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Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

> It happened for telephone and email because they were developed in a different era. It's not going to happen for IM because we're in the era of "why build it if I can't profit from it?".

Who is going to pay for the bandwidth for 5MB to 100MB photos/videos/gif/files that are sent through the network?

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Signal runs on donations with a small staff and budget, and even still half of its infrastructure budget goes to sending a verification SMS on sign-up. You can run an open chat network as a tiny non-profit, and any hope of profits is in the same ballpark. For the incumbents it’s a loss leader for other services, and that complicates the whole analysis going on in this thread.

This makes no sense to me and is probably why we're so far away from a good solution - I pay my ISP for bandwidth to "the network", which includes other devices on "the network". This is the problem, not everything has to go through a "server" which then needs "bandwidth".

Surely, the cost of delivering a packet of data is at least partly function of how far the packet has to travel. Assuming your ISP has to pickup the cost of delivering this packet to every corner of the world, the ISP would have to increase prices to account for this (similar to paying extra for international phone calls).

Currently, it seems like a variety of entities are subsidizing this via things like peering agreements and whatnot to make the use of internet simple for the end user.

So what happens if you send a message with a video and the recipient’s device is not responsive, say because it is out of battery or data service range? Should the message simply be lost or should it be stored somewhere until it can be successfully sent?

That "somewhere" could be a server embedded inside your home router provided by your ISP or another "dumb" mailbox of your choosing. That would of course require regulation or an industry-wide push towards P2P, which is unlikely at best.

The sending service should do the hosting so they can pass it on to the sender themselves. Receiving services can fetch thumbnails or full images on demand

What incentive does the sending service have to pay to host? The answer to this is the response to:

> "why build it if I can't profit from it?".

Like any protocol, to benefit from its network of users.

They can make the sender pay for hosting. Look how paying to receive spam worked out in the USA.

you already lost me

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