And most enterprise software (and almost no individual user) barely needs more than a rack of current gen servers.
So yeah, decentralization will be upon us soon enough.
If 24/7 home computers were never a thing, what did BBSes run on?
But you made a claim that "this was never the case", when clearly there was an era of home desktop computing when your desktop could act as a hobbyist server. This era gave rise to BBSes, then MUDs, then Minecraft servers (and many things in between).
Yes, but again, you have used your PC for something. This has shifted to smaller (Raspberry Pis) or dedicated servers (or "cloud" stuff), so you could run this stuff there.
I used to run a couple of minecraft servers for my kids. Judging by how amazing their friends thought that was... I don't think there were many other people in the town doing that.
On the other hand, I still have a raspberry pi running 24/7 to this day.
My router stays online 24/7. It already has a web server built in. I could hack it to make it serve a public website.
But there’s absolutely no way I’m going to do that. The security and maintenance requirements are just too much of a PITA.
It’s much easier, more secure and more reliable (and likely cheaper once you figure in depreciation and opportunity costs) to set up and maintain an instance in the cloud, or a serverless site.
And if you don’t like the big cloud providers, there are many smaller outfits that can do the basics - compute and object storage are all you really need for a small site.
Consumer hardware and software are not really well suited to running publicly faceing websites.
thats why you need one of the sharing protocols, like IPFS that make security everyone's responsibility, not just yours.
I don't get why you think cloud solution is so much better. Glorified CDNs are a clumsy intermediate solution until internet connections get fast enough for everyone, that running a sharing node will have negligible impact. E.g. no cloud provider can compete with Popcorn Time in speed, despite billions of dollars of effort.
Everyone responsability = No one responsability.
If your data is lost by IPFS you don't have anyone to sue.
The total capacity of infrastructure entities like AWS will increase by 10x at a minimum over the next decade. By comparison, your phone or laptop will modestly nudge forward. Consumers are not going to buy 10x the number of laptops, desktops and smartphones that they do today, ten years out. Most likely, those figures will barely move (the smartphone industry is already stagnating). Most of the incremental spending and investment will go into the centralized infrastructure by the giants.
Network speeds will continue to increase relatively rapidly. We can easily go from routine 50-100mbps home lines to 1gbps over the next decade. We're not going to see a 10x increase in the power of the average laptop (lucky if it doubles in ten years). It's primarily going to be useful for streaming/consuming very large amounts of data from epic scale central systems for gaming, 4K+, VR, etc. Decentralized systems owned by consumers will be far too weak to fill that role.
The AI future isn't going to be decentralized. The very expensive infrastructure that will demand, and its need to run 24/7, will be centralized and owned by extraordinarily large corporations.
It's precisely the typical consumer's home hardware that will act as the ultimate bottleneck guaranteeing decentralized can never take off. This has always been obvious, it won't prevent the fantasy from maintaining its allure of course. That will perpetually draw headlines and hype in tech, for decades to come, with no mass adoption breakthrough.