What "own your data" actually means

“Own your data” is easy to put on a landing page and hard to actually build. Plenty of apps say it while quietly uploading everything to a server “for your convenience.” In SelfScoop it’s a concrete architectural rule, and it shapes how every app stores and syncs.

Content stays local

The heavy, personal stuff — article bodies, individual transactions, raw health samples, diary entries — is written to a fast local store on each device and never uploaded. If you use SelfScoop entirely offline, nothing is missing. The network is an enhancement, not a dependency.

In Feeds, for example, each device fetches feeds itself and stores large HTML bodies content-addressed by hash. There’s no central copy of what you read.

Sync carries config, not content

Cross-device sync — where we offer it — moves only the small, reconcilable state:

• which feeds you’re subscribed to
• per-entry read/unread and tag state, keyed by a stable entry id
• app preferences

That’s it. So when your phone and laptop agree that an article is read, they’re syncing a tiny record keyed by Atom id → guid → link — not the article. The content is re-fetched locally on each device and joined to the synced state by id.

The rule of thumb: if losing it would only cost you a re-fetch, it can sync. If losing it would cost you the thing itself, it stays on your device.

No server to run

Because sync is config-only, it rides on managed infrastructure (a hosted auth provider for accounts, and a small document store for the state) instead of a backend we operate and that could read your life. The same thin sync client is shared by every frontend — from the terminal to mobile — so the behaviour is identical everywhere.

The result: you can wipe the cloud state entirely and lose nothing but a little convenience. That’s the difference between an app that holds your data and one that merely helps you organise it.