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I feel like I own my storage on Dropbox to about the same extent that I own it on S3. Do you not feel like you own cloud storage? Is it because we're just renters? I'm really quite curious what you find ironic.


A big part of "ownership" for me is the ability to replace the service with my own machine, whether I actually do that or not. So (for example) I'd have less ownership over the gmail account <whomever@gmail.com> than one with a custom domain, even if I chose to forward everything to gmail or use google apps. I haven't looked into it at all, but my understanding is that it would be hard or impossible to point applications to a self-hosted dropbox replacement; compare that to, for example, github where I could replace it if I wanted to fairly easily (at least for the small, personal projects I keep there; this probably becomes less true for larger projects, so take it as an example of my thought process rather than a statement about the "ownership" of data on github).




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