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Spacedrive – a cross-platform file explorer, powered by a distributed filesystem

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Re: Spacedrive – a cross-platform file explorer, powered by a distributed filesystem

#41

Post by avgcorrection »

api wrote: post #4
shaunregenbaum wrote: post #3

This is genius. Why didn't Dropbox do this?

All economic incentives for the past 20+ years have been away from "personal" computing because people flatly refuse to pay for software but for whatever reason have less aversion to paying for services. I have to repeat just to emphasize how irrational this is. People will refuse to pay $50 once for software but will happily pay $20-$50 per month for a service that offers less performance, no privacy, worse security…

We can always trust HN to blame the (l)user rather than the businessmen. Even to blame “markets” rather than to blames businessmen.

It is of course unfathomable that any businessmen might have leaned into and promoted this current model. They could have never have sought out to leverage free product+network effect in order to build their business on user data. They would never. They are after all just businessmen, mere puppets of the depraved luser.

Re: Spacedrive – a cross-platform file explorer, powered by a distributed filesystem

#42

Post by bachmeier »

blooalien wrote: post #19
api wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All economic incentives for the past 20+ years have been away from "personal" computing because people flatly refuse to pay for software but for whatever reason have less aversion to paying for services. I have to repeat just to emphasize how irrational this is. People will refuse to pay $50 once for software but will happily pay $20-$50 per month for a service that offers less performance, no privacy, worse security…

I was just about to upvote you until I got to the part where you start trashing FOSS users as unwilling to pay for software. This is a long-time lie of the Linux-hating Win-Troll crowd, since at least the Steve Ballmer days of Microsoft, and patently bullshit. I've personally paid for more (FOSS and closed-source) software since switching to using mostly FOSS software than during my many years as a proprietary softwa…

Yep. The move to free software was about much more than the price. Pay for MS Office. Use it on the one machine it was authorized. Need to reinstall? Hope you kept the authorization code. Want to access your data outside of MS Office? Sucker. You stuck it all in their (at that time) proprietary formats. You bought a laptop? Great. Now you can buy another copy of MS Office to go with it.

Re: Spacedrive – a cross-platform file explorer, powered by a distributed filesystem

#43

Post by vineyardmike »

api wrote: post #4
shaunregenbaum wrote: post #3

This is genius. Why didn't Dropbox do this?

All economic incentives for the past 20+ years have been away from "personal" computing because people flatly refuse to pay for software but for whatever reason have less aversion to paying for services. I have to repeat just to emphasize how irrational this is. People will refuse to pay $50 once for software but will happily pay $20-$50 per month for a service that offers less performance, no privacy, worse security…

> People will refuse to pay $50 once for software but will happily pay $20-$50 per month for a service that offers less performance, no privacy, worse security, no continuity if you stop using it, fuzzy ownership of your own data, and a system that utterly vaporizes if the company goes away.

Daily reminder for HN that if the service you buy is an ongoing service then paying once doesn’t work. If the company has a monthly expense related to servicing you, it makes sense to have a monthly payment to them. Dropbox et al. can’t be “buy once” because that’s not how the cost of data centers work.

Re: Spacedrive – a cross-platform file explorer, powered by a distributed filesystem

#45

Post by api »

avgcorrection wrote: post #41
api wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All economic incentives for the past 20+ years have been away from "personal" computing because people flatly refuse to pay for software but for whatever reason have less aversion to paying for services. I have to repeat just to emphasize how irrational this is. People will refuse to pay $50 once for software but will happily pay $20-$50 per month for a service that offers less performance, no privacy, worse security…

We can always trust HN to blame the (l)user rather than the businessmen. Even to blame “markets” rather than to blames businessmen. It is of course unfathomable that any businessmen might have leaned into and promoted this current model. They could have never have sought out to leverage free product+network effect in order to build their business on user data. They would never. They are after all just businessmen, me…

You are right but both are right. The market and the user pushed the idea of free as in beer (confusing it with freedom) and businesspeople were happy to do everything you describe.

Re: Spacedrive – a cross-platform file explorer, powered by a distributed filesystem

#46

Post by anderspitman »

spicybright wrote: post #30
anderspitman wrote: post #23

I love all the cool backend remote storage projects we have, but what I really want is a simple, well-specified app protocol for filesystem operations. WebDAV is too crufty. I'm bullish on Solid but I think there's room for something much simpler. I've done a bit of work[0] in this space but keep getting distracted with other parts of the self-hosted storage stack. [0]: https://gemdrive.io/

What's crufty about WebDAV? I've never used it, but it seems good enough to just use a useful subset of features to avoid the cruft.

It uses XML, which requires a library for browser JavaScript (EDIT: not true, see comment below), when filesystem operations don't really need to be more complicated than vanilla fetch requests. Also uses special HTTP methods, which isn't ideal. I've heard people say that various implementations are often incompatible with each other in some ways. I'm not sure how big of a problem this actually is in practice, but see for example this readme[0] which explicitly says the library doesn't seek to be compatible with RFCs, but rather with implementations in the wild. That's a red flag to me. See also [1].

Trying to use a subset is an interesting idea, but the technical problem being solved is simple enough that I don't see a strong reason not to just greenfield it and make a bunch of nice improvements along with the critical ones.

[0]: https://github.com/perry-mitchell/webdav-client#about

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10213657

Re: Spacedrive – a cross-platform file explorer, powered by a distributed filesystem

#48

Post by avgcorrection »

api wrote: post #45
avgcorrection wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can always trust HN to blame the (l)user rather than the businessmen. Even to blame “markets” rather than to blames businessmen. It is of course unfathomable that any businessmen might have leaned into and promoted this current model. They could have never have sought out to leverage free product+network effect in order to build their business on user data. They would never. They are after all just businessmen, me…

You are right but both are right. The market and the user pushed the idea of free as in beer (confusing it with freedom) and businesspeople were happy to do everything you describe.

Alright. I’ll take it :)

Re: Spacedrive – a cross-platform file explorer, powered by a distributed filesystem

#49

Post by anderspitman »

vineyardmike wrote: post #40
anderspitman wrote: post #23

I love all the cool backend remote storage projects we have, but what I really want is a simple, well-specified app protocol for filesystem operations. WebDAV is too crufty. I'm bullish on Solid but I think there's room for something much simpler. I've done a bit of work[0] in this space but keep getting distracted with other parts of the self-hosted storage stack. [0]: https://gemdrive.io/

> what I really want is a simple, well-specified app protocol for filesystem operations. Genuine question, what’s wrong with existing Operating System FS + FUSE with any remote protocol? Eg there exists S3fuse if you want object/bucket storage, sshfs for using ssh to a host, and the fuse api is easy enough to port to custom backends (in memory, db, etc). Don’t want to be the guy saying “who needs Dropbox we have sftp…

The page I linked lists quite a uses cases that would become possible/easier with a new protocol.

To your specific concerns, object storage systems like S3 don't support partial writes to files, which makes FUSE mounts a leaky abstraction. SSHFS is much better, but obviously can't be used in web apps.

I'm not saying we need to replace existing protocols, but we need one that can work in a more diverse set of use cases.

Re: Spacedrive – a cross-platform file explorer, powered by a distributed filesystem

#50

Post by anderspitman »

mike_hearn wrote: post #29
qbasic_forever wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd tunnel it over a websocket, or there's no reason why you couldn't translate its verbs into a REST API. It's a super simple protocol with not a lot of complexity. It sounds like you're after a federated storage protocol though, i.e. something that two totally different apps can use to allow a user to transfer data between them. This is a much, much bigger leap in complexity and requires a very strong authenticatio…

Isn't translating filesystem operation verbs into an HTTP based protocol what WebDAV does?

Yes, and it's almost what we need. I think it's just too ossified to adapt to the few remaining shortcomings. Here's a couple:

* Doesn't specify a federated authentication/authorization mechanism to allow self-hosted instances to work with each other. This includes things like how to have an app delegate permissions to other apps, ie for things like launcher apps which can open external apps and give them access to only specific files.

* Doesn't specify a way to implement image thumbnails/previews, which is necessary for any sort of remote file explorer or gallery app.

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