Hey Joaquin, good questions.
Each SSB node holds all the data from their friends, so it’s definitely not the entire SSB network. It’s a network of friends (or relationships of “trust”, if the nodes are non-human), so each node only cares about friend nodes. This mitigates the storage requirements. Overall, the storage story is not that bad, because most of the space used are blobs (images, videos, files) and these can be purged whenever you need. The non-deletable storage that SSB requires is for the log, the low-level messages stored, and this is usually under 1 GB. E.g. my log is currently 596 MB, and I have a lot of messages and friends on my log since I’m a quite popular node. A typical log would be around 300 MB. There isn’t a hard storage limit, but most normal uses of SSB would stay within reasonable amount of storage, because of Dunbar’s number. In other words, storage in each SSB node does not scale to global demands (as opposed to blockchain approaches that require each node to store everything).
About initial sync, you’re right that it can take a long time. Currently it’s one of the most important problems in SSB that we’re trying to improve. It also depends on the amount of data to be synced. If it’s an old node (e.g. 2 years old) syncing with an fresh new node, then it may last something like 20min on a WLAN connection (both peers in the same LAN). Basically it’s the time that it takes to download ~400 MB of the core log, plus the time to index the database (SSB apps do this), plus the time to download some blobs (on demand, blobs are not necessary to get started).
All in all, the network may be ever expanding globally, but locally each peer only cares about its friend peers, so devices do not need to accompany global growth.
Very interesting this Pecan Pico! I also shared this thread with the Scuttlebutt community and they were really interested in Aerocene, and its manifesto too.