The challenge of owning your data

For many years, I’ve been a big proponent of people keeping control of their digital assets. There are three main buckets for this:

1. Your website, which is why WordPress is such a good choice.
2. Your notes, which is why I use Obsidian.
3. Your email, which I don’t follow very well (I still use Gmail and Google Workspace).

All of that stuff is great, and I fully believe in it, but it’s much easier said than done.

• Self-hosted WordPress is more difficult to start a site on than hosted solutions like Squarespace or Wix.
• Obsidian doesn’t have a web-based version. They have a sync tool that works well, but it’s still much messier than tools with an online component (and built-in syncing) like Apple Notes, Google Keep, Notion, and many others.

I thought about this the other day when I went to leave a comment on a friend’s blog and the site wouldn’t post it, and was just showing an error message instead. He went in and fixed it, but that little bug showcases the bigger problem with owning your data — you also have to own the headaches. This can be bug fixes, but also applies to security updates, backups, and other maintenance pieces that you don’t need to worry about on a fully hosted solution.

I fear that this is only going to get worse. As things move more and more to the cloud, which is generally a great thing, it’s going to become increasingly difficult to actually own and control your data.

People already give up control of most of their content by data by sharing it on social media, tools like Squarespace and Apple Notes are much easier to get started with than WordPress and Obsidian, and AI is likely going to make that problem even more pronounced.

I encourage you to continue to fight to control what’s yours, but I think that challenge is only going to continue to get more difficult every year.