I am a self (sovereign) hosting enthusiast. I have built a pretty nice computer room and self-host all the things. I am an avid listener of the Self Hosted podcast.
I see lots of folks doing amazing work in the BTC/SATS etc space and things like V4V , micro payments, removing middleman that "provide trust" . All of that is amazing.
However, I see a problem looming. As this alternative payment/transaction/value rail gains credence, it's main vulnerable underbelly is the "Internet" , which is really concentrated on a few large BGP Autonomous Systems (AS).
I have been focusing on helping extend internet access , via high altitude balloons. It's a multi year project, and I'll do a dedicated post or 3 on that soon.
Is anyone looking at how we can not let perfect be the enemy of good, and remove things like Cloudflare CDN using IPFS/Apache Traffic Server? Can we all "give a little, get a little" in terms of a whole bunch of CDN nodes (can we build a trading bot that constantly scoops up inventory from lowendbox.com and we can just all toss in 5.00 a month to the bot via sat streaming)?
I've worked at some of the worlds largest internet brands and handled massive CDN build outs. Where we pushed content right into global distributed RAM caches as the origin servers to serve the mid tier and downstream tiers fast enough etc.
CDN is one of the few things remaining as a choke point. Can we build a cooperative of 10,000 "little islands" and make one?
Things like NOSTR etc are amazing. However, in the interim, how do we solve the current "middle mile" problem of (say) distributing podcasts ? Sure, RSS is how they are "sovereign" but usually that just points to "someone else computer" as the distribution point. This problem isn't solved by blockchain (ie podcast index/hive etc), that just tells clients "go to the CDN and pull an updated version".