Peer to peer mode ?

The original web was what we call today "peer to peer", that is, people's computers where connected to the network and interacting directly with each other, to talk or access data for example. If anyone wanted to make a web site, he hosted it on his own computer and the person who was interested accessed to his computer directly. That was real peer to peer.

But now most of the web usage has changed, as people access to centralized servers, completely independant from the people who own the information. Blogs are hosted on blogspot.com, people talk to each other on facebook.com, send emails to hotmail.com, and even do instant messenging via MSN centralized servers on miscrosoft.com, etc. Benjamin Bayart, president of FDN (French Data Network, an associated web access provider), gave a conference on the subject [fr].

The only way to get back our data would be the use of peer to peer communication, direct communication between two computers. You can host your emails on your computer, as well as your blog, and use an alternative to MSN to communicate directly. But there are two major issues:

• You have to let your computer always switched on, which consumes a lot of energy ;

• The installation and configuration of these services is not trivial ;

• Most of web providers limit the upload bandwidth, so that if somebody wants to download anything from your computer it will be very slow compared to a download from a centralized server

I think the two first issues could be resolved in a "plug & play" box containing all this, but I haven't seen any offer, if you know of some please let us know !

The third one is quite hard to resolve, as it depends of the commercial web offer.

Presentation

Hi,
I'm creating this blog to express the way I see the web to be humanist, if this concept has any sense.
How can the web technologies help people in their common life ? Does the web bring real solutions for people or only create new artificial needs ?

Articles to come : communication means (email, social nets), publication (blogs, web sites), information (news web sites, personal web sites, blogs, encyclopedias).