Glad to see a mention to Opera Unite. I found it to be a really revolutionary idea, anyone could have a simple static website running in their browser with zero tech knowledge needed. I think the world would have been better if that idea succeeded as a way for people to share their content, rather than the highly monetized and manipulative social networks.
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 compensate for the missed opportunities companies get by collecting your data is, i think, smaller than many people imagine. Which is sad.
I think the only way it will grow to an appreciable size is by seeing up close and personal what a really vicious stasi-like secret police does with dragnet surveillance and come out the other side, with scars. I believe we've only seen a small taste of this.
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.
If this takes off I fear big tech very quickly finding friends among those pushing for things like chat control, while potentially reevaluating some of its more consumer friendly "views" towards privacy. Very easy to undermine something when you start speaking of its potential to facilitate CSAM.
that is exactly what is going to happen, as more people become aware.
that's why we all need to exercise our rights and freedoms. I'm scared that if we fail to do this in next few years. And let the AI be used in similar ways like it has been used to create social media algorithms. Then we are all fucked!
Whoever owns your AI owns you, so it better be you who owns it!
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 your personal data storage through APIs/data export.... This has no downside if it's easy to "activate"
At this point distributed protocols are getting good enough that for a large class of social applications, network effects are the only thing keeping the incumbents in place.
The irony of ad supported free services is that if you just let the advertisers pay you directly for eyeball time then paid for your services, it'd be better for you financially while keeping the web pure outside of the "paid to consume ads" app.
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 and you'll have to reevaluate options.
Also, you can't backup from Twitter anymore. Or Discord. Or google photos. Or many others - they cut off that option once they're big enough.
The fact that the AT Protocol relies on everyone having a domain name, which is a centralized system over which few people have control, and about whose workings most people have no clue about, is problematic. Also impractical, once we consider that - as far as I can understand - 8 billion people should have their own domain name.
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 jackdaniels.is.technically.bourbon.com. In both cases another organization owns some of the path to your identifier and could potentially lock you out of it. In both cases, verizon is near the top of that list (.com).
As far as the domain name system being centralized, I'm not sure I agree. DNS is like a feudal system with hundreds of kings (top level domains) who all work together with one pope (ICANN), and various lords and ladies occupying positions under those kings. If ICANN goes completely bonkers the kings can get a new pope, some of them are literally sovereign because they are nation states. Just for fun, some of those states are ruled by literal kings, too. There are experiments to run a TLD by Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), but I think for the most part nobody really cares because the current system happens to work pretty OK. If you have an idea for a more decentralized way to organize a namespace that doesn't involve your grandmother typing in a massive UUID or onion address, and doesn't result in someone being able to domain squat literally everything; I would love to hear about it.
It doesn’t really rely absolutely on domain names; at the very root there’s just a DID. DNS happens to be the best we’ve got right now as a human-readable username and address in-one goes.
> 8 billion people should have their own domain name
That is something that could be feathered in gradually -- your country, region, city, neighbourhood, etc could have their own domains, and you could be anon237@milan.italy or whatever, until you find it necessary or inspiring to obtain your own domain.
There are around 10^99 different possible domain name labels (the part between the dots), so I don’t quite see the impracticality. Even going the route of Reddit’s autogenerated usernames like Eloquent-Salad9443.net would be viable.
Who has an incentive to provide a Solid server? Not big social media companies, who want the personal information that Solid attempts to withhold. I don't think anyone is prepared to offer a convenient, high quality Solid-based social media experience to everyone for free, because that costs a lot of money. And if you know anything about human nature, it will have to be convenient and completely free in order to have a chance of capturing any mindshare outside of weird tech nerd circles.
> the platforms should be asking us what kinds of data they may copy from our servers, and only with strictly temporary allowances.
Until practical homomorphic encryption arrives, I don't see how this temporariness can be enforced. If we rely on promises or regulation instead of the technical ability to enforce this, how is that any better than today's social media companies promising not to do anything bad with the data they have on us?
price of intelligence is dropping day by day like it or not, sooner or later price incentives for someone to host such social media experience could become financially viable
It was an idea that never went away. Many people have wanted to self host everything. Sadly companies have found it easier to centralise, and then as a bonus can monetise that data.
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.
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 joining other people servers but trying to set up their own is staggering lately. And they’re not simply doing it because they want free movies or something. A lot of them have done it for the same reason I initially started: their kids.
I am concerned about the media that is put in front of my kids. I care about what shows they are watching. Kids are going to get their hands on screens there almost is no getting around it, so I would rather not trust YouTube et al with deciding what my kids do and don’t see. I can’t realistically be there to catch literally everything they watch, but if they’re using my server I know they only have access to a certain Library at all times so I can rest a lot easier. In a lot of ways I imagine this is how our parents felt when we were kids. On cable television growing up there were only so many “weird” or troubling things that could pop up, definitely nothing as extreme as we see today, and you could be reasonably aware of what most of those things were and know what channels to forbid/what times your kids should not have free access to the TV.
I found a lot of other parents feel the same way here. They’re just tired of feeling like the Internet is such an incredibly hostile place and want to find ways to take a little power back into their own hands.
I don’t know hopefully something useful popped up in that rant above. I have a lot of disjointed thoughts about this I really haven’t been able to bring together.
I’m continuing to explore ideas like this in my DN project (short for DownloadNet or Discernet). The core concept: a browser controller / instrumentation harness that, by default, saves everything you browse to disk, and makes it available via full-text search or a browsable alphabetical index.
The browser controller actually runs its own local server that handles indexing and archiving on your disk, while the front end lives inside your browser as a dashboard or control pane. So it’s both a locally hosted app and a browser extension of sorts.
This is still a work in progress, but one direction I want to push further is allowing users to publish curated collections or search indexes of their browsing history.
More likely, though, you’d create a separate archive centered on a topic you care about, and as you browse you selectively add pages to that topic. Over time, you end up with a niche search engine tied to your expertise.
If that archive is good, others might find it valuable—and you might choose to publish it from your own machine. With tunneling tech (Cloudflare, Tor, etc.), you can expose your local box to the public internet. The vision is: user-sovereign data, but still shareable.
You could even federate groups of topic-based archives into a shared search ecosystem, useful for domains like biotech or other specialized fields.
Another crucial point: DownloadNet archives your browsing in real time. It doesn’t crawl externally; it captures exactly what you see, including sites you access via institutional credentials (e.g. research journals behind paywalls). Then you can optionally share those archives with a trusted group.
I’m also exploring a web-document bundle format: package an interactive set of web pages (not just one) into a self-contained snapshot you can send (e.g. via email). The recipient can browse that snapshot locally, with all internal links intact, as of a particular moment in time.
It’s a simple but powerful idea, and I think it has real growth potential in the data-sovereignty space. I started this as a passion project, and I believe many others care deeply about these ideas too. If you’re interested or want to get involved, head to the repository.
One way my vision differs from something like Solid is the philosophy of adoption: rather than launching with a full-blown protocol, you start with a simple tool that users adopt, extend, and share. Over time, emergent use cases and community practices shape the system. It’s bottom-up rather than top-down.
I’m not dissing Solid — I understand its aims and don’t see this as strictly competitive or exclusive. But I feel the incremental, user-led route is likelier to produce something sustainable. You grow it in the wild, learn what users actually need, and adapt. Instead of trying to design for all cases in advance, you let real-world use teach you what matters.
Anyway, that’s the gist of my vision—and how it diverges from other approaches like the one in the article you referenced. While it may seem as a condemnation of other ideas, it's not. So please don't take it that way.
If this is something you could get into, I encourage you come on over to the repo and share your contribution. I also riff more on Solid, this article and the approach of DN if you're interested, here: https://github.com/DO-SAY-GO/dn/wiki/What-is-DiskerNet-and-h...
> 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 users rather than sites).
I don't see how it helps at all with privacy or you "controlling" who gets your data. If you give it to site A but not data collector B, what's preventing A from selling it to B? As far as I can tell, the situation will remain identical to how it is today.
Your data will never be in one place unless you never share it. The moment you use it with other sites or services, it is stored there too, out of your control.
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 - arguably a highly influential institution - and then expand outwards to other highly influential institutions. Only once the "who's who" from those institutions were already onboard did they let down the walls to allow us plebs in, and we all rushed in head-first.
X's current strategy leverages Musk's visibility and influence (for better or worse).
Get the most prominent influencers onboard with your decentralized social network, and others will follow (dramatically easier said than done, of course). But without a significant contingent of influencers/powerful people, your network's DoA.
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 surveillence everywhere.
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
I dont know the way out if there is one, I guess we can keep fantasizing and thinking about it. It just feels like it would be easier to get the earth to start spinning the other way sometimes.
Systems Twin Intelligence, where a Pod represents the full space-time information for part of the world, using Solid Protocol: https://graphmetrix.com/trinpod-server
I find the ideas of data coops to be very appealing. I don't want to depend on faceless mega-corps like Google to host stuff like my email, but I also don't find the idea self-hosting to be realistic. I wouldn't mind paying for the security since losing access to certain accounts would be a disaster, but I'm already locked in, and the benefits of existing services would be marginal compared to the cost of moving.
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 pitching this form of information control have given no set of steps from here to there without significant cost/effort.
Of course they don't have to have the whole path in mind. By definition they just need the first step or two. But they must be steps up.
You don't get wings by wanting to fly; first you need feathers to keep warm (I am not an evolutionary biologist, I don't know if that's a valid theory).
you store ur photos on fb same way you store your money at the bank and your code on github, its delegation of concerns, you can make same argument for literally anything....not using your own silicon, growing your own food, financing your own venture, owning your own land, etc etc.... maybe its more "secure" vs "less efficient" or some other tradeoff. and you have to get the right balance or take risks for optimal efficiency / profit/whatever your values are
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 they do not have any impact like printed photo albums.
With ever growing storage costs (both cloud based and self hosted) I’m thinking of going back to keep only important stuff that too in print format.
This article seems pretty far detached from the problems that people experience using technology. It’s the kind of thing that only deeply technical people consider.
When someone uses a service like Dropbox or iCloud Drive or Google Drive, they really aren’t experiencing any kind of problem where their data “isn’t theirs” or is “trapped.” It’s not that hard to migrate to something else and the services themselves are reasonably low-friction.
In terms of social data, users don’t really have a major issue with the status quo, and those who do have already developed relatively popular solutions like Mastodon and BlueSky.
Even “proprietary” photos applications like Apple Photos and Google Photos have very easy migration paths to other services.
So what exactly is the problem we’re trying to solve here? Giving me an @Bob handle? Did I want that or need that?
I wasn't happy the state of blogging (tracking, bloat, ads, paywalls...), so I built https://LMNO.lol. It's offline first and you can browse blogs from anywhere (even terminal). Your blog is a single Markdown file. Drag and drop it to the browser and your entire blog is generated.
Custom domains are welcome. My blog is running off LMNO.lol that https://xenodium.com
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.
I don't see what advantage any company gets from choosing to build products that enable personal data ownership. I say this as someone working on a venture with these sorts of design aims, it feels like pushing a boulder uphill often.
The business model of cloud service providers makes a lot of sense- we have a system which stores and operates on your data, you pay some rental fee for us to store it and operate on it, easy peasy. The cost is related to both the utility of the operations the operator performs (to both the operator and the user) and the amount of data the user stores.
Fundamentally this is how everything from Dropbox to Facebook is governed- Dropbox does not devise much utility per GB and users store a lot, so you rent per GB, but at Facebook, they don't store lots of your stuff, and on the data side maybe you don't get much value from it as it's a cesspit, but the data is valuable to Facebook to sell ads, etc, so they can provide the service for free.
Importantly, you don't need to improve the product to continue extracting this rent, because the product you are selling is not Dropbox v4, Facebook v2.3, rather you are selling ongoing access to the rental.
As soon as you introduce even simply a federated system where a few corporate operators are involved, it becomes very hard to justify extracting rent there as the network designer, as the operators are taking on the cost of actually storing the data. You have to really be iterating on the core product to use a SaaS business model here. Some things simply don't need a v4, does Dropbox really need that much iteration?
Meanwhile as the system designer, life has become a lot more complex for you. Suddenly you cannot push unilateral sweeping changes to APIs, you need to version things in a way that is compatible between, say, one university updating their system but not the other. Since your users are a few large operators rather than millions of individuals, you lose the network effect advantage of being able to screw over a few users for the "greater good", since if you irritate one corporate client, you lose a lot of your install base. Why would you voluntarily choose this harder path as a company?
Things get even worse as you increase the level of decentralization. The reality is users expect the polished experience that the rental companies can give you; they want their data always accessible so that their friend can see the pic they shared without needing to keep their own computers running, they want the "like counter" to go up without their personal node subscribing to messages from other nodes, etc. The only users that will accept a worse experience are people who have are motivated by their philosophy re: personal data ownership, and this crowd will want a FOSS solution, so you can say goodbye to charging them for Dropbox v4, they are simply not interested if you're not giving them the source code for free. (I suspect this is where the author sits, but fundamentally I don't think it will get mass appeal, most people simply do not care about data ownership above something that "just works".)
So now you are dealing with problems like dynamic generation of redundant data and fault- and Byzantine-tolerant consensus algorithms so that your system can maintain function even when the user turns their computer off, and you have to deal with wrapped-key cryptography so that the redundant data can be split across all these user nodes without you worrying that an unauthorized user can read it, and then you have issues like how do you deal with nodes that are too slow to process updates (perhaps some user data needs to be stored in this conflict-free replicated datatype you devise), and eventually you go through all of this to... create a system that is less monetizable than the rental model, because you can't extract that rent for ongoing data storage, and we know users are not interested in actually paying for software.
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 backup which is charged like iCloud and Google storage per tier. Where your 1.5TB storage will be charged at 2TB storage.
Before 2014 I would have thought Apple to potentially take this route for Time Capsule. Instead they doubled down on iCloud. Google will never take this route. Microsoft is not interested. Amazon should have done this and bundled with cold storage back up but their track record are not good enough. I doubt people trust Meta enough even if the solution was perfect.
In pre 2012 you could at least bet on Apple to be somewhat customer centric.
May be UniFi will do it. They just announced their 2 Bay UNAS and I only just discovered, they are a 40B market cap company. ( I thought they were much smaller )
60 comments
[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 65.9 ms ] threadMost 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 compensate for the missed opportunities companies get by collecting your data is, i think, smaller than many people imagine. Which is sad.
I think the only way it will grow to an appreciable size is by seeing up close and personal what a really vicious stasi-like secret police does with dragnet surveillance and come out the other side, with scars. I believe we've only seen a small taste of 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.
that's why we all need to exercise our rights and freedoms. I'm scared that if we fail to do this in next few years. And let the AI be used in similar ways like it has been used to create social media algorithms. Then we are all fucked!
Whoever owns your AI owns you, so it better be you who owns it!
- 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 your personal data storage through APIs/data export.... This has no downside if it's easy to "activate"
The irony of ad supported free services is that if you just let the advertisers pay you directly for eyeball time then paid for your services, it'd be better for you financially while keeping the web pure outside of the "paid to consume ads" app.
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 and you'll have to reevaluate options.
Also, you can't backup from Twitter anymore. Or Discord. Or google photos. Or many others - they cut off that option once they're big enough.
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.
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 jackdaniels.is.technically.bourbon.com. In both cases another organization owns some of the path to your identifier and could potentially lock you out of it. In both cases, verizon is near the top of that list (.com).
As far as the domain name system being centralized, I'm not sure I agree. DNS is like a feudal system with hundreds of kings (top level domains) who all work together with one pope (ICANN), and various lords and ladies occupying positions under those kings. If ICANN goes completely bonkers the kings can get a new pope, some of them are literally sovereign because they are nation states. Just for fun, some of those states are ruled by literal kings, too. There are experiments to run a TLD by Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), but I think for the most part nobody really cares because the current system happens to work pretty OK. If you have an idea for a more decentralized way to organize a namespace that doesn't involve your grandmother typing in a massive UUID or onion address, and doesn't result in someone being able to domain squat literally everything; I would love to hear about it.
We can work to make DNS /ICANN et.al. more democratically operated and people-owned while at the same time devising wholly alternate paradigms like Handshake and similar: https://blog.webb.page/2025-08-21-dap-the-handshake-successo...
That is something that could be feathered in gradually -- your country, region, city, neighbourhood, etc could have their own domains, and you could be anon237@milan.italy or whatever, until you find it necessary or inspiring to obtain your own domain.
This idea is an incremental improvement over "everyone is posting x.com"
> the platforms should be asking us what kinds of data they may copy from our servers, and only with strictly temporary allowances.
Until practical homomorphic encryption arrives, I don't see how this temporariness can be enforced. If we rely on promises or regulation instead of the technical ability to enforce this, how is that any better than today's social media companies promising not to do anything bad with the data they have on us?
Aka: I agree it can’t be dine with technology; it has to be done with regulation, and the EU example already models a lot of it.
price of intelligence is dropping day by day like it or not, sooner or later price incentives for someone to host such social media experience could become financially viable
We have not solved decentralisation in an accessible and useful way yet, and the incentives won’t change until we do. If ever.
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 joining other people servers but trying to set up their own is staggering lately. And they’re not simply doing it because they want free movies or something. A lot of them have done it for the same reason I initially started: their kids.
I am concerned about the media that is put in front of my kids. I care about what shows they are watching. Kids are going to get their hands on screens there almost is no getting around it, so I would rather not trust YouTube et al with deciding what my kids do and don’t see. I can’t realistically be there to catch literally everything they watch, but if they’re using my server I know they only have access to a certain Library at all times so I can rest a lot easier. In a lot of ways I imagine this is how our parents felt when we were kids. On cable television growing up there were only so many “weird” or troubling things that could pop up, definitely nothing as extreme as we see today, and you could be reasonably aware of what most of those things were and know what channels to forbid/what times your kids should not have free access to the TV.
I found a lot of other parents feel the same way here. They’re just tired of feeling like the Internet is such an incredibly hostile place and want to find ways to take a little power back into their own hands.
I don’t know hopefully something useful popped up in that rant above. I have a lot of disjointed thoughts about this I really haven’t been able to bring together.
The browser controller actually runs its own local server that handles indexing and archiving on your disk, while the front end lives inside your browser as a dashboard or control pane. So it’s both a locally hosted app and a browser extension of sorts.
This is still a work in progress, but one direction I want to push further is allowing users to publish curated collections or search indexes of their browsing history.
More likely, though, you’d create a separate archive centered on a topic you care about, and as you browse you selectively add pages to that topic. Over time, you end up with a niche search engine tied to your expertise.
If that archive is good, others might find it valuable—and you might choose to publish it from your own machine. With tunneling tech (Cloudflare, Tor, etc.), you can expose your local box to the public internet. The vision is: user-sovereign data, but still shareable.
You could even federate groups of topic-based archives into a shared search ecosystem, useful for domains like biotech or other specialized fields.
Another crucial point: DownloadNet archives your browsing in real time. It doesn’t crawl externally; it captures exactly what you see, including sites you access via institutional credentials (e.g. research journals behind paywalls). Then you can optionally share those archives with a trusted group.
I’m also exploring a web-document bundle format: package an interactive set of web pages (not just one) into a self-contained snapshot you can send (e.g. via email). The recipient can browse that snapshot locally, with all internal links intact, as of a particular moment in time. It’s a simple but powerful idea, and I think it has real growth potential in the data-sovereignty space. I started this as a passion project, and I believe many others care deeply about these ideas too. If you’re interested or want to get involved, head to the repository.
One way my vision differs from something like Solid is the philosophy of adoption: rather than launching with a full-blown protocol, you start with a simple tool that users adopt, extend, and share. Over time, emergent use cases and community practices shape the system. It’s bottom-up rather than top-down.
I’m not dissing Solid — I understand its aims and don’t see this as strictly competitive or exclusive. But I feel the incremental, user-led route is likelier to produce something sustainable. You grow it in the wild, learn what users actually need, and adapt. Instead of trying to design for all cases in advance, you let real-world use teach you what matters.
Anyway, that’s the gist of my vision—and how it diverges from other approaches like the one in the article you referenced. While it may seem as a condemnation of other ideas, it's not. So please don't take it that way.
If this is something you could get into, I encourage you come on over to the repo and share your contribution. I also riff more on Solid, this article and the approach of DN if you're interested, here: https://github.com/DO-SAY-GO/dn/wiki/What-is-DiskerNet-and-h...
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 users rather than sites).
I don't see how it helps at all with privacy or you "controlling" who gets your data. If you give it to site A but not data collector B, what's preventing A from selling it to B? As far as I can tell, the situation will remain identical to how it is today.
Your data will never be in one place unless you never share it. The moment you use it with other sites or services, it is stored there too, out of your control.
How about we go back 20yr and train a generation of unix sysadmins and self host at companies and at home.
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 - arguably a highly influential institution - and then expand outwards to other highly influential institutions. Only once the "who's who" from those institutions were already onboard did they let down the walls to allow us plebs in, and we all rushed in head-first.
X's current strategy leverages Musk's visibility and influence (for better or worse).
Get the most prominent influencers onboard with your decentralized social network, and others will follow (dramatically easier said than done, of course). But without a significant contingent of influencers/powerful people, your network's DoA.
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 surveillence everywhere.
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
I dont know the way out if there is one, I guess we can keep fantasizing and thinking about it. It just feels like it would be easier to get the earth to start spinning the other way sometimes.
> creating endless pointless copies of your pesonal information in databases across the world
These are completely different, unrelated concerns.
The W3C Linked Web Storage (LWS) working group is transforming Solid into a web standard: https://www.w3.org/groups/wg/lws/
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 pitching this form of information control have given no set of steps from here to there without significant cost/effort.
Of course they don't have to have the whole path in mind. By definition they just need the first step or two. But they must be steps up.
You don't get wings by wanting to fly; first you need feathers to keep warm (I am not an evolutionary biologist, I don't know if that's a valid theory).
https://ipfs.tech https://filecoin.io
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 they do not have any impact like printed photo albums. With ever growing storage costs (both cloud based and self hosted) I’m thinking of going back to keep only important stuff that too in print format.
When someone uses a service like Dropbox or iCloud Drive or Google Drive, they really aren’t experiencing any kind of problem where their data “isn’t theirs” or is “trapped.” It’s not that hard to migrate to something else and the services themselves are reasonably low-friction.
In terms of social data, users don’t really have a major issue with the status quo, and those who do have already developed relatively popular solutions like Mastodon and BlueSky.
Even “proprietary” photos applications like Apple Photos and Google Photos have very easy migration paths to other services.
So what exactly is the problem we’re trying to solve here? Giving me an @Bob handle? Did I want that or need that?
[1] https://bsky.app/profile/byarielm.fyi/post/3lz4vzzhybk2b
https://LMNO.lol is my grain of sand.
I wasn't happy the state of blogging (tracking, bloat, ads, paywalls...), so I built https://LMNO.lol. It's offline first and you can browse blogs from anywhere (even terminal). Your blog is a single Markdown file. Drag and drop it to the browser and your entire blog is generated.
Custom domains are welcome. My blog is running off LMNO.lol that https://xenodium.com
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.
The business model of cloud service providers makes a lot of sense- we have a system which stores and operates on your data, you pay some rental fee for us to store it and operate on it, easy peasy. The cost is related to both the utility of the operations the operator performs (to both the operator and the user) and the amount of data the user stores.
Fundamentally this is how everything from Dropbox to Facebook is governed- Dropbox does not devise much utility per GB and users store a lot, so you rent per GB, but at Facebook, they don't store lots of your stuff, and on the data side maybe you don't get much value from it as it's a cesspit, but the data is valuable to Facebook to sell ads, etc, so they can provide the service for free.
Importantly, you don't need to improve the product to continue extracting this rent, because the product you are selling is not Dropbox v4, Facebook v2.3, rather you are selling ongoing access to the rental.
As soon as you introduce even simply a federated system where a few corporate operators are involved, it becomes very hard to justify extracting rent there as the network designer, as the operators are taking on the cost of actually storing the data. You have to really be iterating on the core product to use a SaaS business model here. Some things simply don't need a v4, does Dropbox really need that much iteration?
Meanwhile as the system designer, life has become a lot more complex for you. Suddenly you cannot push unilateral sweeping changes to APIs, you need to version things in a way that is compatible between, say, one university updating their system but not the other. Since your users are a few large operators rather than millions of individuals, you lose the network effect advantage of being able to screw over a few users for the "greater good", since if you irritate one corporate client, you lose a lot of your install base. Why would you voluntarily choose this harder path as a company?
Things get even worse as you increase the level of decentralization. The reality is users expect the polished experience that the rental companies can give you; they want their data always accessible so that their friend can see the pic they shared without needing to keep their own computers running, they want the "like counter" to go up without their personal node subscribing to messages from other nodes, etc. The only users that will accept a worse experience are people who have are motivated by their philosophy re: personal data ownership, and this crowd will want a FOSS solution, so you can say goodbye to charging them for Dropbox v4, they are simply not interested if you're not giving them the source code for free. (I suspect this is where the author sits, but fundamentally I don't think it will get mass appeal, most people simply do not care about data ownership above something that "just works".)
So now you are dealing with problems like dynamic generation of redundant data and fault- and Byzantine-tolerant consensus algorithms so that your system can maintain function even when the user turns their computer off, and you have to deal with wrapped-key cryptography so that the redundant data can be split across all these user nodes without you worrying that an unauthorized user can read it, and then you have issues like how do you deal with nodes that are too slow to process updates (perhaps some user data needs to be stored in this conflict-free replicated datatype you devise), and eventually you go through all of this to... create a system that is less monetizable than the rental model, because you can't extract that rent for ongoing data storage, and we know users are not interested in actually paying for software.
Before 2014 I would have thought Apple to potentially take this route for Time Capsule. Instead they doubled down on iCloud. Google will never take this route. Microsoft is not interested. Amazon should have done this and bundled with cold storage back up but their track record are not good enough. I doubt people trust Meta enough even if the solution was perfect.
In pre 2012 you could at least bet on Apple to be somewhat customer centric.
May be UniFi will do it. They just announced their 2 Bay UNAS and I only just discovered, they are a 40B market cap company. ( I thought they were much smaller )