It does require that you own an sshd running on an endpoint somewhere (like a VPS or an EC2 instance or your own server somewhere) - but if you can clear that hurdle, you end up with a very elegant and simple solution.
https://github.com/chetan51/sidestep/issues/62
indicate that it is abandoned ...
Up to you if you trust your distro's security team, of course :). I trust mine.
The instructions in README.md say "sudo pip install" and "sudo ./setup.py". To me, that is a bad idea. Things that are manually installed should be kept in completely separate directories. My preference is to install such packages in my home directory, which should in no way require sudo.