Ask HN: What Happened to the P2P Revolution?

These days, it seems anything of scale (and indeed, just about anything in general) lives in "the cloud". For commercial and other projects with some incentive for income, this is probable fine(tm).

But for lots of open source things, we couldn't scale even if we wanted to, due to hosting costs. Imagine an open non-profit version of Instagram as an example, they spent what, $3 billion on AWS.

Peer to peer seems such an obvious solution to this, but somehow, it's failed to materialize as a widely employed technology. When I first heard of peertube, I thought "Finally! Someone is doing what must be a mix of Kazaa and youtube, where the videos are hosted by all the online computers" and boy was I dissapointed.

So, in short, why do you think we're not seeing p2p being widely deployed as an alternative to traditional hosting?