I've seen probably four or five different brilliant file transfer solutions that totally solved the person to person file transfer problem posted to HN and every dang one of them was shut down or abandoned.
Yes, and tech folks too, but what about if you're not already connected friends? You don't want to invite your entire audience at a conference to send them slides.
You either need to already have a website and say "click on News and find the entry for today", have them type over some long URL with perfect accuracy, or use a link shortener to the same effect. It always requires having hosting, unless there exists file sharing services. That's the problem these things solve.
Also mind that there are size limits in most messengers on the order of a few hundred megabytes. You don't run into them that often, but whatcha gonna do when you do? A dedicated file sharing service that supports in the gigabytes range solves that situation as well.
And we were presuming self-hosting anyway.
In my experience companies usually end up paying for a service that solves this problem for their employees. Yes really.
Anyway I would suggest using
https://magic-wormhole.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
or RustDesk. RustDesk has a nice GUI and file transfer has a really nice two pane file explorer view but that is obviously not great for transferring files to people you don't fully trust.
https://github.com/schlagmichdoch/PairDrop
Other alternatives:
There are myriad options if you get a server of some kind. A webserver is even easier to get, and to share, than an FTP server.
That's not the challenge these projects attempt to meet.
Now that we’ve shifted our company’s focus to https://socket.dev, I’d love to open source Wormhole. I’m quite proud of the code - I’ve worked on P2P and file transfer systems for so so long that I think this might be some of the best code I’ve worked on.
It’s just a matter of finding the time, but I expect this will be open source eventually.