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Comment by kdklol | Hacker News Reader

I don't disagree, but few non-techies will be able to download an image off of an FTP server or mount an NFS share. Thats where such a service adds value.

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I know my perspective is really skewed, but don't filezilla and the like make ~FTP easy enough? Or failing that, even Windows must have the hooks to (implement an add-on to) mount SFTP and treat it like a thumb drive? Why is it harder to use FTP/SFTP than a fancy web frontend?

Because a lot of people nowadays just use a browser. That’s 99% of what a computer is to them.

“What’s a filezilla?”

“go here, drop files there” instead of “download this, put this here, connect, drop your files here” makes the difference between people using your service and not using your service.

This is less true of software like the one mentioned in the article that are intended to be self-hosted, though: I have to walk my users through using it anyways and so I can show them FileZilla or install a SFTP filesystem on their computer or setup syncthing/dropbox for them to handle uploads. There’s lots of ways to avoid exposing a custom file upload service for this sort of thing.

> Because a lot of people nowadays just use a browser. That’s 99% of what a computer is to them.

Doesn't mean they could not learn that it is not. I think that developers underestimating users is a problem. "They are too dumb to run a desktop app, so let's put everything in the browser" is a weak argument to me.

No, that's the _upload_ mechanism: it's just an HTTP URL on the download side like normal.

Yes, I meant upload, sorry. Downloading from a page is trivial. I was more concerned ith the case of grandma sending a picture or similar.

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