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Personal data storage is an idea whose time has come

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

#151

Post by Larrikin »

dzonga wrote: post #148

I like the convenience of the cloud. but don't know whether its due to declining literacy rates / awareness etc. the cloud is nice and e.g google storage, iCloud but now with fast microsd's you can buy 1TB for $100. have a few copies then boom, you own your own data. but now phones don't allow you to have microsd's so here we are. likewise things like email etc instead of all of us being on gmail we could have commun…

Sony phones continue to have MicroSD slots, headphone jacks, AND remain water resistant. They have been that way for at least a decade.

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

#152

Post by layer8 »

Gud wrote: post #84
xandrius wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If even the people who experience a different time gives up because "nothing changes" then it's truly over. We need to do what we preach: sure, things are worse in certain things but for sure setting up a local network with top-level open source self-hosted alternatives is the easiest it has ever been ever. Also I think people forget to realise that the type of people who were online in the 90s are still online, many…

~the internet~ got easier to consume but self hosting in many ways became harder because of how hostile the internet has become.

Not really that much harder, if it’s only for personal use.

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

#153

Post by Hendrikto »

dd_xplore wrote: post #72

When I was a kid, a 4GB pendrive was a huge thing for me. I used to think my 40GB HDD would never fill up, but then Internet started to grow. Today it doesn’t even matter how muc storage you have it’ll always fill up. I have started to self host quite a lot of stuff but eve then every storage solution has a life of 5-6 years in which atleast one of the components would fail. We click enormous amounts of photos but th…

> ever growing storage costs (both cloud based and self hosted)

That’s not my experience at all.

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

#154

Post by jasode »

xandrius wrote: post #61
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…

If even the people who experience a different time gives up because "nothing changes" then it's truly over. We need to do what we preach: sure, things are worse in certain things but for sure setting up a local network with top-level open source self-hosted alternatives is the easiest it has ever been ever. Also I think people forget to realise that the type of people who were online in the 90s are still online, many…

>but for sure setting up a local network with top-level open source self-hosted alternatives is the easiest it has ever been ever.

Understand your enthusiasm but to relate the discussion back to Tim Berners-Lee idea for SOLID data storage protocol... Running self-hosted things like email, NextCloud, Plex, sandstorm.io, etc -- are not relevant to the gp's "nothing changes" complaint.

Without dissecting the SOLID protocol, the basic idea is that transactional data is stored on a separate user-specified "storage pod". It's not just simplistic sharing of "name/address" profile data. Imagining some idealized scenarios might help:

- Spotify music : instead of "playlists, listening history" being stored on Spotify's servers, it is stored on the user's storage pod. Spotify makes API calls to constantly save that data to the user-controlled data location. If the user then cancels Spotify and switches to Apple Music service, Apple can just read the "music playlists data storage pod" and all the recommendations work as expected. No import/export.

- Amazon shopping: instead of order history being in a data silo on Amazon servers. It could be stored in user's "ecommerce orders storage pod". The user can then give permission to Walmart.com to read it to provide product recommendations.

The user "doesn't own their own data" continues with the current AI chat tools. The users' ChatGPT "prompts history" is stored at OpenAI instead of a user-controlled "storage pod".

The walled-garden and data silos don't just restrict consumers. Businesses have the same issue. They use SAP accounting software package or a SaaS tool and their data is locked up in those services. Exports are sometimes possible but cumbersome.

Therefore, self-hosting Plex on local server for a personal music library instead of using Spotify cloud doesn't affect the "nothing changes" narrative. TBL still wants people to have the flexibility/convenience of using cloud services but somehow still keep "ownership of their data".

On the other hand, if you were self-hosting a SOLID Storage Pod at home, and a company like Spotify wrote listening data to it, that's when the narrative changes.

It should be obvious that companies are not incentivized to write transactional data to users' storage pods which explains why the SOLID protocol doesn't seem to gain much traction for the last 9 years.

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

#155

Post by jodrellblank »

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.

> "As if ideologically non-paying customers have a voice worth listening to."

Do people who ideologically refuse to spend money on meat-foods have nothing worth listening to about animal welfare? Who don't spend money on airline flights have nothing worth listening to about climate change? Who avoid companies which use slave labour in their supply chains have nothing worth listening to about human rights?

'Money talks' but that doesn't automatically mean money has anything worth listening to; markets are manipulated by money as well as using it for signalling, and as a goal-seeking mechanism they are prone to local maxima like other things are.

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

#156

Post by Hendrikto »

seu wrote: post #6

The fact that the AT Protocol relies on everyone having a domain name, which is a centralized system over which few people have control, and about whose workings most people have no clue about, is problematic. Also impractical, once we consider that - as far as I can understand - 8 billion people should have their own domain name.

With did:plc, you don’t have to have your own domain, if you are willing to delegate some responsibility.

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

#157

Post by layer8 »

ffsm8 wrote: post #46
erlend_sh wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It has? Don't get me wrong, I'm in the tech industry and generally more online then likely 95% of the population, but ime ... Nobody even knows what bluesky is? (They also don't know what X is, though they DO know what Twitter is) And even more niche products like mostodon, the fediverse altogether etc are entirely unknown to most of the tech industry too.

You must live in a different tech industry than I do. They might not be using it, but most know about it.

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

#158

Post by IsTom »

onion2k wrote: post #136
IsTom wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ and sort by amount, these are not small companies and amounts aren't exactly trivial either, with a mechanism to get bigger if ignored.

Meta appear 4 times in the top 10 with a total of about 2.25bn in fines. That sounds like a lot but it's only 1.6% of their revenue. As a cost of doing business that's probably acceptable to the Meta board. It'd cost them more to do things properly, so there's little incentive to do so.

Besides fines being able to grow that's global revenue, probably a bigger part of EU revenue. And their margins aren't 100%.

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

#159

Post by watwut »

xp84 wrote: post #147
pavlov wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “Applying for a job or apartment or anything today means creating endless pointless copies of your pesonal information in databases across the world that will eventually be neglected, hacked, exploited, sold off etc” This problem is practically fixed in the EU (to the extent that legislation can fix it). Data protection laws have enough teeth that real companies can’t afford to keep or sell customer information ill…

Was this posted from a Brussels IP? This certainly seems to reflect how the EU regulators see themselves, but I haven't met many real Europeans who have themselves realized any actual value coming from their laughable, vague attempts at legislating the problems away. The best they've managed is making some Europeans smug, but their data still exists in all the same places. Worst case a few fines get levied, for megac…

So, if Europeans think these rules improved the situation, they are smug and dont count.

Frankly, in here EU did a good job, certainly better then USA does. It would be neat if USA made similar laws too.

Megacorps do get bigger fines then small companies, actually. Megacorps existence is also literally result of winner takes all and rich are untouchable legal system cranked to 11 Americans are proud of.

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

#160

Post by seemaze »

teeray wrote: post #86
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…

> creating endless pointless copies of your pesonal (sic) information in databases across the world that will eventually be neglected, hacked, exploited, sold off etc… I dont know the way out if there is The data needs to be viewed by the holder of that data as a dangerous liability, not an asset. If there were headlines about “Megabank Files Bankruptcy Over Data Breach, Executives Jailed” instead of the general sent…

I think it's advantageous for data to be viewed as an asset, but an asset owned by the source of the data. If Megabank was like; 'Oops, we left our vault unlocked and someone walk off with your savings' people would be up in arms.
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