(Article author here.) > I think decentralization is also about Users own/control their data. Of course. I'm arguing, though, that while user control of data

(Article author here.) > I think decentralization is also about Users own/control their data. Of course. I'm arguing, though, that while user control of data is important, software and developer diversity is more important. I realize this is likely to be a controversial claim. :) > [If] I'm not able to easy move my old runs to new app then diversity is nothing. Depends. The fact that I have many (old) documents in Google Docs doesn't prevent me from using Etherpad today, even though there's currently no automated migration. Also, quite a few services do actually provide data export and API access that could be used for export, which all suggests that data mobility is not the real problem here. Don't get me wrong: I obviously think data mobility is important. But I don't think approaches like solid.mit.edu -- which seems to focus entirely on data mobility and storage rather than compute -- will actually fix very much if there's still a very high barrier to entry to software delivery. Incidentally, Sandstorm's fine-grained containerization approach (https://sandstorm.io/how-it-works https://sandstorm.io/how-it-works) makes it easy to use a new app for new data while keeping your existing app for old data, while still getting a unified experience. You can have repositories in Gitweb and Gitlab side-by-side on the same server, for example. And, of course, moving data between physical servers is completely independent of moving data between apps on Sandstorm. So you end up with a situation where you can move between apps and servers without really needing a way to migrate data, which I think is, technically speaking, more realistic that expecting everyone to use standardized data formats or write good export/import code. > "Software must be provided as a package – not as a service – with each user running their own private copy." This sounds like a going back to desktop apps. Or am I missing something? The next line is: "It doesn't really matter if the user chooses to deploy to 'the cloud' or to their own machine, as long as they can run any package they want."