2.2 KiB
Rethinking Backend Ownership
Motivation
Modern applications are powered by backends that run on infrastructure and systems controlled by centralized entities. Whether it's social platforms, collaboration tools, or data-driven apps, the backend is almost always a black box — hosted, maintained, and operated by someone else.
This has profound implications:
- Loss of autonomy: Users are locked out of the logic, rules, and data structures that govern their digital experience.
- Opaque control: Application behavior can change without the user’s consent — and often without visibility.
- Vendor lock-in: Switching providers or migrating data is often non-trivial, risky, or impossible.
- Security and privacy risks: Centralized backends present single points of failure and attack.
In this model, users are not participants in their computing environment — they are clients of someone else's backend.
The Vision
The purpose of this initiative is to invert that dynamic. We aim to establish a paradigm where users and organizations own and control their own backend logic and data, without sacrificing connectivity, collaboration, or scalability.
This means:
- Local authority: Each user or organization should have full control over how their backend behaves — what code runs, what data is stored, and who can access it.
- Portable and interoperable: Ownership must not mean isolation. User-owned backends should be able to interact with one another on equal footing.
- Transparent logic: Application behavior should be visible, inspectable, and modifiable by the user.
- Delegation, not dependence: Users should be able to cooperate and interact by delegating execution to each other — not by relying on a central server.
What We Stand For
- Agency: You control your digital environment.
- Decentralization: No central chokepoint for computation or data.
- Modularity: Users compose their backend behavior, not inherit it from a monolith.
- Resilience: Systems should degrade gracefully, fail independently, and recover without central orchestration.
This is about building a more equitable and open computing model — one where the backend serves you, not the other way around.