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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

#201
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRC has pretty much always been free without ads. You make it sound unworkable when it's become so much easier to run over time. And tons of forums are in the same category. Also there isn't a way for people to pay their share of server cost for services like that. For your average non-video communication service your options are paying 0x or paying 50x.

IRC doesn't offer multi device, high availability log archives. IRC doesn't offer a lot things, actually. Fairly sure the standards don't offer persistent identity.

Adding that doesn't take many resources though. It's because IRC is old and somewhat neglected, not because it would be burdensome to provide for free.

And some networks provide bouncers so they basically do have that. And maybe some IRCv3 networks, I haven't looked into that much lately.

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

#202

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…

I wish I understood why people will pay for streaming tv subscriptions but not for social subscriptions.

I suppose social subscriptions have to overcome network effects and a plethora of “free” alternatives - ranging from iMessage to facebook.

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

#203
This is never going to happen.

The incentives do not make sense.

Any utopian future that requires a party to put in a lot of effort to change something in a way that would be a net negative for them, is just not going to happen.

People do not spend money to change the world in a way that would be worse for them but better for other people.

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

#204

This is never going to happen. The incentives do not make sense. Any utopian future that requires a party to put in a lot of effort to change something in a way that would be a net negative for them, is just not going to happen. People do not spend money to change the world in a way that would be worse for them but better for other people.

> The incentives do not make sense

Commercial incentives, no. If this preference exists, it would need to be pursued civically.

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

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> We need to (once again) define “free” pricing models as predatory and broadly outlaw them

Free services funded by ads have been a boon for the poor.

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

#206
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Well its a double whammy -companies are disincitivized, but also the average consumer does not understand or care what this means.

Most comsumers just want websites to work. Something like SOLID would add friction. People who care about privacy are a vocal minority.

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

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I wish I understood why people will pay for streaming tv subscriptions but not for social subscriptions. I suppose social subscriptions have to overcome network effects and a plethora of “free” alternatives - ranging from iMessage to facebook.

I think at least one take on this is that people see it as paying for the content of streaming subscriptions, not the streaming infrastructure itself.

So the idea of paying for the infrastructure needed to see the content produced by your social network doesn't feel like a good deal.

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

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's impractical about everyone having a domain name? It surely isn't due to lack of domain names, because foo.bar.baz.bim.bim.bap.com is a valid domain name. It is true that full data sovereignty isn't something most people are interested in, but this is more about a cooperative model for data ownership and access. Having your data identifier be JackDaniels@yahoo.com isn't particularly different from it being jack…

Small point but > foo.bar.baz.bim.bim.bap.com is owned by the owner of bap.com, under the current system.

Ownership is probably the wrong word since the legal grant is term limited contract for exclusive use under terms of service. Selling subdomain usage grants (also under contract and TOS) feels quite similar.

Top level domains can change pricing, terms, or cease operation. Freenom is a great case study, as they previously operated TLDs. At the edges, a well-operated subdomain service could offer stronger ownership-like behavior than a top level domain.

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

#209
post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

BTRFS / ZFS.

You both wrote "bit riot" but meant "bit rot", right?

I've been running a RAIDZ2 NAS (with ECC RAM) for like 5 years with no data loss/corruption issues. Are you saying if it was just regular RAIDZ there would be data integrity issues?

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

#210
Vertically integrated apps are much cheaper to run - Instagram stores only a small fraction of your photos and makes a lot of money from them. It is somewhat harder to explain why we pay for things like iCloud, which mostly has no web API, only APIs for Apple devices. (Plenty of value there because it keeps you from having to buy a bigger iPhone.) But there are lots of these "almost general purpose" solutions, paying to upload files and store them, but where you cannot use them as you like.

Why not dozens of apps running over the "web filesystem" like happens on the desktop? Two reasons: 1. Amazon pricing for transit/bandwidth is way higher than storage, and so it makes accessing your own data quite expensive if it is not in the same datacenter. 2. And there is a huge security and usability gap between "pick one photo" vs "give me [scoped] access to your Dropbox" Often the general-purpose mode does not work that well, is quite slow, or just costs a lot in bandwidth, a thing nobody wants to pay extra for when they're already paying for storage.

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