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Comment by eplanit | Hacker News Reader

I'm more and more motivated to just cobble together my own dropbox (I know that several folks here have done just that) for my simple needs, to be what dropbox originally was. Their ui has become ridiculous, and 'features' like image spy serve them more than me.

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Take a server with sftp access, so you can mount it locally and browse with winscp if you need to. Put filestash on top and you have a nice ui. That's probably 90% of the original features

=> https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash

For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

Isolated from everything else, that comment was true at the time and is still true today. You can't propose that as an alternative to Dropbox, but that is a specific context. eplanit specifically said "cobble together my own dropbox for my simple needs", so:

- I'm assuming they have the minimal technical skills to make this trivial and accomodate the rough edges that come with it: no easy "signup" flow but creating an ssh key and putting it on the server, for example. Not that it's much harder though

- I'm assuming they don't care about business viability because it's just for them

- I'm assuming they don't need a lot of features: automatic syncing, a simple ui for listing/downloading/uploading

And we re back full circle to the point where that comment was right

I know that's the joke, but, I think, not really.

Dropbox has become bloated and has tons of useless features I and most other HN users probably don't care about and find annoying. But the original core functionality still works really well and is a big quality of life improvement over more hacky personal backup implementations, IMO.

So I agree with the criticisms, but I think it's still a useful service at heart and worth the money. It just - very predictably - got way too big for its britches and tried to expand a useful app into a multi-domain conglomerated platform. Steve Jobs's comment that Dropbox is "a feature, not a product" (to which he might now add "and not a company/ecosystem") was pretty much right, I think. It's still a really good and well-executed feature, though.

That said, would I switch to something that was cheaper and gave me all the same core features with the same level of reliability? Probably.

Is this a joke about how the top comment on the HN post for dropbox was just "hmm don't see the point it's just FTP". Are people really doing this again?

First thing I thought of too!

For reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Well if you don't need multi device sync(i don't), it's literally as useful as a FTP server that is reliable(i just use backblaze b2 with rclone).

I use syncthing for that, and it's been great so far.

There's syncthing.net

Consider Nextcloud if you're going to run a server.

Nextcloud looks great, but the effort of hardening the VPS is too much (for me at least). Hackers love an IPV4 address that has nothing but a login prompt to a Nextcloud instance.

I've been running it on my server for a few years and haven't been hacked yet (well, at least as far as I can tell). I just update it every few months, and followed the recommended security settings when I set it up (the management page in the UI will list some issues).

You can run it behind a reverse proxy. It won't serve anything on the naked IP, the correct host is required in the http request headers.

I've been very happy selfhosting Nextcloud (and many others, including Vaultwarden). There are very few hits that even land on the login page, and essentially all of them only probe for /wp-admin or similar paths, then promptly leave me alone once all those probes return 404.

And then there's 2FA if any actually targeted attack ever materializes. Since it's entirely unknown what's inside the Nextcloud instance, there's no clear economic benefit (aka potential benefits are entirely uncertain, the instance might be vanilla). So I'm certain there's very little reason for anyone to actually try hard enough to achieve anything at all. Keep your system updated through the normal means and you're golden.

Tailscale!

I'd call it: cloudwrap

Logo: a cloud wrapping a file, or something more creative with the words cloud and wrap

I love this! Honestly, if i had heard the name "cloudwrap" on its own without your description, i would have thought: the uber of sandwich delivery...but i very much like your idea better! :-)

check out seafile. It is really performant.

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