[stev0lution]

I really enjoy your thinking.. Do you have some kind of blog where I can follow you? :D As you already mentioned, contributing whatever resources you consume is relatively unreasonable on mobile devices, because it would pretty much double data and battery usage. So while there is most likely some kind of overhead connected to the third solution you suggested, I still think it is probably the easiest one because it doesn't require any new specialised hardware.

Maybe regulation can solve some of the problems with the current systems, but the idealist in me really wants to see provably transparent (open source) and secure solutions which don't require trust in the hardware so we can still make use of modern, efficient (federated) server farms without having to giving up control over our data.

[api]

My seldom-updated personal site is http://adamierymenko.com/

It's actually worse than doubling. The nature of distributed systems means that participating in resources consumed normally triples resource consumption at least. I'm not aware of any approach to decentralization of services like Facebook, Twitter, etc. that would merely double it.

Your typical desktop or laptop has a lot of resources to spare. Your typical mobile device has none. Mobile promotes a client/server mainframe/dumb-term architecture for fundamental technical reasons.