Personal data storage is an idea whose time has come • Hacker News Board

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

#191

Post by anonbuddy » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 4:35 PM UTC

fooqux wrote: post #166

jasode wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 proto…

> 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. Not simply "not incentived" but actually decentivized. It's not just that companies lose the ability to have a better algorithm to recommend products, but the data itself is worth a fortune. Google, Facebook, etc ar…

thats why this is a legal battle as much it a technological one

it comes down to the rights to own the data you produce, and have it easily accesible. Solid is just a way of giving people option to excercise this right

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

#192

Post by ksec » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 4:37 PM UTC

anticorporate wrote: post #167

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…

> for redundancy and to prevent bit riot What are you doing to your hard drives that the bits are rioting?

BTRFS / ZFS.

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

#193

Post by immibis » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 4:37 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #97

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…

> 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 illegally Not even close to the case for any big player. It just exists as a moat for smaller companies.

Like with most laws, smaller companies have smaller chance to get caught and smaller likely penalties.

But I've noticed there are two kinds of people when it comes to entrepreneurship and regulations. There are people who go all gung-ho and do what they want and ignore the law as much as they can get away with. And there are people who are so scared of things like laws that they never become entrepreneurs. I don't see much of a middle ground in practice.

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

#194

Post by ianopolous » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 4:37 PM UTC

jbeninger wrote: post #168

carefulfungi wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. "It's good for you and takes some effort" is a bad growth strategy. For this movement to win, something will have to replace social media and walled gardens with a better dopamine hit, that just happens to keep data private.

I think we're still missing an "open social" closed social network. Something like old-Facebook where you can post to an intimate audience of friends and family, and your feed isn't stuffed full of ads and influencers. Just a little private windows into your friends' lives. That feels like something that could displace other social media in a way that's difficult for for-profit businesses to replicate since it goes a…

You may like Peergos (creator here) https://peergos.org/posts/decentralized-social-media

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

#195

Post by immibis » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 4:39 PM UTC

jon-wood wrote: post #88

pessimizer wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We need to do what we preach You start. edit: I have no idea what people think they're talking about when they're like "people should just" and "you should just." The cage is not all in your mind, dude; it's an actual cage, guarded by people with guns.

Sorry, what? There are people with guns preventing us from self hosting websites? That’s certainly news to me.

Not simple website hosting, but if you want to do something like running social media, there are a bunch of regulations in the way that used to not exist, and regulations are enforced by people with guns (who are called police officers).

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

#196

Post by immibis » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 4:40 PM UTC

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.

Bluesky is not decentralized. Building a centralized system on top of a protocol that can also theoretically support decentralized systems does not make it decentralized. https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/

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

#197

Post by ianopolous » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 4:47 PM UTC

brendoncarroll wrote: post #114

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 wh…

We should talk. This very similar to how apps use E2EE data in Peergos. Maybe we can join forces. https://peergos.org/posts/a-better-web

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

#198

Post by arrosenberg » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 4:50 PM UTC

harrall wrote: post #183

mrbombastic wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes just make user data hoarding and targeted advertising a nonviable business model, and watch the horrible secondary effects start to dissipate. it requires a lot of political will that currently isn’t there but we have become too resigned in the US that things can’t change. I still hate cookie banners though :).

It doesn’t happen because when a company replaces advertising with a subscription, people balk and then switch to a competitor that doesn’t charge anything by using advertising.

We need to (once again) define “free” pricing models as predatory and broadly outlaw them. They distort the idea of a free and fair marketplace by poisoning consumer expectations of what things should cost.

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

#199

Post by AlienRobot » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 4:50 PM UTC

When I read the title I couldn't help but think "did everyone forgot about hard disks?"

I'm sure Tim Berners-Lee is much smarter than me, but I kind of feel there are some parallels between the idea of "owning" posts you made in a platform and the ludicrous idea of "owning" game items as NFTs in a blockchain. The latter promises interoperability that games would never deliver. I wonder about the former.

At least I feel the major dealbreaker with this technology is just that it's not worth it for both parties involved.

Right now, Facebook hosts all the posts and monetizes them with ads. So long as they are making money with ads, they have no reason to delete the posts they're hosting, as the posts are their money maker.

But what happens if Facebook no longer "owns" the posts?

So now your posts are in your "personal cloud", which means that unless they are encrypted any website or local app can display them, even without any ads. This means Facebook is no longer making money off the posts. Why would they accept this?

On the flip side, who is paying for the hosting? Facebook? It's no longer their servers hosting the content, so I don't think so? Is Facebook supposed to pay the cloud service for metered API access? Can a cloud service offer different rates to different companies? Is the user supposed to pay for their cloud storage? So you're going to make users pay money to use facebook?

What happens if a post violates the ToS? Can facebook delete my post in my cloud storage against my will? What happens if content that is legal where facebook operates is illegal where the cloud servers operate?

Can I manually edit the data in my cloud storage like I'd be able with a file and then facebook has to treat every post as if it were untrusted input?

What happens if my cloud storage closes my account? I just lose everything? Will I be able to back up my cloud to my hard disk and reupload it to another cloud so facebook can access it? How is facebook going to handle a single user with 2 clouds that have different content?

I feel like this is a very complex thing and there are infinite questions that we can have about how this would be implemented in practice, while it's presented as simply "you own your data."

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

#200

Post by Dylan16807 » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 4:53 PM UTC

dahart wrote: post #187

Dylan16807 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think such a system would need to load every comment from a different computer when you visit a page and be hundreds of times slower because of that, then yes you did misunderstand something. The person you replied to is assuming a reasonable distributed system.

Please elaborate. If true, and they were imagining some unstated infrastructure, then what is it and what does home upload speed have to do with anything? What exactly did I misunderstand?

The self-hosting machines are plenty to avoid the problem you described, where there's massive slowdowns getting anything at all, including tiny little text comments. I hope you don't need me to walk through every detail of how a distributed system can do comments in a reasonable way?

But self-hosting machines are susceptible to the "I can only upload pictures and videos at 5-10mbps" problem. That requires more difficult peer-to-peer systems.

The first problem only requires getting small bits of data onto the same machine. The second problem requires getting large amounts of data onto many machines. Or reasonably symmetrical upload speeds.