Show HN: SocialVault – Decentralized and encrypted storage for Facebook data | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: SocialVault – Decentralized and encrypted storage for Facebook data

socialvault.io

50 pointsdbrereton16 comments

What is the use case for this? If I download all of my data from Facebook, why would I want to upload it to another product or service elsewhere?

If your killer feature is allowing me to browse my data with a user-friendly interface (instead of a clob of data on local disk), I think you need a demo, video, or even a .gif showcasing it. You have an image that hints at it, but you never actually sell it. Someone who quickly scrolls down your main page might miss the "browse" portion of your product in its entirety.

The use case is that if you're leaving Facebook, you can keep all your data/memories. And you would upload it for the same reason that you upload your photos to google photos, because it's a large amount of files to store locally, and also harder to browse.

I think you're right, the landing page does not do a good job of explaining that. Will work on improving it.

Unless there's a client I can run locally, it's not decentralized in any meaningful way. Needs a link to the means I can sign up, login, and use this without relying on your web server at all.

It is entirely decentralized using Blockstack, which you may read about here: https://docs.blockstack.org/storage/overview.html.

The only part that isn't decentralized is the front end which is hosted on Netlify.

However, if you want to do everything without relying on me at all, you can also clone the repo and run it locally and everything should work the same: https://github.com/dkb868/socialvault

I'm aware of what blockstack is. I want to see decentralized apps succeed, but asking anyone to entrust their sensitive social media data to some random website is a stretch. However little the average person trusts Facebook, they trust your site even less.

Nobody is going to clone the repo and run it locally. Anyone willing and able to do that has no need for this tool. You've gotta pack this thing up and make it like a regular application, or at least a browser plugin. No localhost web servers or anything like that. It has to look like a trustworthy and professional app like Slack, Dropbox, or Lastpass.

For mass appeal? Sure. But you said "nobody" would clone the repo and host it locally. I intend to!

I'm not sure mass appeal matters much here anyway. I could get behind the "sell yourself better" comment but this is such a niche application I'm not sure packaging it more neatly would net appreciably more users running it locally.

Perkeep (https://perkeep.org/) has a similar but broader goal: store all the data you would typically store on social networks or in a backup service and be able to access/search it from any browser: tweets, Pinterest locations, photos, files, docs, whatever

Why use PoW in combination with PoB (proof of burn) instead of using a dBFT style PoS like tendermint for the blockstack chain?

Or I could just save my data to my computer?

Yes, but if you have a large amount of data then it may take up a good chunk of your hard drive space. SocialVault allows you to store these files online, and also provides a specialized file explorer for Facebook data.

So, you are competing with Google Drive?

Apparently not Nextcloud, since it doesn't seem you can self-host this.

Not really, Google Drive is centralized and google can always touch your data. But more importantly, if you dump your JSON file on Google, it will just be a JSON file. With SocialVault you can actually browse through the data in a meaningful way.

This website does not load on Firefox Android, just a blank white screen and a chat box. Maybe not requiring me to use a Google product would be a good start.

Please don't use trollish usernames. That means trolling every thread the account posts to.

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