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Comment by Roritharr | Hacker News Reader

In theory this seems like a great solution to many data privacy problems, but I suspect strongly that this leads in reality to very hard to support products as you can't make that many assumptions about the data stores. Performance and reliability of datastorage makes up a large chunk of the user-experience of any web-app, so having this out of ones control is a tough proposition for anyone actually wanting to build a business ontop of this.

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In reality everyone’s data will be stored at the same four cloud providers.

Sadly this will be true for 95% of the storage

It seems to me that an API intended to make this storage a commodity would lower the barrier to entry, possibly increasing the natural number of participants in the market.

Don't worry, these competitors will host their service on one of these providers

Is that a big problem if data is end-to-end encrypted?

Cynicism like this makes its own truth each time it's repeated.

Do you think this is worse than having it all in one cloud provider?

The number of providers doesn't matter, actually. It could be just one, as long as it is easy to switch whenever you need. See GitHub.

Actually, this has been pretty much a non-issue for us in production over the last 5 years. As the reference JS client library works offline first, it'll just sync data whenever the remote becomes available again. In fact, that's a nice bonus for offline-first web apps in general, not just with remoteStorage.

You'd need shared protocols for data, of some sort. Probably similar to the original dream for XML schemata.

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