A messaging protocol is not enough, decentralized communication platforms like freenet or i2p exist for 20 years now. And the problem with relays is the same as with big corporations, once they get big and successful, they dictate their terms and are regulated. The decentralization needs to happen on the hardware level, a global network with technologies like OLSR, but not enough people are technically versed enough or bother at all.
Discussion
OLSR?
routing protoclol for ad-hoc networks, where you share your wifi i.e.
How does this help with the data storage issue?
Data storage is not the only issue, a bigger issue is censorship on ISP level, a wireless mesh network could help with that. For data storage, well I don’t think you can build a decentralized data center with zaps :) For file storage, I don’t know, maybe a small device that you just plug in, which runs its own IPFS node to store and distribute your own files?
https://ankush-chavan.medium.com/twitter-data-storage-and-processing-dd13fd0fdb30
Although one tweet consists of a 140-characters message, it is seen that Tweeter generates more than 12 terabytes of data per day. That equals to the 84 terabytes per week and 4.3 petabytes per year.
Twitter is making efficient use of BigData concepts. The first technology that Twitter uses to manage the data at a large scale is the Hadoop. By means of Hadoop, Twitter is using the concept of Distributed Storage. Hadoop clusters are running both compute and HDFS(Hadoop Distributed File System).
Twitter has multiple clusters storing over 500 PB of data. The biggest cluster of Twitter is over 10K nodes. Twitter runs 150K applications and launches 130M containers per day.