My cofounder has been working on an upgrade for Sia that switches the core consensus engine to 'utreexo', which uses an accumulator rather than an entire blockchain history to verify new blocks and transactions. This brings down the effective size of the chain for users to just a couple of megabytes for the same history that currently takes 23 GB.
It would be cool if you can implement a light node (just enough to download files) in a browser extension, so people browse Skynet directly.
Otherwise, if people mostly use web portals, then it's not really free and decentralized, as people are essentially at mercy of portals they use. In fact, if application code itself is served through a portal, it is less secure than normal web.
Note: Taek is the same user that the SiaSetup website (the main source of documentation about the project) is criticizing as "unstable project management". Be warned about this man before sinking any significant amount of personal time or money into this project. Source: https://siasetup.info/concerns-about-sia-and-skynet#banned
We've banned this account. Single-purpose accounts are not allowed on HN, and creating one just to stir up the community against a rival project or (worse) some person is a bad sign. Regardless of who's right in this, there's clearly a pre-existing agenda and probably an internecine conflict being imported to the community here, and that sort of campaign isn't in the spirit of this site.
What would be in the spirit of this site is open, thoughtful critique that explained what the problems or criticisms are so that readers could make up their minds for themselves. "Be warned about this man" is a long way down from that. Please don't do that here, and especially please don't create accounts to do it with.