I'm getting a strong early 00s vibe - the time when P2P was getting traction and people were trying to use it this way and that way. Good ideas, interesting tech, but ultimately just a collection of solutions, frameworks and platforms in search of a problem.

When the excitement subsided, it turned out that nobody really cared about things to be p2p per se. Nobody cared how it was done, only that it did what they needed. In some cases p2p was the answer, i.e. BitTorrent and the original Skype, in very many others it wasn't and a centralized solution was simpler, cheaper, more reliable or more user-friendly.

Diode Drive appears to be in the same spirit. As a technical person I appreciate the solution, but it doesn't appear to be solving any tangible problem in some dramatically better way that also maps onto a better user experience. This is based on the 8 minute "How Diode Drive works" video behind two "Learn More" links.

If I got it right, then the idea is that N people can come together as a "trusted group" and use each other as nodes in a storage cluster. They can also share out files from the storage with outsiders and these files will be delivered from one of the nodes in the group.

If that's correct, then I'd argue that this is in fact a solution in search of a problem, competing directly with a good old dedicated storage box, e.g. an on-premises NAS that is accessible from the Internet in some way. I can see Diode Drive being used as a stop-gap solution while a proper one is put in place, but that's about it.

But I may be missing something. I hope do. But on the surface this is eerie similar to the projects of the p2p glory days from 20 years ago.