Back is for insights from history
Have you ever wondered:
- How did I get to this webpage I'm at right now? Where did it all start? How many times have I been here?
- Who are my personal top referrers to articles I spend the most time on?
- What's the longest hyperlinked rabbit hole I've been through? How did it branch and join? What are the most common starting points to the longest trips?
- What are my most frequent "user flows"? What cowpaths do I tend to leave on the web?
- Where's that thing that I copypasted from that website sometime last year? What are all the things I have ever copied to the clipboard from the web?
- Has this news article/terms of service/privacy policy been changed since I last looked at it? What changed?
If you ever spent some time exploring web analytics tools you know how rich, detailed, visual, and insightful the kinds of stuff they have on us can be. They never forget, and they have amazing features to sift through, aggregate, zoom in, zoom out, replay, disect, and make connections from all that history.
It's powerful stuff. Where's all that in my browser? Where are my rich insights on my own history, behavior, learning trajectories, and on the websites I interact with and the people and organizations behind them?
Analytics on the wrong side of the screen. Power over you, not to you.
So now Back Browser is going to fix all that, vacuum up all that data itself, and this time it will be different because you'll get to see it, right? Of course not.
That's your data to keep, delete, search, analyze, do what you want with it. Back is just the interface.
Cutting to the chase, these are some of the relevant buzzwords that I'll probably expand on in later posts:
- offline-first/local-first
- lossless, local, content-addressed, encrypted auto-archiving
- keylogger, mouselogger, timelogger, navigation-graph-logger, everything-logger (can turn on/off, delete, set expiration windows, etc. of course)
- nothing leaves your browser unless you say so
- cross-tab, cross-device, end-to-end encrypted, asynchronous, conflict-free synchronization