>This doesn't apply to the population at large. Most people are on phones or laptops on WiFi. They're not running 24/7 and in the case of phones a background se

>This doesn't apply to the population at large. Most people are on phones or laptops on WiFi. They're not running 24/7 and in the case of phones a background service isn't even viable. They don't need to serve 24/7, they just need to be available 24/7. Do people not have their phones on and connected to the internet 24/7 in case they receive a message? For social media, most people just share text posts, pictures or a few small videos. BitTorrent is a worst-case scenario where it would be only used for large files like movies. >Many people are on CGNAT and can't "serve" data without some intermediary infrastructure. There are ways to get around CGNAT without STUN/TURN. >As for retention, that's a pipe dream. A torrent more than a few years old may as well not exist unless it is extremely popular and maintains its popularity. There's innumerable dead torrents with no seeders. This is desirable behavior in social media. Popular content will have longer retention, unpopular content will have shorter retention. Web forums like this one emulate a "fake" version of this with the weighted voting/time system that favors upvoted posts and disfavors old posts.