There are lots of places where we have trained ourselves to think that timeliness is the most important quality when it absolutely isn't. If I drive into a tunnel and my family has to wait an hour before they see the new photo of my son, that is not an epic tragedy.
There are also maturing p2p ways to help solve this problem. If my sister gets my update with the new photo before I hit the tunnel, she can share it with my mom whenever they manage to connect.
stickfigure|6 years ago
That's the experience we have right now, with centralized servers. With a P2P system the experience is: My sister sees that I uploaded a new picture, tries to click on it, and gets some opaque timeout error because unbeknownst to her I drove into a tunnel. Depending on whether or not my phone is destroyed in an accident before I emerge, she may never see the picture.
Unreliable distributed systems look intermittently and unpredictably broken to users.