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Comment by blurbleblurble | Hacker News Reader

I'm very excited about this! I've been waiting for something like this for a long time!

To me, the power here is in using the technology to foster local, human-scale interaction.

Intranets are totally underutilized. How many people do you know who can reliably transfer personal files over a local area network? Not nearly as many as those who know how to use google or send an email... that's absurd to me, given how ancient of an application file sharing is.

It's my opinion that the survival of the internet may very well rest on p2p webs like this.

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"Intranets are totally underutilized. How many people do you know who can reliably transfer personal files over a local area network? Not nearly as many as those who know how to use google or send an email... that's absurd to me, given how ancient of an application file sharing is."

It's crazy to me that there AFIAK aren't AirDrop clones. That application alone would make this awesome, and it will probably just one of the big use cases for this.

I'm also really pleased to see Mozilla producing this kind of innovation. I'm a Firefox user at home, and am starting to get really excited about Rust, but it has felt to me like the organization has been flailing for a while.

I'm curious how you would use this. What files would you share and with who?

I'm so used to sharing via cloud services and chat apps that I really don't know who or what I'd use this with. Just curious what situations this would come in handy for you.

How about a video of my kids with my Mum who has come to visit?

Uploading and downloading the file to a cloud service will take a while. Many will reencode the video and loose quality. I then have to communicate a URL, rather than have my mum just look in a flyweb (or airdrop or whatever) place on her machine.

Of course there are AirDrop clones. http://instashareapp.com — oh wow their current slogan is "better AirDrop for mobile & desktop"! There are also open source WebRTC based ones like https://github.com/RobinLinus/snapdrop

I wasn't aware of SnapDrop, so thank you for that. I'm aggressively uninterested in proprietary desktop software these days, outside of work.

>It's crazy to me that there AFIAK aren't AirDrop clones. Little know, but there is! Snapdrop[1] does this via WebRTC. Pretty nifty, but I've rarely ever seen it mentioned or used. Solves the XKCD problem, at least for intranet stuff.

[1] https://snapdrop.net + https://github.com/RobinLinus/snapdrop

The issue with file transfer in particular is that it is often asynchronous: you send a file from your phone, and then, you might go for lunch - outside of the LAN - or they might be off that day. You end up needing a human protocol: ask the receiver if they're ready, send it, wait for the upload. It is almost simpler to use a USB key, and certainly simpler to rely on a Dropbox-like.

I read flyweb as being part of Mozilla's IoT effort, to make it easy to convert your phone into a remote control. See for instance this video they made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJ5DEGvqDb4

Well, with some laptop lacking USB-A ports I can see FlyWeb to be more practical for simple, quick and occasional file transfers. Also, most people have cheap, very-slow USB flash drives, so transfering via the network (even wireless) could be faster for larger files.

Another thing to consider if you compare it with cloud solutions is that you don't have to find a second channel to send the shared link (which may require both person to e.g. login on their webmail, spell their email address to one another, etc).

Also, Dropbox can sync over LAN https://www.dropbox.com/en/help/137

That doesn't mean much to me:

> Dropbox needs to maintain a connection to the Internet in order to determine when to sync. To take advantage of LAN sync, all computers need to be connected to a LAN and the Internet at the same time.

Stuff like syncthing/btsync is much more radical in that you don't have to assume that the internet as we know it even exists.

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