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Comment by beatgammit | Hacker News Reader

Or more simply, just allow users to self host. Users can trust one version of the app, and then only update when they need a new feature, at which point they can choose to trust that version.

However, that already exists. I can use NextCloud in this manner and the have a note app.

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I've said this before, but that's just kicking the can down the street. At some point, unless you are inspecting every line of source code, every dependency, every dependency's dependency, and so on down the line until you get to the silicon, you HAVE TO put your trust somewhere.

The approach we're taking at Mainframe is to create a new "baby OS" that provides a sandbox for dApps to live in. This way, the OS acts as intermediary on permissions to access any resource that would contradict the user's will. For example, accessing a URL, signing data with a private key, or making a payment would all involve an OS-level permission. (For now, mainframeOS is part desktop app and part decentralized infrastructure. The user experience of the desktop app is similar to a browser, but cannot access DNS without explicit permission, and relies on decentralized infrastructure only, which provides privacy and security guarantees that today's browsers can't. Someday it will grow up into a real OS layer.)

True. In fact, if you can self-host things, you have already solved most of the data-related concerns.

But with YourNote, my other aim is to allow users to also move out of the app in case they don't feel like using it. That's why we have features like "Export Notes" that exports the data in clean, hierarchical `.md` files. This way they always have easy access to their data.

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