Personal data storage is an idea whose time has come

It was an idea that never went away. Many people have wanted to self host everything. Sadly companies have found it easier to centralise, and then as a bonus can monetise that data.

> The fact that the AT Protocol relies on everyone having a domain name

Well, either that or someone else hosting their identity (see did:plc), which seems to be the part you say should exist?

Probably DNS is the most decentralized centralized system we have available today that most people can actually use, unless I'm missing some obviously better way of doing the same thing?

But what is the alternative. Systems that bind identity to the phone number give even less control. Systems that use a self generated cryptographic key (like Scuttlebutt) are even less practical.

DNS is not perfect but I think the best we have for now.

I’m continuing to explore ideas like this in my DN project (short for DownloadNet or Discernet). The core concept: a browser controller / instrumentation harness that, by default, saves everything you browse to disk, and makes it available via full-text search or a browsable alphabetical index.

The browser controller actually runs its own local server that handles indexing and archiving on your disk, while the front end lives inside your browser as a dashboard or control pane. So it’s both a locally hosted app and a browser extension of sorts.

This is still a work in progress, but one direction I want to push further is allowing users to publish curated collections or search indexes of their browsing history.

More likely, though, you’d create a separate archive centered on a topic you care about, and as you browse you selectively add pages to that topic. Over time, you end up with a niche search engine tied to your expertise.

If that archive is good, others might find it valuable—and you might choose to publish it from your own machine. With tunneling tech (Cloudflare, Tor, etc.), you can expose your local box to the public internet. The vision is: user-sovereign data, but still shareable.

You could even federate groups of topic-based archives into a shared search ecosystem, useful for domains like biotech or other specialized fields.

Another crucial point: DownloadNet archives your browsing in real time. It doesn’t crawl externally; it captures exactly what you see, including sites you access via institutional credentials (e.g. research journals behind paywalls). Then you can optionally share those archives with a trusted group.

I’m also exploring a web-document bundle format: package an interactive set of web pages (not just one) into a self-contained snapshot you can send (e.g. via email). The recipient can browse that snapshot locally, with all internal links intact, as of a particular moment in time. It’s a simple but powerful idea, and I think it has real growth potential in the data-sovereignty space. I started this as a passion project, and I believe many others care deeply about these ideas too. If you’re interested or want to get involved, head to the repository.

One way my vision differs from something like Solid is the philosophy of adoption: rather than launching with a full-blown protocol, you start with a simple tool that users adopt, extend, and share. Over time, emergent use cases and community practices shape the system. It’s bottom-up rather than top-down.

I’m not dissing Solid — I understand its aims and don’t see this as strictly competitive or exclusive. But I feel the incremental, user-led route is likelier to produce something sustainable. You grow it in the wild, learn what users actually need, and adapt. Instead of trying to design for all cases in advance, you let real-world use teach you what matters.

Anyway, that’s the gist of my vision—and how it diverges from other approaches like the one in the article you referenced. While it may seem as a condemnation of other ideas, it's not. So please don't take it that way.

If this is something you could get into, I encourage you come on over to the repo and share your contribution. I also riff more on Solid, this article and the approach of DN if you're interested, here: https://github.com/DO-SAY-GO/dn/wiki/What-is-DiskerNet-and-h...