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Comment by andybak | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to hear from people that are using Sandstorm day to day.

The only thing stopping me that none of the current apps fill a need that I currently have - although there are a few things I'm close on (I still use Mozilla's etherpad but could easily switch if I can break my habit)

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I use Sandstorm daily. Private/company projects are run in Gitlab instances, though I may switch to Gitweb if a minor cosmetic issue is resolved (Gitweb in Sandstorm can only host one repo by design but you still have to click through to it when viewing the instance, which is mildly annoying when all other apps come up ready to use.) I have a bunch of Wekan boards managing everything from coding projects to my GTD buckets to separate boards for random home improvement projects. I prefer Wekan to spreadsheets because I can track work through arbitrary workflows and annotate items with additional data, and Sandstorm lets me manage that without having to maintain and secure a separate Wekan server that any random person could find and exploit. My blog is hosted in Sandstorm WordPress so I have the niceness of its admin interface but none of its security risks, and all the speed of a static site. A small 2-person bootstrapped startup I've cofounded uses it for many of the same use cases plus hosting our app's Piwik instance, again so there's literally no non-Sandstorm-secured user-facing attack surface other than Piwik's API endpoint. I have an idea for a platform co-op in the middle distant future, and if I manage to launch it then I'll run it via Sandstorm-hosted Loomio, which I'm actively attempting to port and am fairly close to completing.

Sandstorm is a great platform, and the community comprises some of the nicest, most dedicated folks I know. When my cofounder messed up our install a bit, Kenton talked us through fixing it on a weekend no less, right down to giving us database queries to run and then patching Sandstorm to handle our edge case the next week. Awesome people.

I've been hosting a Groove Basin instance on it for the last little while. Check it out, it's anarchist radio!

https://mrdomino.sandcats.io/shared/_NnFzbFzvci0JBgXw3hRwCWO...

At some point some crazy mofo is going to post it to hackernews. Hopefully I don't have to revoke the URL and clean up any spam and y'all just groove with the little community I've got going on there! But just in case, here's one where you can only listen, that might last a little longer:

https://mrdomino.sandcats.io/shared/kYJ-X75DzV3HTB0Ro6cTizCD...

I posted a URL for that station to my work's Slack, and then people started uploading stuff and rocking out. We've had a great time taking turns DJing, sharing our musical taste with each other, and hijacking the stream when it gets too boring or weird. I've had friends of mine jump on from elsewhere in the world, some who I haven't seen in years, and drop their music on us. We're completely in love with this -- it's a way for us to stay connected through music without disturbing the people who just want to work quietly.

I'm astounded at how easy Sandstorm made this whole thing. These guys continue to blow me away with their ability to create incredibly useful experiences on a small budget and in such a short time.

I use it daily for etherpad and ethercalc.

Lots of apps now that I need to explore and see where they fit for me.

Looking forward to kentonv <.< clearing the path for huginn

https://github.com/cantino/huginn/issues/839

That seems like a killer app when wrapped in the smooth awesome deploy of sandstorm.

Huginn is tricky because it needs to talk to the outside world a lot and we need ways to let it do so securely[0]. But we're closing in on getting that done, and I can't wait to be able to port Huginn to show off how much more secure it will be running inside Sandstorm. :)

[0] https://docs.sandstorm.io/en/latest/using/security-practices...

I use Sandstorm daily. Effectively it replaces Google Drive/Docs for me. I use Etherpad, EtherCalc, and Text Editor a lot on it. And I use Davros for storing arbitrary files I want to share. My blog is hosted on Sandstorm tlo, but I've posted to it like four times so it doesn't really count.

How do you back up / replicate? How would you recover from your sandstorm instance failing?

Currently, you can back up any particular app instance (grain) by clicking "download backup" in the topbar -- this gives you a .zip of its data, which you can then re-upload to any Sandstorm server. For full-system backups, you'll need to use a standard Linux filesystem backup solution, configured outside of Sandstorm. We (Sandstorm team) plan to add the ability to configure full-system backup through the Sandstorm UI in the future. (Of course, if you use our managed hosting, we are making daily backups.)

I'd love to see integration with uploads of backups to Backblaze B2!

<vaporware>Indeed, the plan is to provide an API such that apps can be written to push backups to different providers. The API will only provide access to already-encrypted data, so you don't have to worry about the app stealing your secrets.</vaporware>

As kentonv mentions, right now that's not fully fleshed out. I do download backups of important grains somewhat regularly, but I'm currently using their hosted service until I'm ready to run my own. (Literally just got a server to play with recently.)

Don't use it day to day; we use Google Docs at my company, so that's what I happen to use for most of that kind of stuff.

But one day Google Docs happened to be down while I was doing a phone screen using Google Docs as a whiteboard for the candidate, and I'd heard about Sandstorm's Etherpad, so I signed up, launched that, and shared it with the candidate. Was quick and easy and we were able to go on with the phone screen.

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