| Oli here from the team building Memex. Yeah indeed, having stuff in the cloud is not ideal when it comes to privacy and centralisation. One of our core values is privacy and data ownership. So we do our best to make our business not dependent on (analysing and selling) your data, and instead provide you with service value you're willing to pay for.
We are built with interoperability in mind, that will allow you to switch providers of Memex and Memex Cloud without frictions, in case there are breaches of trust, or simply better service. We follow these values by currently building for offline first usage, where your data is locally indexed and searchable primarily.
With our search technology you'll be able to get up to 5 years of your research done in the browser. For the cloud part, it is unfortunately not yet possible to do performant search on encrypted data, otherwise it would not be such a big issue to have your index in the cloud. Equally unfortunate is that it comes with a lot of drawbacks to replicate all your data on all nodes, as opposed to have a central point to query. Especially when we are looking at phone usages.
There it is really not practical, so there is a need to have some sort of cloud - UX is still very important. Most people can't be bothered with the drawbacks of decentralised and distributed systems (yet). We hope to get that switch in multiple smaller steps that guide (non-technical) users through a smooth transition to a Memex system that is as distributed as possible. (Check out Dat https://datproject.org/, a technology we likely use to make that first step possible) And as you already noted, this stuff will be self-hostable. We see ourselves as a service provider first and want to serve people who can't/don't want to run their own server.
A bit like the Wordpress model. You can read more about our approaches to running this business in our vision post: worldbrain.io/vision |
I was wondering about mobile usage too, and agree that having a server somewhere available for queries is the best solution. Since this deals with such private data, having a possibility for self-hosting is the correct solution.