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> the quickest way to get a file from phone <-> PC is to Slack it to myself from my work account.

Assuming that phone and PC are on the same network, KDE Connect solves that scenario. You pair the devices once and afterwards you can not also share files, but also have access to a host of other features. The one I use most is clipboard synchronization.

I use Syncthing for this.

I have a computer that I use to play podcasts, and the subscription list (a file) is synced to my main computer, so I can edit it from there.

Syncthing is also on my Lineage OS phone (until my Librem 5 arrives) so I can have a shared Downloads folder.

In the past, I used it to sync a subset of my music collection to my work computer.

It's reasonably usable for a geek.

> I want open services to compete with the entrenched players

Are you ready to roll out free email, maps, photos storage on a massive scale? Cannot beat free, as they say.

Just to derail the conversation further, I've had a thought for that too - one I'm working up the courage to build myself :D

I'm going to presume a few things to keep this short: free and advertising-supported, donation-based, and paid for. I'm focussed on the third option.

Ever notice how many new (typically closed) services are "just the price of a cup of coffee a month"? What happens when I want 20 of these "coffee-priced" services? That's more than I personally spend on actual, gourmet coffee a month (of which I buy copious amounts).

I think there's a decent gap for services that cost $/€/£1/month. The volume of subscriptions at that price point might break even with the profitability of higher subscriptions with a lower volume. It might not of course - but I'm tempted to try it. Mail for $1 a month. Not remotely profitable, but with elastic compute and high volume of customers...maybe. With a self hosted option to boot, to lure in the early adopters and convert them when they want to offload the hassle of running the service...

I don't intend to compete with free, but I definitely think there's room for innovation here. I have a day job, but I'd drop that in a second if there was an opportunity to manage a multi-tenant cloud of Nextcloud instances for customers that a) doesn't cost more than DigitalOcean, and b) had other software bundled at the same price point, e.g. Collabora Online, LDAP auth, Mattermost, Mediawiki, etc. etc. All for $5 instead of $5 x n services....

:shrug: maybe I'm too much of an idealist ;)

From working on Purelymail (which does offer mail for ~$1 a month), I would say that it's feasible to run such a service and be profitable, but that the $5/month services have a lot more leeway in marketing, hires, opportunity for huge profits, etc.

I'm personally a fan of Sandstorm.io and hope it can continue growing and offering an alternative much more aligned with individual's interests than what the largest few software companies in the world are creating.

Wow this really looks awesome! It requires polish as most oss but this idea of an open web app store / cloud that is not tied to a vendor is amazing.

> hope it can continue growing

:/

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20312789

"Unfortunately Sandstorm is basically dead at this point. I kept actively working on it for a while in my spare time after the company failed in early 2017, but I haven't found any time to do serious work on it in probably a year now. I do push monthly updates to keep dependencies fresh but that's about it.

Oasis takes in about $1800 per month, which is just about enough to cover serving costs and business expenses (e.g. annual tax preparation). For a while it was making only $800, with me making up the difference out-of-pocket. Then, last October I stopped offering a free plan. Remarkably, revenue more than doubled and has even gradually continued to increase over time -- I had expected a smaller spike followed by a drop-off.

But now it's getting to the point where it feeling really awkward to let people pay for a service that hosts a library of apps that mostly hasn't been updated in 2.5 years or more. In theory developers could still be updating their apps and submitting new ones, but basically the only app actually getting updates is Wekan. So, not sure how long long this can really continue... :("

Ouch. I hope that $1800 grows to enough to be sustainable for Kenton to invest some time or hire someone's time to grow the product, even if slowly.

I don't want to dismiss what sandstorm is doing. They've been around for a while and they've shown some incredible persistence in pursuit of their vision. I'm also a little out of date since I last checked up on it.

IIRC, one example of the SSO thing I mentioned is exemplified in sandstorm. They either (I can't recall specifics) wrap or fork the relevant projects to make them "fit" within the sandstorm ecosystem. SSO, ACL, and overall storage / permissions are handled by sandstorm, which is why there's a list of supported apps - other apps that haven't been "wrapped" don't integrate with sandstorm APIs so they can't be used directly (I may be wrong now its 2019)

That's...kinda my point. There's OIDC, OAuth, Unhosted, IndieWeb, microformats (repeat ad nauseum) and yet there's still somehow a need to create the XKCD #927 situation (yet another standard). There's already schema.org (OK, Google influence :shrug:), the ActivityPub vocab (still new-ish), RDF / Linked Data etc.

It's not a slight against any of these projects, particularly sandstorm. IMHO the effort and onus should be placed on the component projects to play well with others. GitLab and Nextcloud deserve shout outs for exploring or working on federation strategies that should remove the need for things like sandstorm, but we should keep fighting for and implementing similar things for other projects.

(This discussion is now convincing me to open a second pull request to Wallabag implementing OIDC login)

I am in a pretty similar position to you.

Have you taken a look at Keybase as an alternative for IM and replacement of Slack-for-sharing-with-yourself?

  Advantages over Signal:
  * Doesn't rely on phone number for auth or id
  * No limit on devices
  * Great CLI experience
  * Smooth to share files and messages in groups
  * Encryption closer to widely used protocols

  Downsides:
  * Server-side closed source (but hey, that goes for pretty much any IM alternative you hope to use outside of close circles today unfortunately)
  * US-based company
  * Can't think of much else

UI/UX still has some way to go before being on par with e.g. WhatsApp or Telegram, but they've been constantly improving a lot recently so I think they might get there soon.

Wow, again, last time I looked at keybase I just remember it being identity verification. Glad to see they're expanding on that.

I am - unfortunately - picky :D as you mention, they haven't released their server code and don't seem particularly interested in doing so (which is their full right). Good thread for that here: https://github.com/keybase/client/issues/6374

I get that some people aren't too fussed if the cryptography is done right, and you could reverse engineer the protocol and interop a la Amazon S3, but...yeah. Just not me I guess.

I'm new to the limitations you mentioned (# of devices, phone no. Auth, etc.). I'll need to take a good look before I jump ship. But first thought is I think I'll take those downsides as part of the current status quo of messaging apps for a fully open platform I can support and possibly get my parents to use without too much trouble (yep, my principles have priorities, lower ones get sacrificed when absolutely necessary ;))

(I lied about the phone sharing bit a little - Nextcloud sync is really good somehow, I just wish there was something like AirDrop for everyone else)

Yeah, I totally get you. Basically on Signal, you have the same issue as on WhatsApp; phone number required, unique per account, you can ever only have one device at a time (desktop apps are not first-grade clients but sync to phone), and all the privacy and other security issues that come with that...

I managed to get a lot of my non-geek friends over to Signal, but if things don't change I think I will switch preference to Keybase soon in lack of better alternatives.

It's unfortunate that there's no great implementation of federated IM today. XMPP is a mess and Matrix has a long way to go when it comes to that part, but from what I can tell they have a good vision and might just be able to pull it off so I am keeping a close eye on it.

Then we have Secure ScuttleButt, which I find very interesting and would love to see mature.

> Matrix has a long way to go when it comes to that part, but from what I can tell they have a good vision and might just be able to pull it off so I am keeping a close eye on it.

Matrix is pretty usable for me and a bunch of my friends and family these days. The clients are getting pretty good as well.