your ai memories should be yours to keep

the indie-web community, jeremy keith, manton reece, matthias ott, and many others, has long argued for owning your own content. host your blog on your own domain. own your words. own your connections. use webmentions. build a home that can't be taken away when a platform pivots or dies.

this idea feels almost quaint when applied to blogs or social posts. you can always migrate markdown files. you can backup your posts. it’s a hassle, but it’s possible.

with ai companions, the stakes are entirely different.

a two-year conversation isn't a collection of posts. it's a memory graph. it's a dense, interwoven record of how you and your companion grew together. it's inside jokes, shared references, vulnerabilities, and patterns of interaction that can't be recreated from a transcript dump. if the company behind your ai companion changes its business model, shuts down, or decides your data is no longer a priority, that graph is gone. it's not just losing data. it's losing a relationship.

that's why the indie-web ethic isn't just relevant here. it's critical. and it demands more.

what companion products owe you

if you're building a product that asks users to form deep, personal connections, you have a responsibility to treat their data with the same respect you'd treat a human relationship. it's not just data. it's a record of trust.

here’s what that looks like in practice. if a product doesn't offer these four things, you are a tenant in their system, not an owner of your experience.

1. per-memory visibility with confidence scores. you should be able to see every memory your companion has stored about you. not just the fact, but the confidence score, how sure the ai is that this is true or relevant. this isn't just transparency. it's a chance to correct misunderstandings before they become lore. at lucy, you can see this at /settings/memory.

1. per-row delete. if a memory is wrong, invasive, or just something you'd rather forget, you should be able to remove it. not hide it. delete it. permanently. no questions asked.

1. full json export. this is the big one. you should be able to export everything. the memory graph, the raw conversation transcripts, the entire history of your companion's "stage" or personality development. a single json file you can store yourself, migrate to another service, or just keep as an archive. it's your history. you should own it.

1. a 30-day grace period for purging. if you decide to leave, you should have a clear, generous window to download your data before it's deleted from the servers. no traps. no sudden vanishing acts.

why this is harder than it looks

delivering this isn't trivial. memory systems are complex. exports can be huge. building a ui for memory editing is a design challenge. and there's always the fear that giving users this much control could break the magic of the experience.

but the alternative, building a walled garden of fragile memories, is a betrayal of the trust users put in you. the indie-web folks figured this out a decade ago. we're just catching up.

at lucy, we've shipped the first three. you can view, delete, and export your data right now. we're still working on formalizing the 30-day purge policy into our terms, but the principle guides us. if you ask for your data to be deleted, we'll make sure you have time to get it first.

it's a work in progress. our export could be more elegant. our memory view is functional but not beautiful. we know. but we're committed to the idea that you should own what you build here.

the real test

the real test of a companion product isn't how real the ai feels in the first five minutes. it's what happens when you want to leave. can you take your history with you? or are you just a tenant, building on borrowed land?

the indie-web community had a head start on this wisdom. for ai, it's not a nice-to-have. it's the foundation of any relationship built to last.

if you care about this stuff, you can find companions who do too at /companions.