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Comment by vinhcognito | Hacker News Reader

It's insane to me that this is a frustration I've had back maybe 20 years now and I still feel like there isn't a particularly great solution.

My current iteration is just a "transfer" SyncThing folder that is on all my devices. It's not clean or convenient but at least its incredibly fast.

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The hilarious thing is that was what Dropbox was meant to solve.

Like Drew Houston's demos to Y Combinator was copying a file to a given folder on one computer... and seeing it show up in the corresponding folder on another computer. HN comments at the time were dismissing, like "whatever, I can do that with rsync"

And then cloud storage became a thing.

I hate how it's gotten progressively harder as the big platforms effectively declared war on local files. Tools like ES File Explorer and WinSCP used to work great, once upon a time.

> Tools like ES File Explorer

That one has no one but themselves to blame - the developers went for monetization by click fraud.

[1] https://www.slashgear.com/1010495/the-file-explorer-app-you-...

It is purely because of the lack of static addressing. Probably an entire country's GDP-worth of SaaS products are essentially nothing more than providing basically a proxy to other devices that have to have apps installed to speak their special language.

If I knew your computer's address (and it didn't change) and you knew mine, we could route traffic through the infrastructure we already pay for.

IPv6.

What about it?

It will solve all of our problems for good and after it's implemented across every ISP, everyone will live in an interconnected utopia without NAT and other obstacles getting in the way of direct P2P communications across any device. /s

It will at least address the NAT problem. Theoretically, if ISPs truly embrace it, it will also open up the possibility of direct P2P communication across most devices on the Internet. Can't remember if there's a standardized protocol for IPv6 like UPnP but if not you can just configure your firewall manually. Of course, that's assuming ISPs allow you to do so.

Tbh, I misread your OP and I somehow got the idea you were talking about NAT. Static addressing is also a problem but a smaller one. In fact, IPv6 probably does nothing to help here, and may even make the problem worse with address randomization (which is a legitimate privacy feature, but still).

If only we had something like AirDrop that reliably worked cross-platform.

Proximity-based sharing just makes significantly more sense than uploading files to some server miles away, then immediately redownloading them back when the computer was two feet away from you the whole time.

Maybe LocalSend? https://localsend.org/

Windows, Linux, Android, iOS and macOS. Seems quite cross-platform. Can confirm it works smoothly for Linux and Android at the very least.

Most people will happily install entire ad package from Meta and Google, but not some unknown "LocalSend app".

I know that Meta and Google make money from data, but they are also competent, so they can be trusted to at least not get breeched or sell the data to the an aggregator.

“But they feed us for free in our competent concentration camp!”

If the choice was between 'the competent concentration camp' and 'the concentration camp run by one dude in his spare time', then if the question is 'which one is more likely to feed me', then yes, that is apt.

Seconded for LocalSend.

Works a treat for me.

Insane that we need a third party application for something as basic as this. This is as bad as an OS not shipping with a file browser.

I just tried it and it works as expected for Windows <--> Android.

I was using syncthing but this will replace it for one offs.

EDIT: I checked out another app in the comments and their website mentioned that it didn't work with a VPN. I can also confirm that LocalSend works when connected to VPN.

Never heard of it. Just tried it. Easy to install and run, copied one file in each direction (Linux/iOS).

Seems to good to be true. Are we sure this isn't malware?

Pairdrop was posted on HN a little while back and I setup an instance on my home network. Doesn't work everywhere obviously but it does seem to effectively solve this problem within my household.

https://github.com/schlagmichdoch/PairDrop

It dropped files midstream for me. Name checks out, I guess.

Does it require self-hosting a service?

no, you can use https://pairdrop.net/

Nearby share maybe. It is being merged with quick share from samsung.

Syncthing tries to send over the LAN if it's available, and only uses Internet relay servers if it can't establish LAN connectivity. This is why it's (usually) blazing fast. Not sure why the OP thinks this is a misuse of the tool. In fact, it's probably one of the intended purposes of it.

Yep, syncthing is the closest I've found to a simple(ish) cross platform solution. Though when at home, my actual solution is to copy to my file server on one device, then copy from the server on the other.

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