Proposal HN: Build this with me;

Very disturbing information has come to light in the last two days. The situation with respect to the NSA's data creep and the complicity of some of the biggest names in tech to subvert any trust in the idea of informational freedom has been an eye opening revelation for most, and a confirmation of the suspicions of others.

A modest proposal, and, if interested, contact me to participate, contribute, critique or…

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"The 'black box' recorder for your life": Every modern aircraft has a black box, every household should as well. A resilient and feature rich appliance that serves to capture and host your digital life.

This device would be based on the open designs of something like the BackBlaze storage systems and provide a high capacity, fault tolerant storage system with an Application Suite providing you with the basic services you have come to rely on from multiple parties -- but 100% owned and controlled by you:

"Facebook in a box" -- but without the one-dimensional vertical column, and focused primarily on you and your family. With the ability to share out exactly what you want with other parties using the same system -- or through the web portal hosted on the appliance.

Starting with a picture and file repository, the device will house your important content. It would provide an internal, multi-user life management system (profile, calendar, contacts, messaging, blog etc). An external view provides a public facing site - you control what information is presented.

An evolved data access policy allows you to share limited information with the world at large - and specific information with friends and groups; link up with other families and households and share out information relevant to only that connection through the assignment of data tags and subscribers.

There is a lot more to this - but given the events of the past day - I wanted to field this out there to HN and see what type of input you might have...

Interested?

How to route the thing? Through a peer-to-peer network? If so it's slightly better, but using a peer to peer architecture for just "facebook" seems strange.

It'd be very hard to maintain without a central location somewhere. Surprisingly facebook has a huge amount of data associated with it. So eventually even if this got large it'd have problems.

Batman peer to peer tried to do free wifi for all mobiles which would be awesome, but I don't know really what came of that because peer-to-peer networks are hard to maintain for connectivity.

Tent in a box? (https://tent.io/)

using the analogy of "facebook in a box" is a misnomer, really - but it serves to start the thought process.

The issue is that I dont need to share everything with everyone - What I need is a way to have a set of features and services that act as a life-log (pics and posts mostly) that are organized not only for me - but also for members of my family.

There will always be "facebook" where people can connect with their friends - but there is the need to have a familial or household based digital presence.

Again, Calling it "facebook in a box" is limiting the idea completely. Facebook is a very very one dimentional ego-feed.

You cant have child accounts, household calendars, information regarding what you have, own, household rolodex, a self-styled/branded blog, etc...

There is so much lacking in the disjointed "cloud" services that are available to people.

They SEEM "MASSIVE" only because many others use them, they are not massive because of what they offer you.

Gmail is a sliver of functionality, as is facebook and twitter and any other service. And they are all compromised.

The point isnt to duplicate with they offer - its to pull back from their entire offering model.

HAve an appliance for your house and online presence that is YOURS. Features and services which you can pick and choose from - but in the end that you actually control all access to and from.