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Own your own data

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Re: Own your own data

#21

Post by judk »

hyperliner wrote: post #7

Owning your own data sounds good. Unfortunately, once you share a piece of data, it's out there forever. What we all need is to have our own personal servers that validate tokens. Then we would just give out these one-time use tokens to people or institutions. Does the bank need a SSN? Well, here is an auto-generated token. Bank stores that, but to validate it, it calls your personal little server, which checks for u…

The more people complain and refuse to let their SSN be cusomter id, the more vendors will backoff.

OTOH, there are so many "legitimate" SSN abusers that it's a lost cause.

Re: Own your own data

#22

Post by kentonv »

infocollector wrote: post #19
kentonv wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trick is to find a working bootstrapping strategy. Our approach with sandstorm.io is to make sure it's easy to port existing open source apps. Even with just the platform we have now and the apps we're porting, I feel like Sandstorm is already a product useful enough to stand on its own. Crowdfunding (as we're doing; http://igg.me/at/sandstorm ) can't pay for a revolution, but can pay for the MVP, which can then…

Thanks for the comment. I agree that in practice more developers don't equal more productivity. And I agree that things happen better in small teams. But I still don't see the point of not talking to each other, and learning from each other. One reason I suggested what I suggested is this: If you just run some one else's Linux applications on linux boxes, and call it a personal data store, you have a bunch of problem…

I think all of the problems you bring up are indeed hard problems, and important ones to work on, but they are also problems that exist already, in the current ecosystem of open source web apps, and even often in proprietary apps. About the only way you get "cohesion" on the web today is by limiting yourself entirely to services from one company (Apple; Google), and even then it's far from seamless. Yet, somehow we make progress.

So our goal is not to solve these problems, but to incrementally improve the state of the world. Clearly, the first thing that needs to happen in order for open source and decentralized web apps to be viable is there has to be a way that common, non-technical users can actually use them. Sandstorm is trying to offer a solution for that, and we think we're pretty close. As much as possible, we actually try to stay out of the question of UI or API standards. IMO that's a problem that can only be solved organically.

Re: Own your own data

#24

Post by jmathai »

davidcollantes wrote: post #8
jmathai wrote: post #6

I've spent the last 3 years in this space[1]. 2 of those were with a fellowship from the Shuttleworth Foundation[2]. I applaud all the efforts to free up and decentralize data. I believe it's the future but the way we're approaching it is making that a very distant future. My suggestions are simple. Data ownership will not be solved by technology. Focus and practice on framing the solution in a way that people connec…

So, Trovebox has ongoing costs, plus the costs of the storage itself?

We changed the model quite a bit in 2013 when we began focusing on serving the needs of businesses (namely, non-profits).

When we were consumer facing we had a free account with upload limits and an unlimited account for $29/year.

We decided to not differentiate prices based on storage; ours or yours. The pricing page got too complex.

That being said, nearly everything we've done is open source and even when running as a hosted service we decoupled application logic from data storage. That was our goal from the beginning. We went as far as enabling you to switch storage services (i.e move from Dropbox to S3) with a single click.

My mission was to build the technology but in a way non-technical users would understand. I think we accomplished that. Being open source was the underlying prerequisite since it's important if you start on a hosted account you could switch to your own instance or someone else's hosted service.

All that said, I don't think there's a huge market for this in the consumer space today. I hope in time that demand grows because an Internet the way we were envision looks great.

I blogged about leaving the consumer space here, https://medium.com/@jmathai/hello-2014-goodbye-consumer-phot...

Re: Own your own data

#25

Post by jmathai »

amirmc wrote: post #11
jmathai wrote: post #6

I've spent the last 3 years in this space[1]. 2 of those were with a fellowship from the Shuttleworth Foundation[2]. I applaud all the efforts to free up and decentralize data. I believe it's the future but the way we're approaching it is making that a very distant future. My suggestions are simple. Data ownership will not be solved by technology. Focus and practice on framing the solution in a way that people connec…

> "Data ownership will not be solved by technology" I would say 'data ownership will not be solved by technology alone '. I think it's completely wrong to think we can deal with any of the data ownership issues without understanding how the current technology got us here and what new technologies we need. However, I do agree that throwing some tech out there and expecting it to take off is not going to happen. There…

I agree with that. I think the technology is the easy part. If we knew there was demand for a specific solution then there are plenty of folks who can build it. In fact I think we have built the technology on numerous occasions (i.e. Diaspora, OpenPhoto/Trovebox, OwnCloud, etc.) --- finding the market, describing it in a way that connects with people and being at the right spot at the right time are the difficult parts.

Re: Own your own data

#26

Post by jmathai »

ghayes wrote: post #17
jmathai wrote: post #6

I've spent the last 3 years in this space[1]. 2 of those were with a fellowship from the Shuttleworth Foundation[2]. I applaud all the efforts to free up and decentralize data. I believe it's the future but the way we're approaching it is making that a very distant future. My suggestions are simple. Data ownership will not be solved by technology. Focus and practice on framing the solution in a way that people connec…

I largely feel we should be building companies that do this naturally. If you are making a site where you share photos, bake this concept into your model. Show that it can be non-intrusive for businesses and effectively implemented.

That's what we aimed to do for 2 years before leaving the consumer space altogether. I believe we delivered the user experience and ease of use but we couldn't find the market or the market wasn't big enough.

See my post on why we left the consumer space, https://medium.com/@jmathai/hello-2014-goodbye-consumer-phot...

Re: Own your own data

#29

Post by mrb »

overdrivetg wrote: post #20
mrb wrote: post #15

My proposal in this space is unique: decentralized AND built on an existing protocol, email! See: http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=76 You don't even need special software to set it up. Standard email autoresponder features make it work (see my demo).

Is there some reason this is better than being built on an existing protocol, http!? "It is quite technical to set up, but in the future if the technology becomes more popular we could imagine webmails making it easier to set up." The problem is adoption, and this seems to have the same problems as any other approach there, maybe more. Interesting thought, good luck if you keep pursuing it - sorry to be a downer but…

"Is there some reason this is better than being built on an existing protocol, http!?"

Yes: not everybody has a web space to publish HTTP data, but everybody has email. So intuitively building something on email has better chances of gaining adoption.

Re: Own your own data

#30

Post by andor »

kentonv wrote: post #12

Funny that half the comments so far are people linking to their own projects in this space. Yep, me too. Try a demo: https://demo.sandstorm.io/demo And here's the code: https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm

Impressive demo. It looks good and everything works ;-)

For those who missed it, there was a thread about Sandstorm two weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7961118

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