Personal Data Storage Is an Idea Whose Time Has Come

Consumers want what they're told to want by a constant barrage of commercial propaganda.

Devices are large and non-serviceable because this way they can be sold with a higher profit margin. Side effect being that the larger screens make the embedded commercial propaganda more effective and easy to deliver.

I agree that people don't care enough about owning their data for it to matter more than what the companies want to push, which is of course monetizing the data and maximizing user lock-in.

Similarly, I think it's in the companies' interests to use non-swappable batteries: simpler and cheaper to manufacture (I think this is the main reason) and the device is made obsolete earlier which is an added bonus. Maybe small improvements in size etc., but that's a very small difference. Modern phones are already larger even with non-swappable batteries so I'm not sure it mattered. But again, having a non-swappable battery has to be weighed against other features, and availability of alternatives. In the end, people just care more about the other features, even though swappable battery would be a good thing.

Just to conclude: I don't believe markets work to fully cater to what customers actually want. It's more like customers (and other parties) get a compromise between what different parties in the market want.

People want vendor lock in...otherwise they wouldnt pay for it.

People want bait and switch sales tactics...otherwise they wouldnt work.

People are perfectly fine with high rents...if they didnt, they would not pay them.

People want their smartphones to be deliberately slowed down when they get old...otherwise theyd vote against it with their wallet.

Wouldn't that turn into did:plc:facebook all over again?

But from a practical point of view a decentralised system should not rely on domain name ownership. Any computer can generate a private/public key pair, which is all you need for identify.

> foo.bar.baz.bim.bim.bap.com

is owned by the owner of bap.com, under the current system.

I've been waiting a long time. Over that time, the closed services have only gotten more popular and no regular person is ever complaining that they are "hostile".

Regular people don't like ads, but they dislike paying even more, so they're pretty OK with the status quo. They certainly don't want to be paying for a domain name and paying for hosting.

There was no choice but to use someone else’s computers for moving around large files. Plus CGNAT and whatnot making people have to use dynamic DNS. If a turnkey solution could have existed 20 years ago, maybe a market for it would have developed before the big companies locked it down.

I, and many like me, would pay for centralised service or any other service if it meant that we own our data and can tune the algorithms to our own preferences. I wont pay for doom scrolling, but would gladly pay for algorithm to serve me content that would better my human experience.

Governments have given corporation to much power, people need to rise up agains that, if it remains the same in AI age, we humans, and our collective mind would erode to the point of no return.

So, why can't I have that?

During my standard install of my favourite distro, I would only need to enter my name, subdomain and email password for everything to be magically installed, so I have a standard web site, some file sharing and email out of the box.

However, it would take me a fortnight to get this setup and I wouldn't have a clue how the email actually worked, if it worked. This wouldn't be my first rodeo either, so I wouldn't be starting entirely from scratch. I am also sure that there are some that have setup umpteen virtual linux machines that they could get everything done by tea-time.

Whether two hours or two weeks, it is still not that much work in the bigger scheme of things, which makes me wonder, why haven't I got some all-singing and all-dancing bash script that automates the whole process? But why has nobody else done it either, to make it fully open source and as easy to obtain as it can be?

Also, why can't I buy a glorified router box that does all of this? It could take the mainboard and power circuitry from any laptop, and, out the box, provide a decent web server, mail server and whatever else.

There is a suspicious absence of products in this space.

I started with CasaOS and Jellyfin. Quickly outgrew Casa and moved to learning Docker and setting up my own container stack, moving from media self-hosting to adding new containers of stuff like budgeting apps. I’m still working on building out my server but every container I add, the goal is basically to self-host a version of something I’m doing on a centralized service on the web and ultimately take my data and privacy back.

I will say some peoples’ elitist attitudes about stuff can be annoying and discouraging; it’s the same general spillover attitude from the Linux supremacy crowd. When I started with Casa I had someone basically tell me I was wasting my time and if I wasn’t running everything in VMs why bother. Which is entirely the opposite attitude to get “normies” and low technical literacy people on board, they need easy one-click install solutions like CasaOS. And if they decide to move onto something more complex, well I’m sure they can figure out how to reimage and rebuild their server in ProxMox or Docker as part of that.

Can you? A site's TOS will say that by sharing your data, you grant them the right to display, reuse and redistribute it, the same as you do now. And that would take precedence because your host provided the data. They requested and you provided.

The only thing that would change that is actual legislation. But then the legislation is orthogonal to personal data storage. If you want legislation for that, pursue legislation for that. Personal data storage is completely separate, and the two shouldn't be confused with each other.

But it doesn't? Obviously every site's TOS will say that by providing them with your data they can use it for all sorts of purposes. If you sued, you'd lose.

And you're generally going to want to make your data available to the various services requesting it, because otherwise most people won't see your posts and comments on their preferred platform.

Not true -- advertising profiles are vastly more valuable when based on a lifetime of data.

> also by having ability to enable/disable access to your data, you have the power of who gets what

But realistically, when are you ever going to disable access? If you want people to be able to read your replies no matter what social network they're using, you're going to make those replies available to every social network.

> and for which purpose also reselling of your data should become illegal to start with

This is my point. The solution here is legal, not technological. Personal data storage doesn't change anything legally, and changing the law would prevent reselling even if you didn't have personal data storage.

It seems important not to confuse the two, in order not to give people false hopes.

Don't get me wrong, I'm in the tech industry and generally more online then likely 95% of the population, but ime ... Nobody even knows what bluesky is?

(They also don't know what X is, though they DO know what Twitter is)

And even more niche products like mostodon, the fediverse altogether etc are entirely unknown to most of the tech industry too.

I know the topic of mental health and social media is different from the topic of independence vs the monolithic web. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t significant overlap in terms of those who are willing to boycott Meta for privacy reasons are also the kinds of people who likely dislike social media for other societal reasons too.

This is a victim fantasy, and if being under intense attack from the state meant you were rebelling against the authoritarian system, then you would be capping for Parler, Gab, X and Tiktok. Bluesky, however, is only under attack from its own users, who are authoritarian trolls. At least the management seem to be getting sick of them, because it is actively inhibiting their growth* that they've been used as a base for the angriest, most entitled, least interesting people on the planet. It must be hell trying to manage a site filled with people demanding to speak to the manager.

It is also just a centralized twitter clone backed by VC looking for a return; not a revolution.

[*] Of course, it was their strategy to cater to that group because of all the free advertising they'd get from the media. But it had and has nothing to do with Dorsey's hopeful redemption arc, which was only about decentralization (i.e. not having speech under the control of people like him) and resilience. Bluesky was supposed to be bittorrent.

or unless you don’t comply quickly enough when they say “jump” and they unilaterally take away “your” gvoice number.

And hope you never have your identity stolen, or an account hijacked, since that was the only proof of who you are.

"over the past 20 years" is not the same as next 20 years

What happens when the rising tide stops but the boats still have to rise?

My bet is that we will hate Google, Facebook, Amazon, modern Microsoft a lot more than people in the 80s and 90s hated IBM and old Microsoft.

Giving all your data for better services is easily hijackable.

You start.

edit: I have no idea what people think they're talking about when they're like "people should just" and "you should just." The cage is not all in your mind, dude; it's an actual cage, guarded by people with guns.

Understand your enthusiasm but to relate the discussion back to Tim Berners-Lee idea for SOLID data storage protocol... Running self-hosted things like email, NextCloud, Plex, sandstorm.io, etc -- are not relevant to the gp's "nothing changes" complaint.

Without dissecting the SOLID protocol, the basic idea is that transactional data is stored on a separate user-specified "storage pod". It's not just simplistic sharing of "name/address" profile data. Imagining some idealized scenarios might help:

- Spotify music : instead of "playlists, listening history" being stored on Spotify's servers, it is stored on the user's storage pod. Spotify makes API calls to constantly save that data to the user-controlled data location. If the user then cancels Spotify and switches to Apple Music service, Apple can just read the "music playlists data storage pod" and all the recommendations work as expected. No import/export.

- Amazon shopping: instead of order history being in a data silo on Amazon servers. It could be stored in user's "ecommerce orders storage pod". The user can then give permission to Walmart.com to read it to provide product recommendations.

The user "doesn't own their own data" continues with the current AI chat tools. The users' ChatGPT "prompts history" is stored at OpenAI instead of a user-controlled "storage pod".

The walled-garden and data silos don't just restrict consumers. Businesses have the same issue. They use SAP accounting software package or a SaaS tool and their data is locked up in those services. Exports are sometimes possible but cumbersome.

Therefore, self-hosting Plex on local server for a personal music library instead of using Spotify cloud doesn't affect the "nothing changes" narrative. TBL still wants people to have the flexibility/convenience of using cloud services but somehow still keep "ownership of their data".

On the other hand, if you were self-hosting a SOLID Storage Pod at home, and a company like Spotify wrote listening data to it, that's when the narrative changes.

It should be obvious that companies are not incentivized to write transactional data to users' storage pods which explains why the SOLID protocol doesn't seem to gain much traction for the last 9 years.

Sometimes HN makes me feel like I'm the literal last remaining person on the planet who just... uses a desktop computer, and stores data on SSDs and HDDs, all physically connected to the machine, and never worries about how to access this data from another device because there are no other devices from which it should be accessed.

I mean, okay, fine, I do things like publishing to GitHub. But I still have a local copy, and I'm in control.

Not even close to the case for any big player. It just exists as a moat for smaller companies.