There's a few peer-to-peer hosting solutions, but it's not really practical for a heavy database-driven site with large images, privately-available files, etc.
For a start, most people still don't have the upstream bandwidth to serve material fast. They might be halfway around the world - how do you know who to connect to? What happens if someone turns off their computer - does your website just die for everyone nearby? What about when someone posts a new file - how does it get to everyone else? What happens if you reply to a comment which someone else deleted, but your server doesn't know yet? Etc.
Most issues can theoretically be solved, or at least ameliorated through methods such as sharding, global locking, etc. There's reams on Wikipedia. But it is an order of magnitude more complicated than developing and running a fan site, which is already surprisingly complex if you're developing it yourself (in part because you already have to deal with multiple users accessing the site at once).
There's a few peer-to-peer hosting solutions, but it's not really practical for a heavy database-driven site with large images, privately-available files, etc.
For a start, most people still don't have the upstream bandwidth to serve material fast. They might be halfway around the world - how do you know who to connect to? What happens if someone turns off their computer - does your website just die for everyone nearby? What about when someone posts a new file - how does it get to everyone else? What happens if you reply to a comment which someone else deleted, but your server doesn't know yet? Etc.
Most issues can theoretically be solved, or at least ameliorated through methods such as sharding, global locking, etc. There's reams on Wikipedia. But it is an order of magnitude more complicated than developing and running a fan site, which is already surprisingly complex if you're developing it yourself (in part because you already have to deal with multiple users accessing the site at once).