Hacker News Reader

Comment by pokstad | Hacker News Reader

A lot of fancy tech for only 805MB per user (based on estimate of 500 million users). What if we had a pure p2p web app using webrtc & local storage to replace Facebook? Think everyone could spare 805MB?

Calculation: https://www.google.com/search?q=(300PB)%2F(400000000)

View on HN

You're a bit behind, it's 1.23 billion monthly active users or if you feel that's a bit disingenuous: 757 million daily active users.

Source: http://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/

PS. you calculated using 400 million.

300 pb / 10^9 ~ 300 10^15B/10^9 ~ 300 10^6 B ~ 300MB/user.

Considering my latest fb backup was ~18MB (unzipped), out of which 14MB was pictures, this doesn't sound too unreasonable to me. If anything, it sounds very conservative. If I was actively using fb for photos, I'd easily have at least 100 times as many, maybe 200 times as many. Not to mention that the single (short) video I've uploaded is 1.4 MB.

brilliant idea, lets have 500mil people leave their computers/laptops on 24/7 just so you can check their status and look at lolcats

Facebook had 500MM users four years ago...

What about persistence?

There was a trend a few years ago where users would deactivate their FB accounts when logging out, so that people couldn't see/interact with them while they were away.

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/social.media/11/12/facebook...

So maybe that's not as stupid as it sounds. You could also have some level of caching, eg I visited your pictures yesterday so people can get it from me for some time if you're away.

I definitely see potential in this form of "distributed but controlled" storage mechanisms.

Similarly, I like the idea of having a local backup drive, and another copy at a friend's place (possibly encrypted).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com