Yesterday I wrote a checklist that shows you how to install nodeStorage on a Ubuntu server, from scratch. It doesn't assume you have Node.js installed or a Git client.
It shows you how to set up a connection with Twitter, and it stores user data, both public and private, in the filesystem of the Ubuntu machine. No need to hook it up to Amazon S3.
Why??
Now, that's great -- but why should you care?
With nodeStorage and the open source MyWord Editor, you can have a beautiful writing environment, like Medium, without the lock-in. Each user has an RSS feed. All the data is on your server, to do with as you please.
The software, all of it, from top to bottom, is open source. So it can go where ever the open Internet wants it to go.
It provides the basic back-end services that all apps need. I use the same back-end for Little Card Editor, Happy Friends, Radio3 and Little Pork Chop.
If there were such a thing as an Internet operating system, something like nodeStorage would be the core of it.
I wrote it because it didn't exist, and felt strongly that it should.
It's been running on my servers for users of my software since June 2014. That's a pretty good burn-in. There probably still are bugs in the software, because I've been adding features ever since. But I am confident, and am depending on it myself.