incomplete thought but I feel like something that would be useful is having a portable sense of digital identity where apps could, with consent, read and write data to to a kind of namespaced portion of your identity storage. that way all of your data lives with you.

the closest thing we have to portable digital identity is email which is unfortunate because it is trash technology, but trying to play the hand we were dealt I wonder if we could have applications start a thread in your inbox that represents your state, your data storage with the application. every time they need to commit something new they just respond to the thread, with an attachment or something.

logging into the application I guess would involve forwarding that thread to some email address on the application side? so that they get the attachments and they can rebuild your state on their end. close to a magic link login. that way your data only needs to exist in memory while you are using it and the application servers you do not need to persist it.

kind of falls apart as I think through it idk