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Comment by yadoomerta | Hacker News Reader

You've probably already seen it, but if not, checkout https://sandstorm.io/ It didn't do too well commercially, but might have been ahead of it's time

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Sandstorm is awesome, but it's nowhere near as simple as installing an app on your phone to use it. Selfhosting something like NextCloud shouldn't be more complicated than selecting it from an app store and going through a quick OAuth flow to tunnel traffic from a domain name.

Completely agreed - setting up Sandstorm itself is a bit of a hassle. Once it's installed, additional apps on the platform are extremely easy though.

Thanks for pointing out nextcloud! Hadn't seen that one before.

What's your project btw?

The real killer for Sandstorm is that each app has to be modified to work with it, and they tend to get out of date. It just never gained critical mass as a platform.

But it had many advantages in terms of security and usability. I think if we can ever truly get selfhosting for the masses off the ground, something like Sandstorm will eventually thrive.

> What's your project btw?

It's not public yet. I'm working on the client software side and partnering with PrivateRouter.com to build out the network. We're shooting for a beta release in the next couple months.

I looked at it and it mandated login with a big cloud provider like Google, which almost completely defeats the purpose by giving them access.

It sounds like you looked at a very early prototype circa 2014? Sandstorm has supported login via email, LDAP, and SAML for a long time.

Thank you so much for sandstorm btw! It's a really incredible piece of software

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