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

251–260 of 287 posts

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

#251

Post by walterbell »

Theodores wrote: post #247
walterbell wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why can't I buy a glorified router box that does all of this? Step 0 is to secure that box, as routers are obvious targets, even before they have self-hosted data. There are some products based on RPi, NAS and router form factors. > suspicious absence of products in this space Earlier efforts: Apache Wave (federated) Chandler Diaspora FreedomBox Microsoft Groove (p2p) Urbit.org Sandstorm.io Active OSS projects incl…

Thanks for the links, however, everything above is off the mark, even NextCloud, which I once used to really like. The only problem is that you are instantly deep into the weeds that no PC/Apple consumer-civilian would ever wade into. Facebook and their ilk don't need a manual, and neither should a webserver with email server need a manual to get you started, just subdomain, email domain and username should get you s…

One example might be the eero (now Amazon) router that is managed by cloud account and mobile device app. To get the simplicity you want, keep control plane in cloud and keep data on the edge device. Parts of the control plane could gradually migrate to the edge device over time, while retaining the same user-facing interface. But it would always be a challenge to "serve" content from home networks with NAT/CGNAT. Cloudflare Tunnel, Tailscale or similar proxy can help in some cases, e.g re-routing email to big providers that refuse to recognize self-hosted outbound.

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

#252

Post by apitman »

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…

> 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.

What's the story for people who don't know what an SSH hey is?

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

#253

Post by jodrellblank »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #246
basilikum wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only reason why I ever use these services is because they killed off any alternatives through anti competitive practices. And I hate it every time because they are awful and disrespect me every single millimeter of the way. You are arguing on the premise that ads would somehow be a fair exchange. That is simply the opposite of the truth. Ads are parasitic. Services with ads are almost always worse than services w…

Vid.me was the salvation from YouTube, showing up around 2015 and actually pulling creators from YouTube. They gained traction and were well known, at one point even surpassing YouTube on /r/videos. But they went bankrupt in 2017. Why? Because people don't want to view ads and they don't want to pay a subscription. Vid.me was unable to monetize and collapsed. Nebula is a more recent example. Creators falling over the…

I paid a subscription to Amazon Prime Video. Amazon Prime introduced adverts.

But I suppose expecting ad-free video streaming 'just because I paid for it' is also entitled and childish, because to people who use those things as putdowns, everything other people want, is. It's like "everything I don't like is woke" in that sense.

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

#254

Post by me-vs-cat »

ineptech wrote: post #234
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…

The realistic path off looks like this, I think: * I use Bluesky to chat as a Twitter replacement, which gets me into the Fediverse and gets me a PDS * I use my PDS to store my payment details, giving me a (at first client-side) way to submit stored payment details that feels similar to storing it in the browser, but stores it in my "server" * From there, it's a natural step to giving the retailer a token that can be…

FWIW, I've been able to cancel my NYT subscription with only a web form since I first subscribed in 2020. It works, and I use it every year. Some years there were several weeks before I got the discounted price again.

I wonder how many years need to pass after a company removes a user-hostile pattern before it should stop being lambasted for it. I don't know how long they did what you say, but I could see that 5 years might not yet be enough.

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

#255

Post by AxEy »

ben_w wrote: post #243
AxEy wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This assumes that poor people's attention is liquid and can readily be turned to cash whenever they please. It doesn't matter how much you think my attention is "really worth". If I want the service now, have no cash, but can pay with my attention, I am strictly more enabled than if the service only accepts cash.

I make no assumption there. The fork between (1), (2) is how much cash their attention is actually turned into. To put it another way: what's the attention of a poor person really worth, in dollars? Answer is always less than or equal to the amount they can spend.

The comment you were responding to said that the free tiers were a boon for the poor and you responded that they (under the fork of interest) "left poor people poorer".

I mean I supposed every transaction leaves someone poorer of something and richer in something else. I'm not sure of the point though.

I concede that if the ad companies are willing to forgo collecting X dollars in exchange for showing you an ad then it must be worth >=X dollars to the ad company for the person to see the ad.

But it remains true that the poor person has no way to convert their attention directly into X dollars, and all that taking away the free tier does is make it so that someone who would have made a trade (of their attention for a service) cannot do so.

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

#256

Post by m463 »

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…

> Applying for a job or apartment

Let along actually Living in the apartment or working at the job...

A friend's apartment required you to sign up with a third party to get your packages. They made you create an account and accept that they would make pictures and videos of you to access the package room.

Don't even get me started on connected appliances/wifi and app access for doors.

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

#258

Post by attila-lendvai »

ianopolous wrote: post #197
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

you two should also be aware of

https://www.ethswarm.org/

(censorship resistant distributed storage with the same API)

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

#259

Post by coldtea »

layer8 wrote: post #146
onion2k wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The fines will increase if they continue breaking the rules, so there is incentive.

The fines are calculated to be enough to pad the coffers of the EU bureucracy and for FB to not really care, to keep this racket going.

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

#260

Post by BrenBarn »

There are good ideas here. They won't come to fruition without some form of force. I'm not sure if TBL doesn't realize, is unwilling to accept, or just wants to avoid saying out loud that the only reason it worked for him to create the web as an open protocol is that no one was prepared for it so no one was in a position to co-opt it, commercialize it, and enshittify it. Now corporations are prepared. They will co-opt, commercialize, and enshittify whatever system you come up with unless it is accompanied by a giant hammer that will brutally destroy them if they don't change their wicked ways.
Post reply on HN