Nothing wrong with p2p. But often it's simply overkill.
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.
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?
It was NAT. We ran out of v4 addresses and self hosting / p2p became much harder. And now many iot devices depend on Nat existing as some kind of security measure.
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.
So what happened with IPv6 then? Seems to me that that we solved the v4 address exhaustion problem and then just… didn’t use it? IPv6 support is mostly just a greyed out option on a buried configuration menu as far as I can tell.
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.
Reliability could be improved if all required functionality is P2P, as the program would not need to rely on a third party server. Of course, this assumes that the party/parties on the other end of the P2P connection are online, which is the downside of all P2P services.
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.
> if implemented in good faith ... 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.
Messaging, chat, video calls, and gaming without the need for a centralized service. All you need is a directory so you can find the other party. Like Skype before Microsoft.
i do think this trend is happening and will unlock some use cases. Not sure about P2P though. One reason I switched to home 5G is because i can get 40 mbps up for $25, where I needed to pay $100 to comcast for similar up speed. My main use case is streaming my playstation 4 remotely so I can play on the go.
I am using tmobile's Home 5G right now. I was waiting for Verizon for the mmWave 5G because I think the latency will be lower. If Verizon comes around soon, I'll switch. I have both Verizon and Tmobile phone service so I can get the bundle discounts with home through either. I think both of them are ~$50/mo standalone or $25/mo with a 5G smartphone plan.
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.