@joeyh According to this FAQ, a server could ask for source over the network... but it depends on "reasonable expectation" that a person may be on the other end requesting source.

Maybe it's totally unlikely. I'm not sure how most clients would detect that they're being requested source over the network in the client->server model, or how they would deliver it in many cases. The answer is usually easier for server->client. But I also don't know of any cases of it happening, so it's somewhat idle speculation for now.

The peer to peer example is much more direct, yes. In an ideal peer to peer network, we should expect that both persons and non-persons will be on different nodes. But maybe in an ideal peer to peer network, delivering source should be easy anyway! (There's still the question of, is it easy to do so by default? I'm uncertain, especially in the actor model example posed previously. I thought about this a lot in the context of a "federated MUD" type system, though I think it would apply to many federated + p2p systems.)