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Comment by Geee | Hacker News Reader

One important property of decentralized storage is that it prevents data monopolies. For example, if you host your web app on Sia Skynet, then users own their data instead of being locked in by the app developer. It also enables a model where different apps can easily access the same data. The data is in the "cloud", but still owned by the user.

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Do you know why Sia is overlooked so often? I see a lot of shills on forums and the founder seems to tweet bitterly about Filecoin, but folks seem optimistic about the tech. So what am I missing that makes Sia not get adoption vs. Filecoin?

The Sia team has let down customers for other tangential projects, and Sia has weaker guarantees than Filecoin. It’s been out a long time now and they have failed to address some core scaling and redundancy concerns. I wouldn’t say it’s bad, but it’s seeming more like maidsafe - never got enough traction and now the interest is on filecoin and arweave.

Filecoin got a lot of funding from prominent investors before they even started. I don't think there's much actual adoption in there.

They spent very little on marketing and focused on building something. That's starting to change now.

Likewise with ScPrime (https://scpri.me) which is like Sia but focused on B2B data storage and is changing to PoS instead of PoW to be more environmentally friendly.

I think that this paper is more about file storage, not web apps.

And for file storage, there are no data monopolies already. Take for example AWS S3 storage -- there are multiple providers (AWS, Backblaze or local Minio) and many, many clients in all sorts of languages.

You could implement the same Solid-style model using centralized storage or you could implement lock-in on top of decentralized storage. It's mostly orthogonal.

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