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Yeah, that's the crux of the matter. I'm one of the rare (outside the HN bubble at least) tech users who try hard to retain control of data and avoid cloud prov

Yeah, that's the crux of the matter. I'm one of the rare (outside the HN bubble at least) tech users who try hard to retain control of data and avoid cloud providers. I've never used Gmail, I have a Google account but almost never sign into it, I don't have a Facebook account, I aggressively block ads, tracking scripts, etc, etc. It seems like the main cost I'm paying for that isn't the setup effort (setting up a mail server for instance is mostly a one-time effort), it's the lack of some really neat features. I don't get Google alerts relevant to items on my calendar, the photos I take with my phone stay there until I manually transfer them to my PC, I don't have an easy way to look up which restaurant I visited in another city 2 years ago, and the list keeps getting bigger. I really like the idea of having centralization at a personal level, but it seems like the most you can get out of it is fairly hassle-free synchronization of your stuff between devices. Which is nice, but I don't see how it could provide Google-style features that are useful mainly because of the aggregation of many gigabytes of user data per day.

close04 8y ago
Yeah, that's what I was also curious about: to what extent can you use the data you collect from yourself to get some genuinely useful outcome? How do I get a better news feed, search results, restaurant recommendations, etc. using the data on my personal platform? Because there are 2 sides of this issue: not giving up your data and using it productively.
- ACS_Solver 8y ago
  One thing that seems reasonably possible is to get restaurant recommendations if you built your own app for that. You'd have to tag restaurants you enjoy or frequent manually, in order to avoid providing location data to Google, but with that input you could rank restaurants in any area by how similar they are to your preferred places. This has some complications anyway because Google Places API, if you rely on that, doesn't provide access to all the tags you see in Google Maps, and you'd have to replace some of that with freeform text search. But stuff like search results? Auto-tagging items/locations in your photos? I was very impressed by the stuff Google Photos can do, but those features obviously rely on some very well-trained neural networks. If there existed a promising "personal platform" solution, I'd happily support it by donating and hopefully code contributions, but I'm not aware of anything much better than Owncloud, which itself isn't dramatically different than using rsync/duplicity in cron jobs.
fouc 8y ago
If everyone has their own centralized platform then perhaps there can be a mechanism that lets them share their personal data with others in a crowdsource way. Or better yet, perhaps everyone's platform can be parts in a large map reduce. By the way, so many people will have the same problems, so it seems possible that solutions to common problems can be shared.

close04 8y ago

Yeah, that's what I was also curious about: to what extent can you use the data you collect from yourself to get some genuinely useful outcome? How do I get a better news feed, search results, restaurant recommendations, etc. using the data on my personal platform? Because there are 2 sides of this issue: not giving up your data and using it productively.

ACS_Solver 8y ago
One thing that seems reasonably possible is to get restaurant recommendations if you built your own app for that. You'd have to tag restaurants you enjoy or frequent manually, in order to avoid providing location data to Google, but with that input you could rank restaurants in any area by how similar they are to your preferred places. This has some complications anyway because Google Places API, if you rely on that, doesn't provide access to all the tags you see in Google Maps, and you'd have to replace some of that with freeform text search. But stuff like search results? Auto-tagging items/locations in your photos? I was very impressed by the stuff Google Photos can do, but those features obviously rely on some very well-trained neural networks. If there existed a promising "personal platform" solution, I'd happily support it by donating and hopefully code contributions, but I'm not aware of anything much better than Owncloud, which itself isn't dramatically different than using rsync/duplicity in cron jobs.

fouc 8y ago

If everyone has their own centralized platform then perhaps there can be a mechanism that lets them share their personal data with others in a crowdsource way. Or better yet, perhaps everyone's platform can be parts in a large map reduce. By the way, so many people will have the same problems, so it seems possible that solutions to common problems can be shared.