Break Away From Google Docs: Control You Data

People have few choices when it comes to documents. Historically, this is the world of Microsoft. This is the office suite that is most common. We all know how old Softy is one of the centralized data miners. They are still the dominant player in the PC world.

With the introduction of cloud and mobile, Microsoft failed to transform itself. Even today, it is mostly in the PC realm, at least to the average user. Their cloud division does fairly well in the enterprise world.

Google entered the world of cloud and made progress with their document suite. Google docs might be the most popular cloud suite for documentation there is. It provides similar features as the Microsoft suite although lacks some of the advanced functionality.

The challenge here is with ownership. As we all know, when you load something on a cloud server, it is no longer yours. Many YouTube creators found out that if you are censored by Google, not only does your account vanish, what you loaded on their servers is out of your reach.

While we are not seeing a completely solution, there is the beginning of something that fits into decentralization and allows for mobile. It is a could solution although it is not under the control of any company. In fact, you are in full control of your data and what you create.

Graphite Docs is a collaboration tool that allows users to engage in projects while sharing out documents similar to Google Docs. The difference is all data is encrypted and there is no central authority to lock the account out.

The system was developed with the intent of being private and secure. One of the major trade off with cloud computing is that people are giving up control. This is not the case with the Graphite solution.

https://www.graphitedocs.com/

I was able to set up a Blockstack ID account very quickly. It does require an email where they will send you the recovery code (similar to a key). This is the only way to access your documents if you need to reset the account.

Once inside, there is a dashboard that contains the documents, vault, and contacts. Hopefully we might see more collaboration tools (or perhaps the pay accounts have them) but it is a nice, scaled down platform.

Ultimately, we might see a full suite of applications on this platform. For now, it satisfies the needs for text documents.

The editor is basic yet does have most of the features one needs. This makes for easy text creation while adding pictures and links.

From what I can gather, it uses IPFS to store the documents meaning we are looking at decentralization. The code is also listed on Github.

It appears to be a platform that is worth giving a shot. If you are one who looks for ways to break away from the control entities like Google, this is a good start. Since all your documents can be shared (with the option of allowing another to edit or not), it is a handy collaboration tool.

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