* Most personal devices are battery powered and intermittently operated.
* Many are mobile in terms of physical location and logical network (home WiFi, work/school WiFi, cellular).
Having a third, highly available, high upload capacity location to stage data between production and consumption wins because it is a genuinely effective solution to problems inherent in sharing data between end users.
There's no technical reason for this to be the case. ISPs adapted to the needs of the web, not the other way around.
> lack upload bandwidth
This is relative to each user. The vast majority wouldn't require much upload bandwidth, and there could be technical solutions to address this (caching nodes, data expiration, P2P, etc.).
The biggest technical challenges of large web services are because of the scale needed to support the large amount of users. If we had built services and tools around the inherent distributed nature of the web, centralization and all the problems caused by scale wouldn't be an issue.
> battery powered and intermittently operated
> mobile
Why should user data be highly available? If I'm physically unreachable or just want to be offline, shouldn't my data be unreachable as well? Besides, all of these can have technical solutions as well.
> Having a third, highly available, high upload capacity location to stage data between production and consumption wins
I'm not disagreeing, but a) this wouldn't be required by most users, and b) why couldn't this be under control of users as well? The fact no such (simple) solution exists today doesn't mean that it couldn't have gained traction back when browsers were getting adopted, and today we would've had a completely different web. Unfortunately incentives are turned on its head, users aren't educated about the harms of giving their data away because they've learned that it's the way the web works, we have to pass laws to protect user data, and a vocal minority of web developers have been swimming upstream and trying to undo the harms of centralization for decades with lackluster results.
One of the main reasons we “hire” the platform companies to convey our data to other people rather than opening TCP sockets to each other directly is precisely async delivery. No one wants to use a social network where we can only see each other’s content if we’re using our laptops at the same time. Just make a phone call at that point.
Now maybe you could ask for federated, open standard queueing mechanisms. But we have one of those! It’s called SMTP, and it’s not really up to the needs of modern social applications. And maybe we could do something about that. But it’s also in the nature of federated open standards that are widely deployed to ossify. The other service that Facebook and Twitter are doing for you besides pub/sub is having the coordination and agency to update their own deployments over time, something that e.g. the set of all relevant email operators does not have.
It's not just the data you obviously fill in yourself
and that's before considering cookies other than letting you auto login to a specific site you already logged in to before
Also, isn't Whatsapp owned by facebook now? Don't trust facebook or anything they own