The Locker Project

» see lockerproject.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The repository opened on 7 December 2010 at 02:47 UTC, under a BSD license, with a one-line description that has never been edited: Locker, the "me" platform. The person who started it was Jeremie Miller, who in 1999 had written Jabber, the protocol the world now calls XMPP, and had watched it become the plumbing under a decade of chat.

Locker was software you ran yourself. It sat on a machine you controlled and worked through connectors, one per service, each pulling your own history back out: your Flickr photos, your mail off an IMAP server. The project also absorbed TeleHash, Miller's design for moving data between peers without a server in the middle. What it was built to produce was a complete record of your digital wake, held locally, queryable by anything you pointed at it.

Singly was the company around it, founded in San Francisco in 2010 by Miller with Jason Cavnar and Simon Murtha-Smith, and the bet was that developers would build applications on top of lockers other people were running. Matt Zimmerman, Ubuntu's former CTO, joined in May 2011. In April 2012 the company raised $7 million.

What the money bought was a different product. By December 2012 Singly had turned toward mobile developers and was selling a hosted API, the Singly Data Fabric, which normalized about forty third-party services behind one endpoint. The locker you ran on your own hardware stopped being the thing the business needed. Appcelerator bought Singly on 22 August 2013 and said it would retire the Singly name by early 2014.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the commit log is the death certificate ~

You can date this one to the second without asking anybody. The last push to LockerProject/Locker landed on 19 October 2012 at 23:10:51 UTC, titled "Update README.md" by Kristján Pétursson, and the diff is six lines added and one removed. The six lines are a new heading at the top of the file: "»This project is unmaintained«", followed by a note that Singly had moved development to Hallway, a hosted multi-tenant version, and that anyone who wanted to carry on should write to the developers list.

The deleted line is the one that hurts. It used to read "STATUS: eager-developer-friendly only at this point, we're working hard to make it usable for early adopters very soon." It was replaced with "STATUS: Inactive." The last change to running code had come six weeks earlier, on 8 September, from Ben West, with the message "Allow locker to run under fresh install."

Go the other direction and the first week of commits is just as readable. On 21 December 2010 Simon Murtha-Smith got Flickr working. Three days later Miller landed the IMAP connector with a message that is pure engineer relief: "python is so much better at imap, *pfew*."

~ what the frozen site kept claiming ~

singly.com went on serving its acquisition announcement for two and a half years after there was anything behind it. The page carried the line "Empowering data portability since 2010" above a banner about the Appcelerator deal, and the archive shows that exact page returning 200 as late as 5 February 2016. By the 24th it was redirecting, and by December that year it was a 404.

Today singly.com answers with a 114-byte parking lander and lockerproject.org forwards to a restaurant in South Carolina. The repository is still public, still unarchived, carrying 1,060 stars from people who liked the idea in 2011.

~ where the idea went ~

The idea came back later as regulation. GDPR gave Europeans a right to their own data in a portable format, and the download-your-archive button appeared inside Google and Facebook because the law asked for it. The industry conceded the whole premise Locker was built on, and the mechanism it conceded through was compliance paperwork.

I did not run a locker, and almost nobody did, which is the honest measure of this one. It wanted you to keep a Node service alive on a box you owned in 2011, when the direction of travel was toward not owning the box. Miller had been early once before with Jabber, and the reward for that was watching Google and Facebook build on his protocol and then close the doors. This time the reward was a repository that still collects a star now and then, and a domain pointing at a grill.

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