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Comment by snack_man | Hacker News Reader

The specter of this sort of violation hangs over the shoulder of every internet user now - the loss of an account on a service like Facebook, GitHub, or Trello could be life-altering. Our digital selves are all at risk of becoming The Trial's protagonist.

Do we have any protection besides moving to a new platform that's not big enough to betray its users yet?

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Unix graybeards selfhost. That saying "cloud is someone else's computer." is relevant here. Now, you can ask, what self-hosting really means and that is complicated. Does rented server count? Colocation? Or only way is own premises? I have worked places, where last one is hard requirement. Generally though, I am pleased with colocation, some places even have customer provided locks on racks. But even if you have cheap VPS, at least you can backup it (regularly and before troubles) and restore some other place. With SaaS, you can't always have export in nice and useful form.

I'd say the metric should be "if you can make a backup and do something useful with that backup even if your first provider goes belly-up."

The funny thing is, everyone used to self-host. A home ISP account typically came with an email address, some space to host a website, etc. Of course you could set up other facilities as well, but even without that, you had control of the storage. The Web was full of articles on how to build your first home page, which plenty of non-geek people managed to do just fine.

The biggest danger back then was probably that if you changed ISP then you'd lose access to your old email address. That's still a danger with any email hosting service, including the likes of Google that people often use instead today, and it's why I advocate everyone registering their own domain for life. Email is still the root password to your online existence in almost every case, and letting any third party have more control of it than is strictly necessary is a really, really bad idea.

I would love to see a move back in that direction, which home ISP accounts allowing access to some sort of "starter kit" home server in the same way they probably provide most customers' starter modem/router/wifi equipment already, and with more software built that was aimed at being self-hosted and accessed via your home network or remotely through a VPN.

Sadly, I think this is unlikely, because there's just too much momentum behind the massive social networks and other online services. So instead, every now and then, a large chunk of someone's online life is going to get wiped out by the kinds of poor policies we're talking about today.

> A home ISP account typically came with an email address, some space to host a website

But that's not really self-hosting is it? If my ISP can decide to poke around in my user folder and there's nothing I can do about it?

No, it's not, but it's a lot closer than using some intermediary service, and it's convertible to true self-hosting if you find you need to later because the data is all under your own control and ownership throughout.

Although it's certainly annoying to lose an old account, for many services it's just a hassle.

I went through this with a Reddit account that got hacked. I was able to get the spammer shut down but had to create a new account, and really, it's okay. The people who know you will reconnect, and the others don't matter much.

It used to be that everyone got a new phone number when they moved, and we managed.

perhaps its easier just to create a you fake persona n the internet and use it instead.

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