I wonder if the future should simply be a cloud version of a personal computer. Rather than subscribing to a lot of SaaS where your data distributed across various platforms, you "purchase" a cloud computer (could be a tiny SOC + disk, or a VM), install software on it (licensed, not subscription based), and store all your data on it, as good old-fashioned files only you and your programs can access. Including your video library, part of which you can choose to expose to the outside world through a public IP. When your cloud PC needs more memory or CPU, you upgrade, just like you do your physical device.
And then the company goes under, or decides your variant of the service is not worth maintaining, or that there is potential for enshittification. All your data, gone. And it WILL happen.
If by service, you mean the cloud machine -- I mean a plain vanilla machine running an OS of your choice (e.g. Windows or Ubuntu). Switching to another service provider means taking your file backups + reinstalling your software on the new machine.
Developers already know how to do this with EC2s, Droplets, Linodes, Azure VMs etc. The process just needs to be more average-person-friendly.
And where then is your backup? In the same cloud? The one that just tried to rip your data sovereignity away from you?
The average person still uses the same password for EVERYTHING, despite say iOS and Android making it easy as pie to just go "generate passwords for me". Telling an average person to have a 3-2-1 backup AND run stuff in the cloud that they will 100% lose the password for is not a battle I see to be won in the near future.
