We had something close to good for a brief window before marketing and greed took over the internet.

I think if someone bully a synology nas-like product with apps designed to benefit the end user and people (“your IT person”) to support you which wasn’t aimed at fleecing all personal data and dollars out of customers it may very well work and would be utopia for the end user but the economics probably makes it a low margin business with lots of risks (e.g. liability over losing peoples files)

This sort of thing is very achievable if you work in IT and can run your own server. But what about everyone else?

Your idea of a personal “IT person”, like your own personal barber or tailor, is very intriguing. I wonder if its feasible to provide a service like this to people who are of a similar mindset about disconnecting from huge tech companies/algorithms and using something more personal, but don’t have the technical means to achieve this?

I’ve also been thinking about the personal data aspect of healthcare. I hate that my medical records are stored in MyChart and a dozen other proprietary systems that I have no control over. Yet, I have a super computer in my pocket. Why can’t I maintain my own copy of my records and selectively share data with my doctors when I arrive for an appointment? Why do I still need to have one doctor’s office fax something to another’s? I should be able to own my data and tap a button on my phone to do this. Only Apple’s Health app seems to come anywhere close to providing a fraction of this functionality, but there seems to be 0 adoption of this within the US. Even then, this only benefits Apple users. Something like health data should not be locked in a propriety system, even one that runs locally like Apple Health. There should be some open protocol and an ecosystem of implementations.

Wow, I haven't thought about this idea before. I really resonate with this and can see it being an actual reality in the next 5-10 years. That being said, I'm sure somebody has tried the approach. What's preventing it from happening now?

Just improvising with the idea and trashing more on big tech: I would say, nothing, if something like that gets to happen, my guess, it will be silent, away from the noise, would not be a sexy tech headline, kind of what is happening with mastodon, there is no big names, personalities or numbers with tons of 0s behind it, just an interoperable protocol, you know, real tech. it does not need marketing or infinite scale, dependent on FOMO or other social phenomenons, its just pure value for its users, also, as Cory Doctorow said somewhere, as instances of mastodon, ideas like that are going to come and go, and that's fine, that's the process of finding the next valuable thing that will stick with us, it should be organic, the next big thing will not come from the silicon valley casino like esque. An "IT person" would be just a job. pretty much as any other craft, what happens its that some of the most noisy parts of our industry are sick, feverish, delusional and full of their own bullshit, and we have in our subconsciousness that everything needs to be flashy, glorious, amazing, disruptive, big, competition proof and fast (in terms of success), not sustainable at all.