Never program a computer you can't unplug.
Found myself revisiting this article the other day, sort of on accident, as I was trying to look up software that was somewhere between server and local in its functionality. The ideas laid out still appeal to me as someone that likes to handle my own data more, but doesn't necessarily like to fuss with server software & configuration (if I can help it).
My personal ideal would be an open source server, but with an added clause to the license that requires any server using the code to allow any user to export their data in a format that's both human and machine readable at any time (you'd need to work on the language, but basically you want all the user facing fields to be labeled as the user would expect). Then anyone can provide the service at whatever cost they think is fair so users aren't forced to be tech savvy to use it, but users aren't locked in to a single provider and can run their own as desired.
An alternative is clear legislation that requires any service period provides a user all their data in machine readable format and explicitly provides protection against any IP related claims for other platforms to import that user data into their own services.
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