Comment by josephg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by josephg | Hacker News Reader

This is truly awful, and honestly shouldn't surprise anyone given the modern cloud approach to software.

I've been thinking a lot lately about ownership. If I have a book, I can interact with it the way the publisher expects (I can read it). But being a physical object, I can also do lots of other things with my book. I can burn it. I can give it to a friend. I can sell it. I can draw in it. I can rip it up and use it as wallpaper. I can get the author to sign the front cover and donate it.

Software used to work this way too. If I have a Word document, I can interact with it the way Word expects - open it, edit it, save it and so on. And I can also do things microsoft doesn't expect. I can put it on my website. I can email it. I can back it up. I can delete it. I can reverse engineer the file format and edit it using other programs. I can archive it for 30 years, and know it will still work when I open it using the version of microsoft Word which created it. And so on.

But the new software model with smartphone apps and data in the cloud takes all this away. You can only do with your data what the publisher expects. If Notion doesn't have a working export API, tough luck. If GMail is missing an API for searching by regular expression, tough luck. If Adobe shuts down their activation servers, or a startup fails, or Google kills a product, tough luck. You've lost all your data. There is no backdoor. There are no other ways, by default, for you to have any agency over your own data that a product manager hasn't approved of. Amazon can delete books that they've already sold you. And they have. You can't sell a game you bought on steam. Or get it signed by the author. Or reverse engineer the raw database entries which store a google doc.

And this sucks. Its disempowering. I love the security on my phone, and the operational simplicity of not needing to manage my own backups. But this? I hate this. I hate that there's a good chance Notion will aquihired by a big tech company and shut down. I'm not ok with my own creations being at the whim of market forces like this.

I reject the idea that word and google docs are the only options. Git + Github is the model I want, where the cloud is a convenience but everything is stored locally as well. We need to start fighting for that.

One of the big problems is that software doesn't sell (or at least is really hard to sell). Piracy and that pesky "pay once unless you want to upgrade" problem companies aren't fond of. Services are easy to sell and code on your server is hard to pirate.

Still, there are gems out there, like Obsidian. Your files, put them where you want, how you want. Use the tool however you want, extend it if you want. Every other day someone comes up with some crazy plugin idea I didn't think I needed but now I do. If the company behind it goes poof, it will keep working.

Going along with the software doesn't sell problem, supporting software on customers laptops is a nightmare.

No two environments are identical, you don't know what weird things they've done, this causes all sorts of new bugs.

We don't know how to write bug free software for a reasonable price, and it's a lot easier to debug and update software on a server you control than on a customers computer.

On a server no one complains about auto upgrades, on a customer computer there's going to be a lot of people who don't upgrade but still want support, even if you try and force auto upgrades (which will annoy people) someone will have figured out a way to prevent that from happening.

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I think for a lot of companies SAAS is unfortunately the responsible financial decision.

Indeed you have a great point here, as I can simplify, you do not own your data, you buy allocation of certain service, like you said about Amazon ebooks.

Indeed I'm a guy who balances more between freedom instead of making it rigidly by laws, however the "Tech World" really needs "foundational directives" where all companies should abide.

Like John Locke defines, as I remember, that you have a "natural right" to Life.

Why not make an analogy here...

Right to Life - Your data is yours.

Right to Liberty - Your data goes where you want.

Right to Property - help me here lol

Idk we really should start to think more about privacy to all people, and where the top ones do with them.

The industry isn't collaborative enough to voluntarily come up with such practices so the most likely avenue seems to be through laws and regulations.

Indeed the problem is how to make an international law which they could abide?!

And, right to cancel AUTO-UPDATING!!!

> Git + Github

You mean, you “own” copies of your data, but unless the person who controls the interface with that popular happy workflow that Everyone Already Knows How To Use lets you store it on their server, a lot of people who might otherwise be willing to collaborate with you will go “eh” and give up, and therefore, since so many marginal things require that to get anywhere, you can still just lose completely if you don't agree to the GitHub Terms of Service?

I imagine you didn't mean that part primarily, of course—but it's another thing to be aware of. There's a lot of potential for SaaSS interface lock-in—I think this is much worse for users with less technical inclination or less mental slack, but even in the realm of “people who are already developers who use Git”, this becomes a large friction source. And with more-social smaller-world flows, the coordination-control aspect has a stronger grip.

That said, it's also worth looking at how the “cloud” model is in a way reifying the folk model many users were already using. People thinking of their documents as being “in” (for instance) Word, and having no idea where they are in a filesystem or what that is in the first place, is already seared into the cultural memory of people who were family tech support in the 1990s. The default consumer cloud model is an easy extension and solidification of this: now it totally is “in” Google Docs rather than being a leakier folk-model weakening of accessing your your hard drive, and now Google Docs is accessible from anywhere. Everything is like you expect! No need to panic when your machine breaks, just get a new one and it's all still there!

And those upsides are real in their own way. But a number of downsides which are also real are less obvious and immediate.

That's why I become a software engineer. I would like to host the services and use cloud as backup.

Right now, the only thing bothers me is the email service. For a selfhosted email service, there might be some problems.

For example, I would like to sign up FB by my custom domain email address, but after roughly two days they treat me as bot and ask for cellphone which I don't want to give them. Because there is no way to delete the cellphone later. The function on their setting is not working. Even if you deleted the cellphone on setting page, you could still get targeted AD by hashed cellphone information. It seems like they use hashed information as the way to against user deleting.

In the case of GitHub and any other similar service the lockin is the number of services they added to the plain repository. Pull requests, issues, wiki, API for third party services, etc. You get back some of them if you self host with GitLab but every service supports GitHub, maybe not GitLab.

In this case, I don't even know what they get when they export from Notion but how are they going to collaborate on those data?

Yeah, I wish PRs, issues, wiki and all that was also stored in the git repository. I understand there's no incentive for github to do so, but it would make interoperability so much easier.

> how are they going to collaborate on those data?

CRDTs make collaboration possible and work well, without needing a central source of truth. For example, Yjs.

The wiki is a git repository of markdown files (maybe some other format too.) I edit locally, commit and push to GitHub. The name of the repository is user/project.wiki The file for the sidebar is _Sidebar.md

No idea if other services can import those files into their wikis.

We can't even export Google Docs in its native format. If one day Google shutdown Google Docs, you probably loses your documents forever.

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