Comment by aeorgnoieang | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aeorgnoieang | Hacker News Reader

This is very interesting. I've been thinking about what kind of storage solutions to use for several tiny PWAs (progressive web apps) with which I've been tinkering.

I'm pretty skeptical that this is really practical for most people. I think it's a lot like 'programming for everyone' tools. Most people are basically doomed to fail in some kind of way because both maintaining data and programming are just inherently difficult.

Hell, I'm pretty confident in my programming abilities, but most possible interesting projects require a significant amount of time, if nothing else. Similarly, even tho I'm pretty comfortable with servers, command line shells, etc., managing a working and reliable personal backup system – that's actually resilient to infrequent but inevitable catastrophes – is not a trivial amount of work. And getting the damn thing setup in the first place has been a very significant amount of work!

I'm not sure most people are making a wrong decision with respect to all of the relevant tradeoffs. Most data is probably not that valuable and so the effort to actually secure it and protect it is wasteful.

That's why you can choose a storage provider to do it for you. But as with email, you're not locked in to a single provider, and small ones will probably not scan your personal data using AI/ML algorithms, like e.g. Google does.

Edit: the library in question also supports using Dropbox and Google Drive, so your users don't even have to know about RS in order to sync your PWA's data to their own account with those.

> That's why you can choose a storage provider to do it for you. But as with email, you're not locked in to a single provider

I wrote this before I realized you're right:

> Yeah, I get it. But the real benefit, that outweighs the cost in time and attention, and maybe money too, is that you can control your data. Not having your own copy, and your own backups, or not having the technical ability to access relevant info in your data, as I'd expect the vast majority of people to not have, doesn't seem like it means that much effectively.

Thinking about email was what opened my eyes. Even tho most people don't understand email technically, it's a standard feature, effectively, that pretty much anyone can have a new email provider import their emails from their old provider. That's a big benefit and just that benefit alone is worth implementing something like RS for a lot of webapps, if not nearly all of them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com