@dctrud@mastodon.randomroad.social good points.

I have wondered if you could provide a public service with a backend composed of volunteers' home computers composed over a VPN. All computers are partial replicas but with enough full replication when combined with peers, even sharing load they can serve with only the data they have.

This would let the cheapest compute hosting to be used to host the public endpoint (hosting bandwidth use might be double, to route from VPN nodes to clients).