It's the only way to run a truly global network. Otherwise you'll get a cluster of nodes controlled by a tiny oligarchy. That's what happened to Ethereum, where "this is fine" and "hardware is getting cheaper" narratives were also dominant.

>Good thing that with the improvements to lightwallets you’ll only need to have 1 person in your social circle that you somewhat trust running a node.

Even Bitcoin, where the chain can be pruned to a couple of gigabytes, has only ~16500 active nodes, and the number is not growing anymore. That's one node per ~400000 people.

The cost of running a node needs to be comparable to the cost of running ActivityPub server. Only then node-sharing might become prevalent.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Hosting this server is more expensive than my Monero full node since I already have a PC and got a used 25€ 500GB SSD just for the node. I doubt cost of hardware is actually the main reason why people don't run nodes. The biggest reason would be that they simply don't have a PC they can leave on all the time or are on limited data plans and downloading anything above a few GB would mean they don't have internet for the rest of the month. My whole point is just that storage is not this massive bottleneck bitcoiners make it out to be, there are others that are way bigger.