I suppose personally serving all of one's own data is the only reliable way for users to "freely give their data". As you say, one can't expect service provide

I suppose personally serving all of one's own data is the only reliable way for users to "freely give their data". As you say, one can't expect service providers to be their remote harddrive so they can get their data back. Service providers are in the business of presenting one's data through the lens and filters of their service. Personally serving one's own data such that a service can lens and filter it would require an entirely new protocol. It would need to have the data properly secured so the parts of you that are an open book (cat pics, blog posts) are served freely, and secrets (bitcoin wallet, personal notes) are not. For apps that shouldn't be centralized, processing related to your shared data would need to be distributed such that a service could be formed entirely from peer-to-peer user nodes. In a perfect world, no central organization could hoover up all the data and do their analytics on it/share with the repressive governments. For availability, you'd want your data to replicate to many trusted peers so that you could always get at it. As if the world were one giant cassandra ring, you'd always want to reach consistent states eventually. It seems like there are too many hard computer science and networking problems for this to be a community effort (at least any time soon...)