivity and static IPs, are more commonly asymmetric today. I think that this capacity imbalance and bias toward consumption snowballs and reinforces the broader assumptions of consumption at the edge (why make a product you self-host when most people don't have the proper connectivity?). This in turn means more centralization of services, applications, and data. Nevertheless, even with mediocre upload speeds (measured in mere tens of megabits), I insist on self-hosting data and applications as much as I can muster. All of my devices are on my VPN (using the original notion of "VPN," meaning quite literally a virtual private network; not the more modern use of VPN to mean "encrypted tunnel to an Internet browsing egress node located in a data center"). For example, why would I use Dropbox when I can just access my network file system from anywhere? To me, it's a matter of simplicity. Everything I use understands a simple file system.