Show HN: Surfer Protocol – Export and build applications with your personal data

Hey everyone, we built a local-first, open-source framework to allows you to export and build applications with your personal data.

This August, we built a digital footprint exporter (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41325719) that allowed people to get back their personal data, but there was no way to interact with it. So we added a python package, improved the reliability of the exporting, and implemented a unified JSON structure across platforms.

How it works: - Electron’s built-in webview element is used to navigate to the platform’s website and the user can connect their account. A CSS selector is used to determine if the user has successfully connected their account. Then, the data is exported through intercepting the network requests and using the cookies and auth token to make requests, or by automatically clicking buttons / links on the website and handling the downloading and parsing of the file. All this data is transformed into a unified JSON structure - For iMessage, the application requires full-disk access and then runs a python script to turn the iMessage sqlite database into JSON.

How to get started: - Download the Desktop app or run it locally from source: https://docs.surferprotocol.org/desktop/installation - Connect your accounts and export your data - Use the python package to interact with the data: https://docs.surferprotocol.org/sdk/python. Example applications are in the cookbook: https://docs.surferprotocol.org/cookbook/python

Here's a demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuLnEFlQsHE&ab_channel=Sahil...

Would love some feedback and thoughts on what you guys think of this!