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Comment by OJFord | Hacker News Reader

The number one thing I care about in such a product, and it's make or break, is 'where is my data, how is it stored, what do I do when you disappear'. (And you disappearing of course includes a 'successful exit', congrats, but there's at least a 50% chance of an 'incredible journey' blog post to follow.)

Since it's not mentioned anywhere, I assume I don't own it. It's all in your database in AWS or wherever, maybe there's some export that's about 60% complete in a sort of workable format. But it's not going to be usable 'plaintext' on disk, parseable with other tools, and usable even if the Emery app stops being updated/disappears.

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This. 100%.

Because of this, I've come to distrust any offering that's not self-hosted on my homeserver. Sounds drastic, but I've been burned too often. The quality I get from this is significantly lower, the amount of work I need to put in is much more, and though often fun it's not always at convenient times and sometimes I hate it. But I'm fairly confident that all my data, be it email, cal, notes, pictures, whatnot, will still be accessible 3 years or 10 years from now. Some things from 10 years ago I dearly miss, and I don't want that to happen again.

While I generally want control of my data too, I think if the small team has to prioritise creating final APIs (on a data model that probably still in flux) and export functions for the 1% of users who might end up using that… OR… building features and trying to find a product that has market fit and that people like to use and find valuable.. I hope they choose the later. People are less likely to try out (let alone choose) a product based on export functions than they are actual productivity functionality. Well done on the launch it looks really exciting!

Sure, but this here is "Hacker News". We are the 1% that you are talking about.

Export functions wouldn't convince me though. Those can disappear och be broken or miss things, which I wouldn't only notice when it's too late.

I sadly agree. While I love seeing products like this, I always hesitate to fully embrace them because it would have a major impact to my day and I don't want surprises there.

That's a very valid concern. Given how often it was expressed in this topic, looks like we need to find a way to accommodate it (e.g. export option). We'll think about it, thanks!

This could also tackle the “right to access” aka “right to export” in the EU GDPR.

I'll suggest something along the lines of Bitwarden (also Vaultwarden).

Even though I self-host Vaultwarden, I pay the yearly subscription to BW.

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