It would be interesting if it were possible to hijack the infrastructure of the existing cloud players to do something similar. Like using encrypted blobs on Google drive, Microsoft OneDrive, etc, as the backing store. In some way that provides redundancy, safe peer-to-peer key exchange, opacity (your account is storing not just your encrypted blobs) etc.

Foisting off the infrastructure funding on the opposition has a sort of poetic justice to it.

Google "parasitic storage." That's what CompSci called such schemes when I last saw them. They might even have done "parasitic computing" or something like that by now.

Interesting. I could see using something like the blockchain as proof of which domains/urls are the current central authority to get the rest of the info from. Such that the base reference isn't easily shut down. It's whack-a-mole to try and kill the head, no need for complex decentralization.

Would be kind of fun to watch the giants trying to shut it down. Given some level of popularity, it might become too difficult​ for them to do. Users donate newly minted Google/Microsoft accounts as old ones get shut down. With some sort of karma reward for doing that.

You might want to take a look at Blockstack (https://blockstack.org/). It does exactly this on top of the Bitcoin blockchain. You resolve a globally-unique name to a DNS zone file, which has URI resource records to off-chain data on one or more external storage systems.

Disclaimer: I'm one of its creators.

Only on HN. I describe an unusual idea in fairly vague terms, and it turns out it exists. And one of the creators clues me in.

Thank you, and I will check it out.

Use an old laptop as box.

Install NextCloud, eg via "snap install nextcloud" on Ubuntu. Now you probably want to configure NextCloud a lot via its web interface.

You are 90% there. There might be a hurdle to access your box if it is behind your home NAT.

Not available to non-techies, but you could sell such pre-configured boxes.

I would rather use my phone as the box instead, since it is the device that is potentially on 24/7.

I wish that by installing the app it would take me to the following process:

1. Set up my custom domain preferences 2. Set up email 3. Set up file sharing 4. Set up personal website (optional)

For the periods in which my phone is offline, e.g. on a flight, the whole thing would fall back to the app vendor service as a contingency to people sending me email or wanting to access my website. Once I'm back online, things would be sync up to the phone and the fall back contingency removed.

Maybe it's just me wanting to fast forward the world 5 to 10 years from now.

A phone is not "on" 24/7. A phone is asleep 99% of the time, because anything else would drain the battery too quickly.

Why restrict the software to nextcloud? What if I want Git hosting? Or run some cms. Imo, something like yunohost, arkos or cloudron is better suited.

This, one of the key perks of Sandstorm.io is that you can use apps written in any language that runs on Linux pretty much.

Cloudron.io is fairly similar, though makes some different design choices.

I definitely like sandstorm approach over nextcloud plugin model that tries to make nextcloud do everything. It's a security nightmare

I do too, and I feel Sandstorm has the superior security model of most of these platforms. But a key perk of Nextcloud is that it can be installed on cheap shared hosting which doesn't grant the customer root access.

Sure.

Still, NextCloud provides the most popular cloud stuff for non-techies: Storage like Dropbox and adressbook like Google/Apple.

Do you know how well NextCloud works in a home environment? Is it really easy to automate the punching of a hole in the home firewall to allow access from anywhere? If you know of a project that automates this punching, it's a great combo to nextcloud.

I punched the hole manually. Unfortunately, even this is not enough. The tricky part is to have the same hostname inside and outside of your NAT.

Have you tried a Diskstation?