> Data ownership will not be solved by technology.

Yes, it might sound disturbing to many, but I'm afraid this is an area which could possibly be push forward massively only by some major government regulation kicking in. In a data-driven economy we live in it would be naive to expect companies to be interested in giving up on user data.

> "Data ownership will not be solved by technology"

I would say 'data ownership will not be solved by technology alone'.

I think it's completely wrong to think we can deal with any of the data ownership issues without understanding how the current technology got us here and what new technologies we need. However, I do agree that throwing some tech out there and expecting it to take off is not going to happen. There is the hard work (as with any new solution) of defining and selling the benefits.

I agree with that. I think the technology is the easy part. If we knew there was demand for a specific solution then there are plenty of folks who can build it. In fact I think we have built the technology on numerous occasions (i.e. Diaspora, OpenPhoto/Trovebox, OwnCloud, etc.) --- finding the market, describing it in a way that connects with people and being at the right spot at the right time are the difficult parts.

I disagree. The technology needs to be fundamentally different before we can have viable, distributed, alternatives.

We've had crypto for a while and yet nobody encrypts their email by default (or even shares keys). We've had the option to self-host for a long time but few people do. Why? IMHO it's because doing any of these things means you have to become a sysadmin to some degree. Very few people will put up with that for long.

There need to be tools which solve the fundamental (and common) problems of creating distributed systems/applications -- identity, connectivity/sync, deployment. With those tools, new and robust alternatives can be built with the end-user at the centre of their network. Without those new tools, we're simply using band-aids.

> Why? IMHO it's because doing any of these things means you have to become a sysadmin to some degree

I long wished that the App Store model could/would be applied to server stuff.

Imagine the following scenario:

- Buy a Mac Mini (or whatever Airport Server or enhanced Time Capsule)

- get Mail Server.app/Calendar Server.app from the App Store

- have a couple dialogs which configure the sandboxed app with DNS details as provided by DNS provider (which configures a full-blown imap+smtp server, and the remote access) and possibly my email details as provided by my email provider (which configures a fetcher and a smarthost instead)

- physically authorize user devices to accounts via NFC or BT LE/iBeacon. No login/password shingamajig needed! account creation/mapping on the spot!

- download boatloads of personal services from blog to photo management to microblogging to instant messenging to Gitlab to Tor node to whatever innovation came by, some possibly communicating in a decentralized way, possibly without even a need for a DNS record (global zeroconf, DHT, alt DNS, onion routing).

If I can do it with a few debconf-set-selection on dovecot and postfix (plus a few API calls on Gandi to set MX, SPF and whatnot), there's no reason it can't be done automatically for everyone. Of course this is not meant to serve medium to big enterprises (for which the options that actually prevent complete automation exist), but individuals and SOHO really don't need much. People used to think setting up a PC and all its individual apps was a needlessly complicated and/or boring affair (and it was!), now we have built them trivial management. There's no reason our servers could not be treated the same, we just have to stop thinking about the 'old ways' and start with an open mind. I just want you to realise that we tech folks have been doing this for years already just like we did set up and fix computers for everyone for years and we don't have to any more (or way less) thanks to iOS, and Android but also Mac App Store, and soon Chrome Store and Windows Store.

It's a huge endeavor and opportunity to bring such a platform to market, at the right time, with the right pitch, but it has happened before, just on the client-side of things.

From what I understand, a NAS box from Synology actually provides one of the closest experiences to that ideal. It comes with a Package Center[1], which is like an App Store for server applications, and like Android it can install from the standard source or from manually added repositories.

Then you get a panel to configure the new application, usually in a consumer-friendly way, like this iTunes Server[2].

[1] https://www.synology.com/en-us/support/tutorials/500

[2] https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/app_packages/iTunesServer...

Some consumer NAS boxes have this, and there's a Linux distro called Yunohost that does this (and they'd probably love to have more contributors).

> We've had crypto for a while and yet nobody encrypts their email by default (or even shares keys). We've had the option to self-host for a long time but few people do. Why? IMHO it's because doing any of these things means you have to become a sysadmin to some degree. Very few people will put up with that for long.

It's not only that. Previously, encrypting e-mail brought a bigger benefit (at relatively high cost in expertise, maintenance) than it does today, because we no longer own our machines the way we used to. PCs are now permanently connected to the 'net, OS vendors can install anything they like whenever they want, Smartphones come without administrative privileges for the owner even.

What use is encrypted e-mail when various unknown corporate / government entities "own" your device and can work around e-mail encryption easily (by installing a keylogger, grabbing your private key etc.)?

We need to get ownership of our devices back before thinking about crypto too much.

I largely feel we should be building companies that do this naturally. If you are making a site where you share photos, bake this concept into your model. Show that it can be non-intrusive for businesses and effectively implemented.

That's what we aimed to do for 2 years before leaving the consumer space altogether. I believe we delivered the user experience and ease of use but we couldn't find the market or the market wasn't big enough.

See my post on why we left the consumer space, https://medium.com/@jmathai/hello-2014-goodbye-consumer-phot...

So, Trovebox has ongoing costs, plus the costs of the storage itself?

We changed the model quite a bit in 2013 when we began focusing on serving the needs of businesses (namely, non-profits).

When we were consumer facing we had a free account with upload limits and an unlimited account for $29/year.

We decided to not differentiate prices based on storage; ours or yours. The pricing page got too complex.

That being said, nearly everything we've done is open source and even when running as a hosted service we decoupled application logic from data storage. That was our goal from the beginning. We went as far as enabling you to switch storage services (i.e move from Dropbox to S3) with a single click.

My mission was to build the technology but in a way non-technical users would understand. I think we accomplished that. Being open source was the underlying prerequisite since it's important if you start on a hosted account you could switch to your own instance or someone else's hosted service.

All that said, I don't think there's a huge market for this in the consumer space today. I hope in time that demand grows because an Internet the way we were envision looks great.

I blogged about leaving the consumer space here, https://medium.com/@jmathai/hello-2014-goodbye-consumer-phot...