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> In 2020, it feels positively archaic for me to edit office documents except in my browser and saved in the cloud, accessible anywhere.

Weirdly, I feel the opposite. Google Docs still feels clunky and second best, because the software is still second-fiddle to the browser. Two menu bars, some shortcuts not working (the clipboard permission snafu for example) and the strange heirarchy of cloud storage when I typically want to save locally.

Of course, if you want to save locally.

But I just can't imagine going back to a world where I can't pull up any doc on my phone, or on my laptop despite last having worked on it on my desktop. Or have my storage be limited by the (comparatively puny) size of my laptop's SSD.

Putting up with two menu bars is a small price to pay for that, in my world. :) And I've never run into any clipboard permissions problem in Docs, and I've always used Cmd+X/C/V.

> In 2020, it feels positively archaic for me to edit office documents except in my browser and saved in the cloud, accessible anywhere.

I regularly have to export documents out of Google Docs and use an office suite like LibreOffice to format documents, let alone do anything vaguely complicated.

Google Docs is buggy and falls apart if you aren't doing something simple like writing a letter.

Weird, I've never found Docs to be "buggy" at all.

I found it limited in formatting options 10 years ago... but these days it supports sections, columns, line spacing, paragraph borders and shading, a thousand open-source fonts, to the point where I haven't actually found it lacking in anything at all. E.g. you can lay out a newsletter no problem.

I mean obviously there are obscure things only Word can do... but these days Docs is pretty grown-up. The only time it "falls apart" is if you're working on a 150+ page document, but even there it's improved a lot (it used to slow down at ~30 pages).

But in any case, I was wondering about LibreOffice Online, not Google Docs — you know, specifically for people who want online editing that isn't Google.

> I mean obviously there are obscure things only Word can do... but these days Docs is pretty grown-up. The only time it "falls apart" is if you're working on a 150+ page document, but even there it's improved a lot (it used to slow down at ~30 pages).

I have a very simple resume that I wanted to align items on. I couldn't do that using Google Docs, but was able to do it in a minute with LibreOffice.

My company is trying to switch to Google Docs, but it still has some pretty basic missing features that makes it quite difficult. For example it can't number headings and figures automatically, or do cross-referencing (saying "see section 1.2.3").

The difference between the real Excel and the web-based are staggering, really. As far as I can tell.

This is a big advantage of LibreOffice / Collabora Online: the engine driving desktop and online is the same, so any missing functional is purely down to UX.

The disadvantage is that the hundreds of LibreOffice desktop features are already too numerous for the full desktop UI, and have no place in a browser.

> But putting all the craziest ideas together in one jumble... has anyone ever seriously proposed something like distributed hash table cloud storage, extremely redundant, that was perhaps financed by a blockchain cryptocurrency operating on some kind of auction or supply-and-demand system, that could be used by open-source software?

Yes, that's the closest I'm aware of.

But IPFS seems more designed for public sharing as opposed to private storage, and most notably only for popular content. Much like torrents, content disappears in IPFS if nobody's using it.

This is why I think the concept of paying others for guaranteed storage is the necessary second half. Not paying people individually, but that I'd simply be receiving some payment ~monthly for making available say 100 GB of space on my SSD, and the protocol would immediately redundantly copy content from other nodes to yet one more node the moment I go offline.

Paying others to seed is where FileCoin comes in. And if you want private, you encrypt the file. There's no other way it you want other people to host it.

I've tried it in the NextCloud and it's pretty usable. Of course formatting can be off if you need some advanced staff, but for basic formatting it's a pretty good alternative for Google Docs. As a 2 years Linux user in a past it's much better than LibreOffice was 5 years ago, at least I can confirm it's usable.

In 2020, I feel writing linear text for other than niche purposes is archaic. Conveying information that way is quite slow and doesn't really scale, that might be also one of the reasons, why we haven't really much progress in efficiency in information transfer since about the late 90s. The other aspects like collaboration and not having to care about access from multiple devices or backups is just another component and I would say rather a detail in the big picture.

Disclaimer, I work for OrgPad.com where we are thinking (and doing something) exactly about the problem of linear text/ media and better approaches and tooling for work and sharing of information in general.

Quite the opposite - it's archaic to use thin clients.