Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Personal data storage is an idea whose time has come

blog.muni.town

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 287 posts

Re: Personal data storage is an idea whose time has come

#111

Post by seabass-labrax »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #91
InMice wrote: post #26

Among the first page and 2nd page (top 60) there is always atleast 1 post about how we're gonnna "take back the web" or make it back into some form of our 90s millenial nostalgia memories, self hosting, federated this or that, etc etc. Meanwhile - Nothing changes, everything generally gets worse and younger generations come into the world with no memories of the 90s internet or the world before mobile devices or surv…

Everyone wants "free ad-free no tracking no payment" Internet. Nobody wants to compensate anyone for it, and therefore nobody wants to host it. Then the people who have not viewed an ad or paid a subscription in 20 years complain that the internet sucks and we need to go back to IRC and chan boards. As if ideologically non-paying customers have a voice worth listening to.

This isn't even close to true. The people who are serious about privacy and the open Web, and in the technologies posited to bring that about (such as self-sovereign identity and federation), tend to spend much more money.

They buy servers to self-host services, extra hardware to store data locally and domain names to let others find them. Those who cannot afford it sometimes join niche communities like the Tildeverse as an outlet for the interest.

In my experience it's largely the 'just not interested' camp who always go for the free webmail and whatever free messaging service comes with their phone.

Re: Personal data storage is an idea whose time has come

#112

Post by Larrikin »

ksec wrote: post #105

In terms of NAS, I have long wonder if there is a market for a combination of both online and offline. We will need at least 2 HDD for redundancy and to prevent bit riot. And the NAS will be sold as a whole package and subscription, with an encrypted backup services included for first 2 years and requires the backup subscription to work there after. The profit margin is first on the hardware and then on long tail bac…

>with an encrypted backup services included for first 2 years and requires the backup subscription to work there after.

Its confusing if you mean the NAS will stop working if you stop paying for the subscription or not. If you can no longer access your data on the NAS without a subscription, then the NAS just becomes the cloud with an extra up front cost plus the cost of your own electricity.

Personally I have started moving as much of my data out of the cloud as possible. I've got a Synology and a few single board computers running various services with a Synology in my parent's home for their photos. Their photos back up to my NAS and my data to their Synology.

Its a shame Synology decided to enshitify this year for all products going forward, but UGreen looks like a suitable replacement when I outgrow my current NAS.

Re: Personal data storage is an idea whose time has come

#113

Post by jauntywundrkind »

> Another spiritually similar idea being championed at the time came from the Opera browser folks who wanted to put "a web server in your browser".

Opera Unite was such an awesome idea. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2009/06/opera...

There was a neat idea a bit back to allow Service Workers to work across origin: foreign fetch. It wasn't on the internet, was only in the scope of your browser, but I thought it was such a neat advancement. Would have done so much to allow the offline web to weave itself. Alas, deprecated. https://developer.chrome.com/blog/foreign-fetch

Re: Personal data storage is an idea whose time has come

#114

Post by brendoncarroll »

I work on a FOSS project in this space, Blobcache.

https://github.com/blobcache/blobcache

Trusting a server to store an application's state is a different thing from trusting it to author changes or to read the data. Servers should become dumber, and clients should become smarter. When I use an app, I want the app to load E2E encrypted state from storage (possibly on another machine, possibly not owned by me) make whatever changes and produce new encrypted data to send back to the server. The server should just be trusted for durability, and to prevent unauthorized access, but not to tell the truth about doing either of those things. Blobcache provides an API to facilitate transactions on E2EE state between a dumb storage server and any smart client.

Blobcache can be installed on old hardware along with a VPN like Tailscale and then loaded up with data from other devices. Configuration is like SSH, drop a key in a configuration file to grant access. It removes most of the friction associated with consuming and producing storage as a resource.

I'm using it to build E2EE version control like Git, but for your whole home directory.

https://github.com/gotvc/got

Re: Personal data storage is an idea whose time has come

#115

Post by floundy »

erlend_sh wrote: post #31
InMice wrote: post #26

Among the first page and 2nd page (top 60) there is always atleast 1 post about how we're gonnna "take back the web" or make it back into some form of our 90s millenial nostalgia memories, self hosting, federated this or that, etc etc. Meanwhile - Nothing changes, everything generally gets worse and younger generations come into the world with no memories of the 90s internet or the world before mobile devices or surv…

This is demonstrably not fantasy as the example case is a fully productionized network (Bluesky and the rest of AT-net) that’s having real-world impact to the point where it’s under threat from several authoritarian states.

Wasn’t BlueSky kinda ruined by the whole leftist Twitter exodus while simultaneously being fawned over and settled by Reddity political types? Maybe I’m missing something but I’ve tried to use it a few times and it just feels like another internet echo chamber silo (even if that’s due to user self-isolation and not the underlying tech).

Re: Personal data storage is an idea whose time has come

#119

Post by Dylan16807 »

dahart wrote: post #96
lotsofpulp wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

95% of Americans had shitty upload bandwidth until very recently, since coaxial broadband is all they have at home. It still probably sucks for most. 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 companie…

Does the performance of individual data ownership hosted at home actually change very much when people have gigabit upload speeds? Since applications can already make multiple asynchronous requests, if we’re imagining that applications would need to request user data from each user’s house, the upload speeds would primarily affect latency and not necessarily throughput. If this does affect throughput, and it certainl…

I don't know why you're imagining such ridiculously bad infrastructure that it has to access every person's house every page load.

Decentralized does not need to be slow like that. And very limited upload does get to be a problem if you want more than a couple people/servers to be able to access your media posts at the same time.

Re: Personal data storage is an idea whose time has come

#120

Post by jauntywundrkind »

gcanyon wrote: post #45

Both of these proposals (as far as I've read them, YMMV) fail the evolutionary test. At the scale we're talking about, ideas must proceed as evolution does: not with a far-away goal in mind, but with incremental changes, each of which individually must be an improvement over the status quo. We are at (near) a significant local maximum, and (again, as far as I've read, which is not all of it for sure) the people pitch…

99.9% of BlueSky users use only Bluesky services. But BlueSky has a Personal Data Service for each. That means:

Those users have credible exit to take their data off BlueSky's hosting to someplace else (and as of a week or two ago to move back to BlueSky if they want).

Those users can put whatever kind of data they want in their PDS. They can host their git data via https://tangled.org . They can store their music listening scrobbles with https://teal.fm . They can blog on https://leaflet.pub .

And there's been rapidly advancing host it yourself options. Plenty of folk individually or collectively host PDS. There are alternate relays that collect &n syndicate out everyone's PDS data as that changes. Hosting the aggregation layer is significantly harder especially if you are trying to fully connect the network but there are a couple & progress is good.

it feels like a huge improvement over the status quo, and there's extremely visible developer energy building forward & rolling with the concepts. The breakdown on architecture allows for wins and work in various areas. The base seems solid, the core seems coherent & well built, built to scale not as one big thing but coherent layers. I think it's doing what you are asking for, and the signs of advancement & uptake warm my heart to see.

Post reply on HN