>the educational potential of near-future world where storage gets so dense and cheap that the tide turns back toward local computing, away from the trend of th

>the educational potential of near-future world where storage gets so dense and cheap that the tide turns back toward local computing, away from the trend of the past 10 years toward "online cloud" I'd argue that storage is already dense and cheap enough to "turn the tide back toward local computing." The reasons why the cloud (more precisely: someone else's servers) and all manner of non-local computing and storage became so entrenched was (at least in the US) that ISPs mostly offered (and still do) asymmetric internet links for "consumer" plans, refuse to provide static IP addressess (IPv4 and IPv6) and actively discourage (via port blocking/throttling) running servers on such links. And when download/upload bandwidth ratios (for my links they're 20 and 17) are so skewed towards downloads, hosting content becomes less viable. Add poorly managed physical plant and resistance to spending money on upgrades, and you have unreliable links with inadequate bandwidth. After decades of this, is it any wonder that centralized storage/compute/streaming services found a ready niche, and have exploited the anti-consumer/anti-competitive actions and policies of the big ISPs to the point that many folks don't realize it could be any other way. Want to move back toward local computing? Make decently fast, symmetric internet links the norm. Getting that done (at least in the US) will be a tall order. And even if/when we get there, such a shift won't happen all at once, especially since centralized services will fight tooth and nail to keep their customers (for paid services) and product (for "free" services) at our expense. However, once decently fast symmetric bandwidth is the norm for "consumer" internet links, decentralization will follow. It would likely take a while, especially since many (most?) of the developers of decentralized solutions (I'm looking at you, diaspora, mastodon and matrix, among others) make self-hosting their software inaccessible to non-technical folks[0]. There are many great reasons to move away from centralized compute/storage/streaming services, but there are significant barriers to doing so, at multiple levels of the network infrastructure. And more's the pity. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30783477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30783477