In our desktop app we currently behave like a "Full Node". On the web frontend we behave like a "Light Node" which trusts its own server to validate the content.

User Pain: The desktop app consumes too much disk, CPU, and network resources.

We could introduce a Desktop app mode, "light mode" where it relies on various servers to provide the current snapshots. It would enable good performance while having a much lighter use of local resources.

User Pain: The desktop app is too slow to load content, even when it has lots of disk space and good network resources

The best of both worlds is "Hybrid mode", which mimics our current full mode, but still allows for fast loads where a server snapshot is temporarily trusted while the full source blobs are downloaded and eventually validated. This would require improved UX to show the user that this temporary snapshot was provided from a certain domain.