Not sure I get the problem. Yes an expensive server in expensive data center has more CPU, Ram, disk I/O, and bandwidth than a normal desktop, laptop, or phone

Not sure I get the problem. Yes an expensive server in expensive data center has more CPU, Ram, disk I/O, and bandwidth than a normal desktop, laptop, or phone. But say you track 1000 peers, find 50 online, and send a 280 character tweet to ten of them. Sure it's going to take seconds for that tweet to get to whatever fraction of millions of people that are interested. Sure your client should ask the 40 peers if they saw the message to make sure it went out. The beautiful thing is that even on a smart phone paying 10x the bandwidth of a tweet is still effectively zero. If the goal was a commodities trading platform, sure distributed wouldn't make sense. But receiving tweets of interest send in the last few minutes seems rather insensitive to a peers bandwidth, latency, CPU, or ram.