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Comment by tconfrey | Hacker News Reader

I think there's going to be an increasing push for people to own their own data, from whatever application it is they are using. Tim Bernes-Lee's Solid [1] is aiming at that idea and a lot of the new personal knowledge management tools like LogSeq [2] and Obsidian [3] can work from a local file. My own browser bookmarking plug-in BrainTool [4] reads and writes plain text (in org-mode format) from a local file. BTW I'm advocating for org-mode as the universal exchange format for productivity apps [5].

[1] https://solidproject.org/

[2] https://logseq.com

[3] https://help.obsidian.md/Obsidian/Obsidian#How+we're+differe...

[4] https://BrainTool.org

[5] https://braintool.org/2022/04/29/Tools4Thought-should-use-Or...

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I find SOLID frustrating because I feel like it's chief selling point is that Berners-Lee is pushing it. I think it's a fundamentally flawed design: It still relies on apps which are hosted by other parties and can hence disappear, or of course, do evil things.

Retaining your data is important, but so is retaining the application. Google Takeout is a great example: You can download all your data but literally nothing ingests most of it and makes it at all useful, so it's mostly pointless to download a bunch of JSON files.

Do you know of alternative efforts besides SOLID? Would love to research this some more.

I think a far better approach is to just self-host your own applications, instead of just your data like a SOLID pod. Several solutions assist with this with varying levels of security isolation and open sourceness.

I use and contribute to Sandstorm.io, but also on the open source side there is also YunoHost, and on the proprietary side is Cloudron and Umbrel.

Self-hosted applications can still be closed source, but hosting them locally means you can monitor their behavior, and they should continue to work even if the developer shuts down and abandons it.

Selfhosting everything yourself is not realistic for the majority of users. And even experts who have the time, money and expertise, can't selfhost everything, after all at some point they must exchange data and trust others work. I mean, just take this forum. How would you selfhost this place which needs a centralized power which upholds order? How would you realize a good moderation and trustable voting on a dezentralized forum, with sane solutions? Sure you could decentralize this all and play blockshit-bingo, for a high price. But until we have a true dang-ai, forget about the quality of moderation. And this is just for a simple text-forum, let's not talk about youtube or the like... That's the point were solutions like solid make sense. Places where centralization is unavoidable, but also places were people are to lazy or "poor" to use other solutions, thus a compromise for the real world.

Oh god! BrainTool is the extension I've been looking for so long. My note taking usually starts with some bookmarking or link from a forum or post and it was always difficult to be consistent to manually storing each link/bookmark on Obsidian or Joplin so I always end up with a messy bookmark list or notes with missing references.

This is perfect, thank you so much. I'm going to try it.

So far I'm pretty happy with TiddlyWiki - steep learning curve and a bit of a hassle to get setup right, but I can't go a day without it if I'm hacking at something. https://tiddlywiki.com/

Highlights:

* You can drag-and-drop plugins from other wikis you come across

* You can write own plugins and customise everything

* Hostable as a self-contained file (one index.html) and it builds itself (a quine)

* You can host it in Node if you want stand-alone note files

Still didn't figure out a good mobile workflow though.

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