when there are people on Mars the only widely accessible websites will be those rare few that actually have their own servers on each planet, very-nearly-zero-cost IPFS and Dat websites, and those with rather expensive CDNs.

@alexandra
Won't all space communication be via satellite? Assuming owning a satellite would be cheap If made/deployed in space- I imagine space internet would be the final frontier for the internet.

@lucifargundam@qoto.org It takes between about 4 and about 24 minutes to send signals between Mars and Earth, regardless of how you do it. As a result, it's not tractable to view a Web page hosted on Earth from Mars (the round-trip time is of course twice the one-way time), so for the Web to be usable on an interplanetary scale at least one copy has to be hosted on each planet.

Even running servers in several geographic locations on Earth is more difficult than running just one, when you factor in the effort of making sure changes on one server stay in sync on the others and/or deploying code and content changes to all of them in a reasonably seamless manner.

Of course, the reality is there will be services that abstract this, just like we have CDNs and serverless cloud now. But it'll still be significantly more expensive than IPFS/Dat.

@lucifargundam@qoto.org This is all above the level of the Internet itself, which would probably end up in a multi-level situation where most traffic is intraplanetary via the existing IP stack and interplanetary traffic like email, CDN updates, etc. go through special gateways to be transmitted via delay-tolerant protocols by powerful radio antennas or whatever.