Dave Winer, Think different about developers:

This is the same problem web devs have, we have to become resellers for Amazon S3. Why can't Amazon, who already has an account for every freaking person in the world, let the user own their own data, which I believe they would reallllly like. I don't want access to it, I just want to make great tools for them to use

This echoes something I wrote about years ago: separating publishing from hosting.

The current paradigm for web-based software is all-in-one silos. The software and your data are trapped together on servers controlled by the software creators.

But, it doesn't have to be this way. Software should be separable from the files and content it handles—even when deployed to a server. It should access your data, with permission, wherever you control it. Developers shouldn't need to also become data landlords.

Brent Simmons recently wrote about this recently in Why NetNewsWire Is Not A Web App:

If it were a web app instead, I could drop the developer membership, but I'd have to pay way more money for web and database hosting. Probably need a CDN too, and who knows what else.

What if he didn't have to worry about database hosting at all? Let users bring their own databases. Let developers write apps that use them. Much of the complexity disappears—you might even end up with a static web app running entirely in the browser with access to the user's online data.

I've pitched this before at Mozilla: every Firefox account should come with a bit of public web hosting and private data storage that web apps can request permission to use. Users could pay to expand capacity. Alternative providers could compete with Mozilla. Developers could build tools without capturing everything users do with them. The whole ecosystem could gin up interoperable formats for apps to use. We've been here before.

But I'm not great at product pitches, and I don't know how this attracts users or makes money. I don't think I'd be able to start my own company to make it happen. Also, lately, I hear every startup is looking for an unassailable "moat"—and that's especially intensified with the current age of generative AI and its thirst for data. Stumping for a more user-sovereign web seems a bit quaint in general nowadays.