Unfortunately regular people don't understand why they'd use something like this rather than just using Facebook, Instagram, Google Photos, etc. and the major limitation of self-hosting this way is that it's only accessible when your computer is on, which regular people aren't used to.

A lot of people also had pretty limited bandwidth. I was in Australia on ADSL2+ with around 9Mbps down and 700Kbps up.

I think plug-and-play NAS systems are the closest equivalent today, especially now that a lot of people have faster connections. Comcast boosted upload speeds in some markets last year - in my area their regular plans start at 300Mbps down and 100Mbps up. A lot of NAS systems are still missing the "regular person can easily set it up" aspect though, and I'm not sure if they handle sharing stuff with external users.