31–40 of 243 posts
It's basically a P2P based Dropbox with no accounts, full end-to-end encryption and no folder size limits.
It's not open source, but it can work without a central server if you need it to. It's also amazingly simple to set up, much simpler than sync thing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And cloud SaaS are enemies of both! After all, in order to have data freedom, you need to have something to open in that other program, and cloud solutions do their best to not give you proper open/save file (and even if there's an export function, and even if everything is actually included in the export, it often isn't followed by import function that could read that export). For this reason, I avoid using cloud Sa…
Absolutely. There are some exceptions though. Github is the obvious one. Dropbox by nature has your data constantly exported. Google for its sins has Google takeout.
Google - yes, web e-mail obviously is similar to the above; as for their office suite, I recently found a good excuse to justify shelling out for a proper Microsoft Office subscription (though I don't like that it's a subscription), and I stick to using the faster, locally-available, file-using, much more powerful (if still proprietary) software.
https://github.com/micro/micro https://micro.mu/docs/network.html
My company built this more than 10 years ago, and nobody was interested. Here's a press release from 2007: https://www.macworld.com/article/1058169/mcnucle.html
The cloud apps are not slow only because of moving data, but there is also a problem that an average server is fast(16cores CPU + 64GB RAM), but If it's used by let's say 100users, It means one user has only 0.16core + 0.64GB memory. So an average laptop(4cores/4GB) or phone(4cores/1GB) is way faster. Basically people buy billions of transistors to use them only as a terminal to the cloud. Not to mention privacy risks.
A week ago, I did showHN for skyalt.com. It's a local accessible database(+ analytics, which is coming soon). I'm still blown away how fast it is, that you can put tens of millions of rows to single table with many columns on consumer hardware and you don't pay for scale or attachments.
It also depends on _who_ owns the data. In an enterprise environment the company usually has a vital interest in the data and on-premise deployments are a good way of retaining cloud computing without giving up data ownership. I'm surprised that more SAAS products don't offer on-premise given the privacy and ownership benefits. The tricky part there is making software that is easy to deploy and maintain, which might be the reason that it isn't done more often.
A product like Grammarly that allowed on-premise deployment would side-step a lot of the issues with sending all that data to a third party. I can't imagine a law firm ever being able to (legally) sign up for that.
Today's SaaS world is largely economically opposed to the idea of data ownership. It's a lot easier to make money by renting people access to their data. The problem is not inherently technical. The solution must address the fact that the software businesses favor cloud solutions and other systems that make it difficult to stop spending money
Yes, this is it. We went from local, to local infrastructure/IT, to cloud services in which data is mixed with other data and ownership is nebulous. The business as you say, favours this, because the 'downsides' of the model are more on the side of risk (your data leaking, losing rights to your data, your data being 'sold' etc.) - which we don't like to pay for until it's too late. Unless there are 'big scares' or re…
It’s strange that Evernote is omitted from the list - it is a great example of local-first app. Their recent-ish history, when the their free tire become limited to only syncing a few devices, illustrates that even if software is fully local, and supports open formats, having the functional cloud matters, a lot.