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Comment by dvt | Hacker News Reader

These kinds of ideas always get traction here on HN or similar places (slashdot), but I think that ship has long sailed. People, by and large, seem to be totally okay with storing data in the cloud -- from Dropbox, to Google Docs, to InVision. All things considered, data breaches are rare, and if they do happen, they're usually to be blamed on configuration blunders, not the services at large.

Other than a few highly-specialized niches (InfoSec, government, military), the de-facto reality is that online-first collaboration pros seem to outweigh the cons.

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You seem to underestimate the pressure from the market.

At one point the younger generation does not even remember there was a local-first software.

Sadly the relentless efforts of the corporations are paying off.

That doesn't mean people are okay with it. It means their choice is made for them.

I disagree. I think HN is rabid about privacy and "owning your data", but by and large, most people just don't care.

Most that I talk to do - but it's similar to how they care about the national debt.

There's nothing they can do, they have no realistic expertise or control, and they vote with what - dollars once every phone purchase?

I think this is a good analogy, because the national debt is not a good measure of anything. People bring it up at all the wrong times, and takes grandstanding postures around it. Just like this, eh?

At least there might be a reason to care about privacy, but there actually isn't a reason to care about the national debt. There's no evidence the model of it being debt means anything - it certainly isn't household debt when it's in a currency you can just print more of.

And even under the model where printing money causes inflation, we're in a negative interest rate regime meaning printing money would cause /deflation/.

> and they vote with what - dollars

More and more, I am seeing many companies that realize they can do both: take the user's money and feed them ads. After all, that's more profitable than just taking their money.

As examples, T-mo, Verizon, my local gas station, various airlines all both take my money and give me ads. Some are even known to sell my data.

So, can I actually vote with my wallet?

There’s a whole thing with growing or making your own food as much as you can. We keep outsourcing food production. In affluent areas that’s a boon, in others it’s an active problem.

Probably we will see the same play out here.

Consider who taught them not to care.

I know plenty of enterprise guys who won't store critical documents, designs, code, or IP in cloud services. Also, local untethers from SaaS changes (prices/features), snooping, data loss, hacking, etc. at the expense of supporting, backup/restore, disaster recovery, and securing it yourself. It's fine if you have a competent IT shop and already have the scale to do it, but it's not the first choice for small, non-technical ventures.

Indeed, it seems there's a market opportunity there, isn't it?

Not just that, but there also a lot of cases that the local-first software will perform much better given the resources might be cached.

If you mix the two crowds: the people that actually care with the people that will just want faster apps, you get a powerful bootstrap traction.

Lets also not forget that things might just vanish and when we are able to collect them and make personal relations that make sense to us, we will want to be secure that things that matter to us wont go away because we are keeping them. Its pure psychology.

The parent poster is forgetting that before we get use of how things are right now in the digital realm, we had to deal with the material world and thats how we shaped our minds. And in that world we learn how important is to keep things nearby and have mnemonics to help our minds that needs to keep so much information that our devices become our second brains.

I'm working on a fancy chromium inspired prototype to tackle this exact issue and just with what i got here working in "prototype mode" i kind of don't want anything else.. it's just.. another level.

Its technologically superior and even ordinary, unaware people will just want this. Cloud have its place of course, but "local-first" will eat a lot of their lunch in the coming years.

> If you mix the two crowds: the people that actually care with the people that will just want faster apps, you get a powerful bootstrap traction.

Do we really though? Most people just buy a new phone, idly agree to all cloud sync stuff that the Android vendor has slapped on it and only notice "hey, I have 500GB free storage for the next 6 months!" and that's the end of it.

There is a market for local-first. Absolutely. But I question how big it is.

Maybe in corporate? If not there, I don't think you can make it big in that area. We at HN are a fairly negligible rounding error compared to most of the internet-connected humanity.

I agree with you. But that's because the state-of-the-art in clients are cloud hungry applications, giving their parent companies have much to profit from this behavior.

Local-first is a technological sophistication from the current tech status-quo, so it requires more labor to get at a point where it can stand against the current cloud-first applications.

We will only be able to see how far it can go, once the next-gen applications reach the same level.

It will be a harsh competition, but if we can just ship the platform along with it, and at least Android make it possible, users wont even notice, because it was the dev's that made that decision for them. And the dev's will do it because it might make their apps a little better, more responsive and fail proof.

Of course this all must happen before 5G or part of the leverage is gone unfortunately..

But we need at least try anyway, because a world where all the information is centralized on the FAANG titans is a world where freedom, civil and human rights are constantly endangered(especially in the age of AI automation).

Oh, I completely agree, especially with the point that most end users wouldn't notice the under-the-hood changes (except maybe for apps working better when connectivity is scarce or missing).

And yes, the world is heading into a dystopia. All of us that care better prepare some big ZFS clusters for redundant data and well-connected ISPs so we can still exchange data in an encrypted and decentralized manner.

But I feel that it's a lost battle. We missed the train. There's still time but it is shrinking every year.

everywhere outside the US this may be true, but in the US there is the millennial age group, which is a mini-population-boom. The millennial age group remembers stuff like handbrake and bittorrent, is socially conscious about the effects of centralization, and is about to become the largest demography with consumptive power (they are in their earnings/savings prime right now and having children).

Increasingly, millennials also are having children, and I think there is a market opportunity for these sorts of products (e.g. I want to sort pictures by my kids, but without giving facial recognition to fb/google).

People use the cloud because they are being forced through the software user interfaces. Working with local files takes increasingly more steps compared to cloud based solutions. So I wouldn't exactly say that people are ok with it, it feels more like they choice is being made for them.

If web pages could be more easily given access to a directory on your filesystem, Google Docs could more easily show you you files in your Documents folder.

'Access to shared data' for proprietary, untrusted "apps" is an anti-pattern that even iOS and Android are now getting away from. If a JavaScript app needs to access some sort of complex directory structure, that can happen within current API's by locally "uploading" and "downloading" a standard archive format, e.g. a .ZIP file.

Running code from untrusted sources (Javascript/WASM in the browser) is an anti-pattern. It causes all sorts of problems and vulnerabilities.

If web pages had a harder time getting their fingers on online data, that would give the same outcome.

I think you're mostly right.

However I would've said the same thing about Telegram/Signal/Defi and other decentralized/privacy first technology not too long ago.

I think there's a reasonable case for the idea that as the conversation around censorship and data ownership evolves, we'll see a restructuring of the market toward some level of personal data ownership. We're probably far from that today though.

People have no clue as to how computers and networks work. In fact, you may have even interviewed people for software jobs who don't have a solid grasp on these matters.

This is good news, as far as system architecture is concerned, as the opinion that matters is principally concerned with utility, convenience, usability, etc.

Secondly, the ship may have sailed, but interestingly these ships apparently are generational. There used to be a ship called AOL. /g

(There is a reason every ideological effort for authoritarian control heads straight for the school house and youth camps. The reason is the said 'ship' that sails, on schedule, every ~20 years.)

To be constructive here, if you care about these matters and have technical know-how, invest in the future and mentor the younger generation on how to build decentralized systems. Give them knowledge, blue prints, and tools. They'll crack the generational social code on their end.

YES! Though why teach only the young? ;)

> People, by and large, seem to be totally okay with storing data in the cloud

It's simply not true, or if it is, it's only because of what you're choosing to looking at to build your view of how it 'seems'.

https://mydata.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula... https://ethereum.org/en/ https://solid.mit.edu/

Meeting every week: https://identity.foundation/working-groups/secure-data-stora...

> All things considered, data breaches are rare, and if they do happen, they're usually to be blamed on configuration blunders, not the services at large.

Did you work at Google? Do you know about PRISM? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#C...

Can't tell if you're intentionally or accidentally misleading.

> Can't tell if you're intentionally or accidentally misleading.

All I'm doing is looking at the market cap of companies like Facebook and Dropbox. I mean, hell, Facebook literally sold personal data and sure, you occasionally see "boycott FB" movements, but they're all bark and no bite.

This is sort of like saying people are okay with cancer because they buy certain plastics in mass. The reality is people are ignorant of what is good for them in a ton of applications, including this one.

Only a handful really grasp the context of what is happening with their data and most importantly how their data could affect them.

People routinely do things against their own interest. It's up to the other people that care about this issue to make competing products that don't harm. There's simply no way to get everyone to really care about an issue with nuance and/or niche knowledge.

I don't think you're giving people enough credit. It's not exactly a mystery at this point that Facebook/IG make their money by selling access to your information to advertisers. People really just don't care which doesn't make them ignorant and doesn't mean they're wrong to not care. We're the privacy obsessed weirdos. I've been in conversations where people talk about products they "discovered" through IG ads.

The mindset where we're the only ones that really understand what's going on and everyone else are just sheeple -- sheeple I tell you is gross. This issue really isn't all that nuanced. That's just the lie we tell ourselves because we don't want to admit that we're the nutters being like "they're watching you scroll through Facebook and they're gonna use that to lower your credit score. THE ALGORITHMS!!"

I'm proud to be part of this weird club but let's not use it as an oppertunity to shit on our outgroup.

We may be interested in the deep details/debates the general public has no knowledge about. However i can assure you many people care about their privacy. They're not all ignorant, but they're usually powerless.

Wanna keep in touch with friends? Gotta use facebook. Wanna watch cool videos? Gotta use Youtube. etc.

But there's a very strong movement of non-tech persons for privacy, decentralization and free software/culture. In France, it's best exemplified by the Framasoft association which started from a network of teachers : https://framasoft.org/en/

I'm in France, and have met some of the excellent folks who help framasoft with their project to degooglize the Internet.

I know a number of people who dispair, thinking they can't protect their privacy. But gradually, those who know a geek may be moving towards better software, as privacy respecting options with decent UX get developed, and as their FOSS-geek friend or family member patiently points out tools they can actually use.

Malice, apathy, ignorance, or simply don't care. They all look the same from a distance. With the same outcome.

You eat your ham sandwich. But did you hear the pig cry out at the slaughter? The same people reading your comment right now are the same people sticking the knife in you.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." --Upton Sinclair

In 1998 people turned their back on the FSF and joined the "open source" initiative. Everything that has happened since has been inevitable.

From a business perspective, it doesn't really matter. There's still a large market of people that do care about it. Look at the explosive growth of Obsidian in large part because it's a local-first solution.

In addition, there's a difference between using those services and being "totally okay" with it. If you like Evernote, then sure, you'll be using the cloud. If you had a way to use Evernote without storing your data in someone else's cloud, a lot of people would be happy.

Even non-technical people talk all the time about not trusting services because of data issues. Many will not use a new service because they're worried about their data if the service stops. It's a really big issue for businesses.

>>All things considered, data breaches are rare

Data breaches are not the only consideration. There's not many things more important to a business than their data and putting that entirely in a 3rd party's hands at a remote location only is very risky and could be catastrophic.

It's one thing to send a copy of a blueprint of a product design to China to have it manufactured and quite another to send them your only copy of it.

> pros seem to outweigh the cons.

Exactly

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