Comment by spauldo

I think you're taking the "FTP" part a bit too literally here. No one's suggesting we'd jump in a terminal and type in FTP commands manually or even use the FTP protocol itself - we've got better options today, and we'd have even better options if the Internet had had global node-to-node connectivity all along.

It'd likely just be built into your operating system's tooling. Your file manager would be able to access other machines it can authenticate to, or you'd automount remote directories on login, etc.

The reason people use cloud storage systems for moving files around is because they have to. A 3rd party server is required because we don't have node-to-node connectivity.

Hell, we'd likely have had cloud storage options sooner because people wanting extra remote storage would totally have been a thing.