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Computers as I used to love them

tonsky.me

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Re: Computers as I used to love them

#41

Post by southerntofu »

adwn wrote: post #40
southerntofu wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And suffers from the same underlying problem as Dropbox and iCloud: it's profit-driven proprietary software. Are you sure your interests as a user are aligned with that of Microsoft as a company? Are you confident that will not change over time?

Are you sure your interests as a user are aligned with that of Syncthing's open source developers? Are you confident that will not change over time?

I'm confident they are at the moment. And i'm even more confident that if that ever changes, i'll find many people in a HN/Github thread whose interest are very much aligned with mine to fork the project and keep it going in a direction that suits us. Something you won't ever be able to do with a proprietary piece of software, unless of course you're willing to spend thousands of hours reverse-engineering a protocol they're going to change as soon as you achieve interop.

Re: Computers as I used to love them

#42

Post by Strilanc »

thom wrote: post #24

I suppose I’ve just become used to saying no to a bunch of things when installing Dropbox, but once that’s done I have no interactions with it at all. I don’t remember being pestered at any point recently and I’ve got it on three devices. I keep waiting for it to annoy me in some way that causes me to find another solution but it’s yet to happen. I migrated several G Suite accounts to Fastmail recently so I suspect i…

Personally I've noticed how dropbox has gone from being a tool that fits well into a larger context, to instead trying to encompass the entire experience of touching synced files. For example, the number of clicks (and the precision of those clicks and the distractions around them) to open the dropbox folder in your OS's file explorer has gradually increased. And the amount of attention dropbox asks for, things like notifications and upsells, has also gradually increased.

The post aludes to this notion of not trusting dropbox to just do the one thing well, and instead expecting them to grab more and more (because they are financially driven to do so), which resonated very hard. It's so common for a good piece of software to get worse and worse, bit by bit, as the marketing and business downsides consume the technical upsides.

Re: Computers as I used to love them

#43

Post by AlphaWeaver »

The biggest gap I've noticed in SyncThing right now is that their iOS client doesn't work well. It's a third party solution you have to pay for, and it can't sync into app folders or the new iOS file paradigm introduced in recent versions of iOS.

Re: Computers as I used to love them

#49

Post by square_usual »

I love syncthing as much as the next guy on here, but this article feels very much like "why doesn't this square peg fit my round hole?!" Dropbox (and iCloud) are meant more for cloud file storage than pure device-to-device synce. I couldn't go to a less tech savvy friend and say, "Oh, you use Dropbox for backups? Here, use syncthing instead!" For one, most people don't have multiple computers they want to keep in sync, and even if they do it's unlikely that those multiple computers have overlapping periods of being online, which syncthing will need to keep back ups!

The author's baffling reaction to iCloud and Dropbox's warning just makes my point. Those warnings are super clear to people who use those services for backup - remove this file and it won't be backed up, hence not available elsewhere. That isn't those platforms begging for attention (???). Remove those warnings and see how many normies complain to Apple/Dropbox that they didn't know removing a file from their synced folder meant it wouldn't be synced anymore. This also applies to the bizarre complaint about cloud storage space limits - of course you need storage space on the service if those files have to live elsewhere!

Re: Computers as I used to love them

#50

Post by grimgrin »

jwr wrote: post #9

I've been using Syncthing for about a year now, with multiple computers, and it's fantastic. Dropbox has become a real pain over the years (I've also been a paid Dropbox customer for a long time): * adding bloat and features that I don't want or need * constantly nagging me for upgrades * lying that the admin password is required (it isn't) * consuming large amounts of CPU when anything changes anywhere in the filesy…

Can you summarize what they maybe introduced/fixed to quell your old review?

> over the last week, syncthing has corrupted my git repository twice. I reported this as an issue, but the issue was immediately closed with an explanation I disagree with.

> I no longer trust syncthing until this gets resolved, unfortunately.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23660438

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I would absolutely be syncing directories containing git repos, for better or worse

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