Great insight, and I agree. With a lot of family and some friends in rural parts of the U.S., the weak internet and cable connections are detrimental to any sort of internet-based tech.

What would you use then?

Linode, DigitalOcean, or a $200 used server from EBay. Both Linode and DO also have really good Kubernetes services. AWS and alike force users to stick to their ecosystem of products, and come with all sorts of weird pricing models. And if you really need some sort of serverless features or BaaS, you can just self-host that on a VPS.

Binary lane for Australia is fantastic.

Echo this. great pricepoint, I'm on a BSD box and their console/backend has been flawless. And, its full dualstack v4/v6

Would you find an issue with user interaction though? If you provide a means of customization, then your site’s aesthetic depends upon a user’s incentive to change their page’s display. Once a certain fraction of ppl stop caring, then you’d see a visual degradation of the site that would cause a ripple effect.

A decentralized social network protocol is needed (ActivityPub is something like this), data stored in a neutral way, and the software. When exchanging data between users, you exchange only data, and you see it based on your software (protocol implementation).

The software would ideally be hosted on the cloud, so it's always online. You log in your software and see all your updates/interact with others.