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Comment by sarreph | Hacker News Reader

I get that the SaaS model of owning user data is wrong. However, I've noticed that some comments seem to imply that it combats being "locked-in" to a provider. Surely a web-app'a data structure is so tailored to its service that you couldn't switch to another provider easily, with local storage.

What I'm getting at here is that remote storage isn't service agnostic really, is it? Unless the data structures are really standardised/simplistic.

Nonetheless user ownership is worth enough in of itself.

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Yes, it's merely an enabled - multiple providers will still have to be interoperable. That's not as infeasible as it sounds, though. For some applications it is, but consider browser bookmarks: most browsers can read each others export files (perhaps they've already converged to the same one by now?).

Likewise, this might make sense for open source PWAs. They can now be developed without needing to provide a server, and can simply be hosted on e.g. GitHub Pages or S3. People can now serve different instances of it and people can switch between those.

Yeah i agree with you...however, there should eventually be some sort of de facto standardization with the most frequent types of data sets, right? One would think, i guess? For example, LibreOffice, OpenOffice, and MS word can all open and edit .doc files. So, while the myriad webapps would have different data structures which are not compatible for the long tail...i can imagine scenarios where common app categories - e.g. doc editing, note taking, ToDo apps, etc. - would eventually crystallize around some sort of "common enough" standard that would allow for remoteStorage users to benefit. Hey, markdown isn't yet as consistent, but the files are "transferable enough", right? Anyway, i'm optimistic of remoteStorage and certainly hope it gets used alot more.

It gets somewhat easier to reverse engineer one of these apps, since the structured data can easily be made available. Not that it means that much, but it's something.

Also we can hope that the next step is standardized ways to store some data (e.g. a common key and data structure for calendar events) allowing multiple apps to read the same data =D

Core team member here. This is indeed something you can already do today, but more importantly which is our next area of focus for development and improvements: https://remotestoragejs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/data-module...

We'd be happy about any and all feedback and ideas about this specific topic. Our community forums are a good place for that: https://community.remotestorage.io

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