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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

#91

Post by Workaccount2 »

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.

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

#92

Post by btbuildem »

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 could onboard people en-masse by providing what's missing there, and filling a real need.

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

#93

Post by crazygringo »

viraptor wrote: post #28
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…

You just wait. The closed services will close down or become hostile enough that people will migrate. Not everyone will, but over a longer period - enough. People getting into Solid and ATproto today are like people using own XMPP servers decades ago, or Mastodon years ago, or Matrix. Some projects like that will succeed, others will fade. But one day, you won't be able to post to Discord due to some policy changes a…

> You just wait. The closed services will close down or become hostile enough that people will migrate.

I've been waiting a long time. Over that time, the closed services have only gotten more popular and no regular person is ever complaining that they are "hostile".

Regular people don't like ads, but they dislike paying even more, so they're pretty OK with the status quo. They certainly don't want to be paying for a domain name and paying for hosting.

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

#94

Post by lukeschlather »

I love the idea of personal data storage and I want it to be the default, but I think there are some possibly insurmountable technical problems. This article doesn't mention schema once, and schemas make seamless data portability virtually impossible. I've spent a week making sure a simple CRUD app could change a string field to a UUID field without causing any outage or bugs.

You can export your data from Google or Facebook today, but then you need to write a copy of the source UI that faithfully replicates the way all those data fields are supposed to display. And tomorrow the source makes a change so what used to be one field is now two fields, oh and they also removed another field entirely so that data is just gone. Well, in future dumps anyway. Are you going to use the old schema or the new schema for your display? Is it possible to do both?

When everything is in data silos, you can freely and safely change data format, which is something that needs to happen a lot as applications evolve. Even in a data silo, doing this is pretty tricky and bugs and data loss are significant risks. If you're trying to sync between an unbounded number of data repositories where each repository has potentially conflicting relationships with the data schema, data loss is practically assured.

Another big problem is schema permissions and identity. I might have some piece of data that says "person A is allowed to see this set of fields" and another piece that says "person A is blocked from seeing this other set of fields." This gets synced to 3 different servers, one of those servers has no idea that userA is in fact person A. So you fail closed, but then the data on that server practically does not exist if the goal of this data repository is sharing some data with person A. You really can't do any sort of fine-grained access controls in a system where trust/identity/auditing is decentralized.

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

#95

Post by btbuildem »

dist-epoch wrote: post #8
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…

You got the market incentives wrong. Most people have no incentive of owning their data. Otherwise the companies which don't give you that would die out because people wouldn't use them if they cared. Same fallacy as believing smartphones are giant and with non-user swappable batteries because somehow smartphone making companies are forcing this on the market, instead of the real reason which is that it's what consum…

> the real reason which is that it's what consumers want

Consumers want what they're told to want by a constant barrage of commercial propaganda.

Devices are large and non-serviceable because this way they can be sold with a higher profit margin. Side effect being that the larger screens make the embedded commercial propaganda more effective and easy to deliver.

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

#96

Post by dahart »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #39
9dev wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn’t the companies but the users that found it easier. There’s a reason why everyone’s on Facebook, instagram, and gmail instead of running their own hosts—because it’s vastly easier for the majority of people to do so, and because everyone else is there. We have not solved decentralisation in an accessible and useful way yet, and the incentives won’t change until we do. If ever.

95% of Americans had shitty upload bandwidth until very recently, since coaxial broadband is all they have at home. It still probably sucks for most. There was no choice but to use someone else’s computers for moving around large files. Plus CGNAT and whatnot making people have to use dynamic DNS. If a turnkey solution could have existed 20 years ago, maybe a market for it would have developed before the big companie…

Does the performance of individual data ownership hosted at home actually change very much when people have gigabit upload speeds? Since applications can already make multiple asynchronous requests, if we’re imagining that applications would need to request user data from each user’s house, the upload speeds would primarily affect latency and not necessarily throughput. If this does affect throughput, and it certainly might, then I’d guess that everyone having gigabit upload speeds doesn’t fix the problem. If we’re talking about something like Reddit and Facebook needing to make external requests for every comment in a long thread, I’d wager that it wouldn’t matter if every single request could upload at 100GB/s, it would still be hundreds of times slower than what we have today.

Even if I’m wildly in favor of user control over data, I’d venture to say that there still is no choice but to use someone else’s computers, and not just for performance reasons. If applications have to gather every individual user’s data that gets shown to another user from somewhere outside their servers every time, won’t reliability and consistency and UX likely become nonexistent, in addition to the unusable performance?

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

#97

Post by coldtea »

pavlov wrote: post #76
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 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.

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

#98

Post by coldtea »

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.

Metaphorical guns, but yes. And if needs be, actual ones.

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

#99

Post by Workaccount2 »

anonbuddy wrote: post #41
9dev wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn’t the companies but the users that found it easier. There’s a reason why everyone’s on Facebook, instagram, and gmail instead of running their own hosts—because it’s vastly easier for the majority of people to do so, and because everyone else is there. We have not solved decentralisation in an accessible and useful way yet, and the incentives won’t change until we do. If ever.

But those who actually want to do this should be allowed by law to practice their ownership over their data. I, and many like me, would pay for centralised service or any other service if it meant that we own our data and can tune the algorithms to our own preferences. I wont pay for doom scrolling, but would gladly pay for algorithm to serve me content that would better my human experience. Governments have given co…

Users have the most power, by far. Corporations are the garden plants and users hold the hose. The graveyard of companies who didn't follow consumer trends is huge.

Unequivocally, users water plants that deliver in demand fruit while being most convenient and cheapest.

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

#100

Post by mrbombastic »

pavlov wrote: post #76
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 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…

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 :).
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