There is a third way. Own your own data. Own the algorithm. Own your apps. Store data locally, in relays, on servers, in git. Make apps that work on the data. Yes, you have to start small. But over time it is possible to take back large territories of the internet.

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This is why I selfhost as much as I can - but there are certain things I'd rather not. Like E-Mail - I use ProtonMail fo rthat. Or, off-site backups - a means to recover some of the most important things, should the worst case happen. So eventhough I selfhost nearly everything from files, to messaging, to calendar and whatnot, there is a use for external services as either a backup or secondary backbone.

And if I have to use any of that, I might as well chose very clearly what I would want to use. I'd never use OneDrive, although my data is encrypted, for instance (using rclone's "crypt" layer for file contents, filenames and foldernames - all the way).

So if there ever happens to be a service X that I can not selfhost for one reason or another, and I see a chinese competitor in the space, I am likely to pivot there rather than an american thing, as long as I get a means to secure it. Should it then leak anyway, it's more likely to stay in china than would it have leaked from a western company.

That said, this is just /my/ mindset. o.o

rclone is fantastic, needs a #nostr auth module with nip-98

agree it doesnt matter too much whether to store commodity data in western or eastern data stores, both have weaknesses

owning your own data, and then coupling them to apps, "smart data" if you will, is my motivattion for making https://nosdav.com/ (WIP)