I'm pretty sure anything running on the mainnet these days will be 10x more expensive than a classic centralized option just with gas fees and is as such completely useless.
Yep there is so much overhead to making things decentralized. Take a look at filecoin sealing. Its a super cool system with a bunch of fun cryptography and math, but generating the proofs requires a lot of time and compute power and adds a whole bunch of restrictions to how you can upload data.
If you really, really, want to say your storage is decentralized, use it, but S3 is a 1000x simpler.
- Economy of scale means this won't be "AirBnB for hosting". I can't negotiate power costs or get as much efficiency out of my operations as someone with a real datacenter. Not even close. [EDIT: see also, Bitcoin mining, which started out "anyone can do it!" but wasn't anymore as soon as real money got involved. Just buy an expensive rack of ASICs that aren't good for anything else, and find some place to arbitrage power costs. Yeah, real accessible to the masses, that is.]
- All these "decentralize everything down to the end user" efforts neglect that most personal computing devices run on battery and sleep most of the time, these days, and that trend does not seem likely to reverse. See also: IPFS. Most folks don't have an always-on desktop- or server-class computer for this sort of thing, at all, and would have to buy one to participate. That's not super appealing. Also, decentralization tends to come at costs for routing and lookup, which often end up eating cycles (so, power, so, battery) on the end user's machine, compared with centralized options. See again: IPFS. So they end up adding centralized access points that are what most users actually interact with (see, yet again...) or their entire audience is computer nerds. If they have any real, viable use case, it ends up being as part of a centralized system, to help make it more resilient or cheaper to operate.
Just to make a point, it's fine if something's audience is entirely composed of computer nerds or academics at first. After refinement it can gradually make its way into consumer world; e.g., the internet, the most successful distributed system.
