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Comment by askvictor | Hacker News Reader

Indeed, but for this kind of thing to make a serious dent in Facebook, it would need to include a photo hosting and sharing service. Which, unfortunately, cost money to hold the data, so you either need to charge for hosting, or collect revenue through ads or selling data (self-hosting would be nice, but difficult to get your grandma to do it)

But, maybe even a simple photo sharing service _that lets you share those photos back to facebook users_ might be the first crack in the dam wall

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While it is going to cost money of course, this is exactly what we are building into our product. But instead of using centralized servers that know your private keys, we are building it on decentralized hosting (IPFS) and we never know your private keys. Take a look, https://www.textile.photos/

I thought IPFS required someone to pin/host the content in order for it to stay alive. So if it's private how many people are likely to host it?

Or am I missing a detail?

Until filecoin is live we are spinning up ifps nodes to ensure your content is available. Alternatively, we are building both a mobile and desktop client and you'll be able to just choose to have your desktop automatically pin your content. Finally we provide you a private wallet that will contain your personal hash list, making it so you could move your data to other services or tools however you like.

That's pretty cool. Can I suggest though, that sharing easily on other platforms will be important (at least as a stepping stone)? So that might involve building a facebook app that shows shared photos as well as the default one. Even though this might seem counter to #deletefacebook, I think you need to let people take small steps to taking their data back.

Totally, I'm into that. One of the big motivators here is how painful it is currently to move _your_ photos (or any personal data) across services. We want to build an open system where you control where your data goes and how. It seems like a great idea to have outbound integration like that for sure.

I wonder if something useful here is a service like what some NASes (Synology) provide, where you 'self-host' on your PC/NAS, but also replicate to someone you know's PC/NAS. Basically, install the app on both PCs, swap keys (or authentication details) and start synching.

Cloud backup without needing cloud and it would be bi-directional so you get off-site redundancy for your data/photos. Further leveraging the SAN capability is that you could share the photos online by providing public URL's. Maybe too difficult to manage for Grandma, but if either end can share (with only authorisation provided by the other party) it might work?

This is in line with what we are building right now at https://www.textile.photos/. See andrewxhill's response above re: mobile and desktop apps that automagically sync with one another. Getting grandma on board is always difficult, but with super simple (and super secure) inter-device linking, we're hoping to lower that barrier to entry big time!

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