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Show HN: Bloom – A free and open source 'Google'

kerkour.fr

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Re: Show HN: Bloom – A free and open source 'Google'

#201

Post by sonnyblarney »

Communications point: the several pages of diatribe before the presentation of your product is in the way of expressing the more material value of what you are doing, i.e. the 'product'.

Your specific worldview is going to be less interesting to most people, outside of HN'ers who probably don't mind.

You can summarize all of that in a tagline, and tuck away the elementary school valedictorian bits on another page.

Also, the registration process before we even get to 'see what this is' is a little much, it'd be nice to be able to 'get in there' without having to give up my email address.

So try to get to they 'why it matters to your visitor' much quicker.

Good work though.

Re: Show HN: Bloom – A free and open source 'Google'

#202

Post by nathan-io »

z0mbie42 wrote: post #199
neop1x wrote: post #189

I like your enthusiasm but I am afraid you are overambitious. For me, it sounds a bit like GSuite alrernative hosted on Google Cloud. It doesn't make sense to me. What is the advantage of it being opensource when it is hosted by you. I have been hosting my own NextCloud instance on a bare metal server for years, email (exim, dovecot, roundcube), dns (bind) and it all replaced gsuite for me, they are awesome libre and…

Thank you for the feedback. The plan is as follows: Code is free and open source, but 98% don't have the time/the knowledge/the will to self host and will happily be us to manage and secure their data (like DropBox). Open source is not much a marketing argument, but in my opinion the only way to build a sustainable future.

> Code is free and open source, but 98% don't have the time/the knowledge/the will to self host

The vast majority of people who use GSuite won't understand or care about the OSS angle. Even if they do, they won't have the sophistication to examine your code. Thus, they must simply "trust" you, the same way they'd trust a corporation like Google.

People who really care about OSS are more likely to choose a more established solution for each use case (ie. Nextcloud for storage), and to self-host those solutions.

> will happily be us to manage and secure their data (like DropBox)

Again, if your edge over Dropbox is "we're open source!", I think this is just not compelling to most potential users who still want someone else hosting/managing their files. In that case, the open source transparency doesn't even mean anything, because the code in your repo isn't necessarily the code you're running on your servers.

In my case, I don't trust Dropbox, but I want their infrastructure. So I use a third-party encryption tool to ensure that they don't have access to folders I want to keep private. Best of both worlds.

Re: Show HN: Bloom – A free and open source 'Google'

#203

Post by z0mbie42 »

dancedar wrote: post #137

So, I tried bitflow, pasted a magnet with 2500 seeders. Same in to seedr.cc. The latter it was downloaded in roughly 45 seconds, on bitflow it's still queued. No title/name, just the magnet link. Can you share details on this?

Resource were not size for the load. I'll increase resources :)

Re: Show HN: Bloom – A free and open source 'Google'

#206

Post by z0mbie42 »

rcdwealth wrote: post #141

Hello Sylvain, Today I was reading news.ycombinator.com and found your website: https://www.kerkour.fr/blog/bloom-a-free-and-open-source-goo... You may consider me free software supporter since 1999. That is how long I am using GNU operating systems with Linux kernel. I am business consultant too, helping people to startup in business. Let me give you few comments on your website: Congratulation on publishing softwar…

Hi Jean, I received your email and will reply, please give me some time for the things slow down.

Best regards, Sylvain

Re: Show HN: Bloom – A free and open source 'Google'

#208

Post by z0mbie42 »

solipsism wrote: post #124

How are you going to do all these amazing things? When I go to bloom.sh and click About, I learn that the core team is one product designer and one graphic designer. If you're asking for support, I think you'd benefit from learning from the Kickstarter model -- go to great lengths to prove to supporters that your goals are realistic. Comparing yourself to Google doesn't help you with that, IMO.

To prove our goals are realistic we released this beta.

We had much more attention than we expected today. You can follow us on twitter to stay informed about the future updates :) https://twitter.com/bloom42

Re: Show HN: Bloom – A free and open source 'Google'

#209

Post by z0mbie42 »

g105b wrote: post #161

I'm impressed by your high goals, but I feel like the announcement on Show HN is quite premature, or the "Google" title is very misleading. I'm aware of the beta label, but currently I seem to only be able to use the "Drive" product, which seems like it is a simple file upload/download tool to and from S3. It's as if the other products are just placeholders for the future; ideas that look like products if you don't t…

You are totally right. Today's announcement was to explain THE why: https://www.kerkour.fr/blog/the-just-cause-and-the-infinite-...

We had very good feedback and a lot of people would love to contribute :)

The what is an ongoing process.

Re: Show HN: Bloom – A free and open source 'Google'

#210

Post by z0mbie42 »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #201

Communications point: the several pages of diatribe before the presentation of your product is in the way of expressing the more material value of what you are doing, i.e. the 'product'. Your specific worldview is going to be less interesting to most people, outside of HN'ers who probably don't mind. You can summarize all of that in a tagline, and tuck away the elementary school valedictorian bits on another page. Al…

Thank you for this honest feedback!

Today is the WHY announcement: https://www.kerkour.fr/blog/the-just-cause-and-the-infinite-...

The what is an ongoing process :)

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