Hacker News Reader

Comment by fouric | Hacker News Reader

This is excellent! I've been missing Firefox Send ever since they took it down.

However, it needs to be hosted somewhere.

...and if I'm going to be using a hosted service, I'd like the ability to easily pay for it (so that it doesn't eventually collapse or resort to shady things like ads), either though donations or microtransactions for bandwidth/storage.

Unfortunately, there's no good microtransaction service.

Wasn't Mozilla working on one? Where did that go?

...and thus, we've gone full circle.

And I'm typing this comment in a Chrome browser, because my company is migrating away from Firefox due to "security issues".

View on HN

This is a comment for my instance specifically, but you might find it nice to know:

The https://send.vis.ee/ is mostly funded by donations right now. I do not plan to take it down, unless the cost becomes a problem. I'll never resort to ads.

If this ever happens, I'll likely show a warning beforehand. Some time later I'll disable the upload page, and will take the rest of it down the week after. Files have a maximum lifetime of a week anyway. So if you discover this when uploading, you can simply switch to some other service. Existing links should not break.

There's a donation link on the bottom of the page (https://vis.ee/donate). But feel free to use it without a contribution.

You can host your own Send, and the host need not exist when there's nothing you are sharing which is right in-line with utility computing as provided by "cloud" hosting companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle, &c. Should be possible for under $5 for a month of Send operation provided low disk space suffices, say under 5GB. Perhaps not micro enough though.

Yes, the problem is that it's "not micro enough". The value of this service is low enough that it's not worth it for me to self-host, and the financial overhead of cloud providers is enough that it would cost far more for me to spin up a dedicated instance than pay someone for the fractional cost of usage of their instance.

More generally, I want the ability to make microtransactions (substitute "extremely low-friction donations" if you will) for everything that could be "free" but also costs money (bandwidth, compute, storage), because no matter how much free time I have, there will always be services that I could benefit from, but are low-enough-value that it's not worth it for me to self-host or get a cloud host myself.

Did your company actually gives any details for those supposed security issues?

Probably more related to financial security...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com