Comment by fencepost | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fencepost | Hacker News Reader

I can certainly see the need for something like this, though I've seen a lot more folks on another forum talking about ownCloud and Nextcloud as alternatives to Dropbox business plans.

I really dislike that the Syncthing website appears to have mastered modern "we won't tell you what it is" marketing speak. Did I miss something and this is now a game with scoring for speaking around topics?

"Syncthing replaces proprietary sync and cloud services with something open, trustworthy and decentralized. Your data is your data alone and you deserve to choose where it is stored, if it is shared with some third party and how it's transmitted over the Internet."

Oooooooh, new shiny with buzzwords! What's it do? Is it a replacement for Chrome's cross-system syncing? Firefox Sync (which I think can already be self-hosted actually)? Password managers? Maybe hosted Exchange? Wait, it's not?

Oh, wait, it's a multi-system file syncing package. Well why didn't you say so while you were telling me I deserved to have control and blah blah blah. Cripes, it even says "a large number of features have already been implemented" then provides a list that implies that running on Windows, OSX, Linux, the BSDs and Solaris is one of those features.

There are several places where what it does is implied, but to actually get to a statement of "For this guide let’s assume you have two machines between which you want to synchronise files." I have to go to the bottom of the site, click Docs, then either click on Introduction and Getting Started (in the documentation structure) or click on the "getting started guide" link within the first paragraph of the Introduction.

grmbl get off my lawn

Edit: I should note, I'm not talking about the 1.0 announcement on their forums - that's for folks already actively involved with it. I'm talking about the very spare https://syncthing.net

Lately, I find myself looking for the github icon before anything else in a website. I find a github readme much more readable than any landing website.

Wow, no kidding.

The first two sentences of the readme are:

> Syncthing is a continuous file synchronization program. It synchronizes files between two or more computers.

That copy should absolutely be somewhere on the main website.

> That copy should absolutely be somewhere on the main website.

Yes. Specifically, it should be in a large font, roughly centered, at the top of the page. You should load the page, and immediately read those words.

Agreed.

Also: top-left logos should link to the root (syncthing.net) not to a sub-root (forums.syncthing.net). When I land on your forum site and I want to know what syncthing is, I expect to find the answer by clicking the top-left logo in the header.

Seconded. I was just about to say exactly this.

They appear to be using Discourse, which appears to have copied phpBB/Vbulletin's decision to do the same thing for the past 20 years.

Jesus Christ do I know what you mean. It's like actual things don't even fucking exist anymore and everyone is just trying to sell buzzwords themselves.

I used syncthing to implement part of a project at work and it does a pretty good job, it deserves a website that actually tells you what the hell it is.

I know, right? It seems like a great project, but just saying "P2P open-source Dropbox alternative" would convey as much information as the rest of the home page combined.

Yeah, same. I had to look at Wikipedia to figure out what it was.

Yeah, as somebody who loves using Syncthing, I would be very hard pressed to know what it is by looking at the front page.

I cancelled my YouTube Premium, and started seeing ads on YouTube for Android; and one of the first few was an ad for some app called Killi or something. It jumps straight to how to find it on the app store and google play, and then explains how to set it up, all the while you're wondering what on earth it is.

I feel like I missed my best opportunity (pre-social media) to combat this.

IIRC, Nexium (antacid of some sort) when it was first introduced had ads everywhere full of people talking about the "Little purple pill" and how much it had changed their lives. There was nothing in the ads that indicated anything about what it did, just "ask your doctor if Nexium is right for you."

Had I been a bit more connected at the time I think a real push to start talking about "The purple pill that cured my X" would have been amusing, with X being something like uncontrollable flatulence, incontinence, explosive diarrhea, etc. Unfortunately, that was back in the days when social media was LiveJournal and Usenet was already well on its way into decline.

Strongly agreed.

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