P2P may have a comeback, because home connections are becoming more symmetrical. DSL usually had relatively low uplink rates, and COMCAST cable was worse. But fiber is usually symmetrical, and 5G wireless typically has an uplink bandwidth of half the downlink rate. This makes P2P more feasible.
Automatically exposing ports is very flaky and doing so manually is way beyond the understanding of almost anyone.
I mean how could it happen that such a basic utility as the router was developed with such fundamental design flaws that hosting a webserver at home is above the skills of 99% of people?
There’s a router in every home anywhere now, so this is a fact we’ll have to deal with for decades.
I’m pretty young so i was not around at the time. How did it come about?
But largely no one cares because you wouldn’t want to host any real website at home anyway. It’s extremely cheap and reliable to just rent a VPS.
https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
I would argue many aspects of the protocol’s design made it difficult to implement, for both vendors and networks. A simple “same protocol, larger address field” and more focus on backwards compatibility probably would have fared better.
Either way it doesn’t completely solve the problem mentioned above. You need a firewall to block inbound connections to things on your LAN. So to do p2p you need a way to add rules to allow the traffic you want in. So it either remains too complex for the average person to do manually, or you run something like uPNP. But that can have its own security considerations.
v6 does remove some of the complexities for trying to run services from private address space behind NAT though. So it’s an improvement.
Yet still, WSL doesn’t support v6… we have a long way to go before ipv6 can be a default option for hosting.
Another underrated benefit of P2P (if implemented in good faith) is that the users will have peace of mind with regards to the ownership of their data.
Famous last words! Not sure how users will establish the trustworthiness of P2P protocols (and there will be many competing versions), when now they cannot determine the trustworthiness of one service.
And with the popularity of the cloud it has made it available across data centres and even regions.
So it is debatable whether P2P is more reliable than centralised.
But upload speeds have risen a lot, despite many of them still being lower than downlink.