Overview
Sharing some of the high-level thinking that will guide the future of Backup Brain.
A Centralized Place To Find Your Things
At the time of writing Backup Brain (BB) just does bookmarks, but that’s just the start.
We create things in so many places: Mastodon, our Blogs, our Journals, Obsidian, Logseq, etc.. Sometimes it’s hard to know where something is, or to retrieve it even if you do know where. For example, “I’m sure I ‘bookmarked’ someone’s post about this on Mastodon, but I can’t find it.”
Backup Brain wants to be where all the things you think are worth keeping are kept. It wants to make it easy for those things to be found in the future. It wants to help guarantee you’ll never loose years of work, because someone decided to shut down a company that wasn’t profitable enough.
We Can’t Code Everything
Backup Brain will have some pre-built ingesters, like one for Mastodon bookmarks, but there are too many tools to write custom adapters for.
Instead, what will likely happen is that BB will provide an API that will allow people to write tiny adapters for their favorite tools.
Less Geekery
Adding Docker support has dramatically reduced the geekery required to get Backup Brain up and running, but I want this to be something anyone can use. Maybe that means pre-installing it on Raspberry-Pis that people can just buy and plug in to their network. Maybe it means “one-click installs” for hosting providers like Digital Ocean.
The more things Backup Brain can ingest, the less inclined I am to put up a multi-user web site that people could get accounts on. I don’t want to be responsible for hackers getting their hands on thousands of people’s private documents.
The goal is not to build something that people will give me money for, although I’d love your support. The goal is to make sure that you and I have a way to control, and keep safe, the information we care about.