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

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

#261

Post by theshrike79 » Mon, Oct 06, 2025, 9:31 AM UTC

floundy wrote: post #123

Forgeties79 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve always had this like 70% formed idea about Plex and how it’s indicative of how people want to self host more than we realize, but I’ve never quite been able to articulate what I’m thinking here and what the larger implications are. Plex is obviously not true self hosting, but it’s a lot closer to it than a Netflix subscription, and the number of people who I do not consider very tech savvy who have not only been…

Yup that’s why I started self-hosting, when my wife got pregnant and we started to think about what technology access for our future kids would look like. I started with CasaOS and Jellyfin. Quickly outgrew Casa and moved to learning Docker and setting up my own container stack, moving from media self-hosting to adding new containers of stuff like budgeting apps. I’m still working on building out my server but every…

I've been "self-hosting" for 30 years now (= running a 24/7 linux server)

And I still don't get the "VM for everything" crowd. Why would you do that when you have containers?

It's much simpler and lighter. Any 200€ old corporate PC can run a dozen containers easily. What it can't do is run that same stuff in 12 VMs.

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

#262

Post by theshrike79 » Mon, Oct 06, 2025, 9:35 AM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #22

> Rather than being in countless separate places on the internet in the hands of whomever it had been resold to, your data is in one place, controlled by you. I don't see how this follows. The moment you create/share data with a site, what's to prevent them from reselling it? The only thing this seems to attempt to solve is portability/interop (and moving control of and responsibility for blocking/moderation/spam to…

"Control" here means that there are people who write blogpost worthy comments or messages on Facebook or other Meta properties. That's the only place where they exist.

When Meta (or any other company) decides to destroy them, they go away forever. You have no "control" over it.

https://indieweb.org/POSSE is the way to go.

You want to write a long post on a 3rd party platform? Write it on your own device, that you control. Then you save it, copy the content and post wherever you like.

If your 3rd party blogging or social media platform goes tits up and everything disppears, you still have your own copy you can just Ctrl-C Ctrl-V anywhere.

You can go as fancy with this as you like, depending on your nerd-level. You can have a self-hosted N8N system that automatically reposts everything to new sites you add to the flow. Or you can just have your stuff in a directory in Obsidian.

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

#263

Post by theshrike79 » Mon, Oct 06, 2025, 9:37 AM UTC

Jaxan wrote: post #103

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…

We still print photo albums. I can strongly recommend this!

I bought a Canon SELPHY photo printer on a Black Friday sale last year. It prints archive quality photos we can put in an album to save forever.

It's kind of fun to go through the thousands of photos in our digital photo libraries and pick the best and most impactful ones to print and save "forever".

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

#264

Post by theshrike79 » Mon, Oct 06, 2025, 9:38 AM UTC

AdrianB1 wrote: post #142

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…

I run a NAS, in various forms, for almost 20 years. The lifetime is quite longer, I still have ~ 10 year old drives in the backup NAS built on a Ryzen 1600 (8 years) and the average power supply works for me 10-12 years. The primary NAS is still on hardware that is more than 5 years old, except the drives that I just replaced with higher capacity. As I find the size of current drives bigger than my yearly additions (…

In many cases the cheapest "offline storage" is a second NAS in a friend's or relative's apartment if your data amounts is in the multiple terabytes.

If not, Amazon Glacier is cheap-ish, as is Backblaze B2 and Hetzner storage boxes.

True offline media like tapes and DVD-RW is mostly dead nowadays as far as I can see.

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

#265

Post by theshrike79 » Mon, Oct 06, 2025, 9:45 AM UTC

pydry wrote: post #3

The problem isnt technical feasibility it is market incentives. Most companies have no incentive to let you hold your data when they can just hold it for you. If they do this they can mine it for data to improve their product as well as sell or otherwise indirectly profit from it. And, it's easier. Also, while the market for privacy focused products isnt nothing, the number of people willing to pay a lot extra to com…

Of all the big name corporations Apple is the only one I can see doing this.

I'm still hoping they release an Apple TV Pro with fully local LLM capability that's shared with everyone in the family - adding a few TB of disk space to it for local data storage and backups wouldn't be a massive thing.

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

#266

Post by theshrike79 » Mon, Oct 06, 2025, 9:50 AM UTC

dist-epoch wrote: post #7

How do I post a message on Discord/Twitter/Instagram from my personal data storage? If this is not supported, this idea is born-dead. Very few will use it, for the regular person the conversation goes like this: - Who can see my personal data storage posts? Can someone with Twitter see them? - No, but you'll own your data - Bye So maybe start with something which backs-up what you post on Twitter/Instagram/Discord to…

The push model is easier, all of the above three protect automated data exfiltratration pretty severely.

There are SO MANY bots on both Twitter and Instagram that a legit developer shouldn't have any issues automating posts.

Discord is a bit harder, you an post as a "bot" easily, but if you want the posts coming from your actual user, you need to poke the actual client.

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

#267

Post by gatestone » Mon, Oct 06, 2025, 11:49 AM UTC

No one mentioned Upspin? A global file namespace (URL, but better...) and protocol to isolate public data users from private governance and storage, by gurus like Rob Pike. https://github.com/upspin/upspin

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

#268

Post by Workaccount2 » Mon, Oct 06, 2025, 2:18 PM UTC

jodrellblank wrote: post #253

Workaccount2 wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You pay for an ad-subsidized version of amazon prime video.

The ad-free version is available if you cover the cost of lost ad revenue.

Just because you pay doesn't mean there will be no ads. And just because there are ads doesn't mean there is an ad free service available.

This is how smart TVs can be bought for $300. It's a $600 TV but you pay for half of it in smart TV ads.

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

#269

Post by mactavish88 » Mon, Oct 06, 2025, 3:14 PM UTC

btbuildem wrote: post #92

mactavish88 wrote: post #25

For those of us who've been around for some time and still value privacy, this sort of paradigm is obvious. The trouble isn't a lack of the right technologies - I'd argue it's a problem in the go-to-market strategy of those building these products/technologies. Ideas flow along lines carved out by power/influence. Facebook's early strategy was to start with restricting its usage to people at Harvard University - argu…

> prominent influencers onboard with your decentralized social network That's sort of a contradiction, no? Or at least it assumes transplanting the same mechanisms into a new milieu -- which I argue is something to leave behind, because it's those very mechanisms that have ruined the current internet. I think instead of tapping into the same addictive attention economy schemes, the distributed / decentralized socials…

Even if they fill a real need, their go-to-market strategy will determine whether the masses even know about them, or give a damn about trying them out in the first place.

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

#270

Post by arrosenberg » Mon, Oct 06, 2025, 3:59 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #205

arrosenberg wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I fail to see how. Having ad-subsidized access to Facebook and YouTube has not reduced poverty, hunger or made housing and healthcare more affordable for them. The overwhelming majority have not used it to up-skill or improve their income prospects. Predatory "free" pricing appears to have simply made the poor more easily targeted by propaganda and advertising.