Updated June 19th, 2023 Sorry, your browser doesn’t support embedded videos. But that doesn’t mean you can’t watch it! You can download Small Is Beautiful #23 directly, and watch it with your favourite video player. Small Is Beautiful (Oct, 2022): What is the Small Web and why do we need it? Today, I want to introduce you to a concept – and a vision for the future of our species in the digital and networked age – that I’ve spoken about for a while but never specifically written about:
Wasn’t this the intention of the web originally? I’m sure I remember reading about netscape and people hosting their own websites locally…
That was the original plan. One thing that screwed with it was ADSL with very low upload speeds.
If you are self-hosting, you need a symmetrical connection as you are sending the site to everyone who visits. If you are using the net only to consume (download) it is not as important.
Or Australian post-adsl2, which still has slow upload speeds, I have a gigabit plan which is basically 800/44
100mbps up would cost $250 instead of my $130pm and would cut the download by -67% to 250mbps.
Yep. Not being symmetrical when on fibre in insane.
The sad part is you would be better off with 200/200 than either plan listed, and it would be less work on the network side to provision.
True, the ability to effectively serve content was outpaced by the ability to make harder to serve content. But not anymore! For people with good connections anyway.
Wouldn’t it be great if the FCC (or whoever) forced ISPs to only sell symmetrical service?
It’s not possible everywhere. Copper line physically can’t be for the end user, same with satellite and rural broadband. Fibre is pretty much the only thing that can be symmetrical. Unless you get some symmetrically shit ADSL.
True but we lost 20 years in the process.
The pushing/rolling out tiny upload/ big download ADSL over symmetrical dsl was a deliberate decision on the part of the Telcos. I worked in the telco network space back then.
In the late 90s/early 00s I had a 10m/10m cable connection and was able to host multiplayer game servers from my apartment.
I moved out of the cable area, and it was 20 years before I had 10m upload again. So the game servers died and these days self-hosted multiplayer games are basically nonexistent compared to corp hosted games that shut down when they want you to move to this years version.