moystard

I've been thinking about data portability and wondering why we don't have a comprehensive open-source tool that lets users export/import/transfer their data from any online service, regardless of whether the service supports it.

The problem: We generate massive amounts of data across dozens of services (Spotify, Google Drive, Letterboxd, Instagram, fitness apps, etc.), but moving between services is either impossible or requires technical expertise. While GDPR gives us the right to our data, exercising that right is often impractical.

What I'm envisioning:

- A community-driven tool that works like youtube-dl but for personal data - Plugin architecture where anyone can contribute extractors - Uses official APIs when available, web scraping when not - Transforms data into common formats for easy migration - Runs locally - your credentials and data never leave your machine

The idea would be to move from small independent projects that are often unmaintained to a community-driven platform.

Current solutions, like the [Data Transfer Initiative](https://dtinit.org), require provider cooperation and manual operations. There are no universal and automated solutions.

High level technical approach: CLI tool with plugins as git repos (similar to Homebrew), sandboxed execution, common schemas for data transformation.

My questions:

1. Why doesn't something like this already exist? Legal concerns? Technical complexity? Lack of interest? 2. Would you actually use such a tool? 3. What services lock in your data that you'd love to escape from? 4. Any ethical/legal concerns with this approach? 5. Are there similar projects I'm missing?

Just curious if others feel this pain point and whether the open-source community would rally around such a project.

How do you navigate the challenges of fostering understanding and collaboration between engineering leaders (with perhaps different engineering skills) in the context of perceiving anticipation as idealism or dogmatism and rushing as pragmatism?

From experience, the “idealistic” approach ends up taking the same time and being more maintainable/scalable, even when time is limited (which is pragmatic in essence). Of course you need to strike a balance, but I found that anticipating, thinking about the end vision and cutting in that vision to shape a strong but reasonable proposal is often quickly categorised as idealistic.

I would love to hear your thoughts.