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tonystaunton

2 karma · joined May 14, 2025

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tonystaunton··on Show HN: Family Folder – Help your family remember everything, organise anything
Thanks for letting me know. It's a bug with night mode so I will add that to the backlog :)
tonystaunton··on Show HN: Family Folder – Help your family remember everything, organise anything
Wow, thank you for the excellent feedback and taking the time to go through Family Folder with such detail.

# Comparison - I'm currently working on comparisons page and explainer.

# Organization - Great point/question, there is a full calendar within Family Folder so I definitely need to emphasise this more.

# Screenshots - I will definitely add more screenshots. The FAQ is designed to help families remember things or have easy access to info such as WIFI codes. Also a family member can create specific folders for example a summer vacation folder which could contain several FAQs such as flight numbers, hotel details, etc (something I am currently using Family Folder for).

# TOS - agreed will amend this to be give the user total control, rights etc over what they upload. Thanks for pointing this one out. All data is your data.

# Header - will add it to the bug list :)

Again, really great feedback, thank you for taking the time.

Tony.

tonystaunton··on Show HN: Family Folder – Help your family remember everything, organise anything
Thanks for taking the time to look at Family Folder.

With regards to open source & self-hosting, while I agree that open source and self-hosting are strong options for trust and control, for the moment I’ve prioritised ease-of-use and low-friction onboarding for non-technical families. Open-sourcing the core functionality and offering a self-hosted version is something I would consider in the future. As the solo person on this project I need to be very careful with my backlog but definitely something to add to it.

For encryption & privacy details I do need to provide more depth and add to the FAQs. Here’s a brief overview of how Family Folder currently works:

- In transit: All traffic is encrypted via HTTPS/TLS. - At rest: Files uploaded to S3 are encrypted using server-side encryption, and the database is encrypted at the volume level via Heroku Postgres. - Access control: Families are isolated by design — a user can only see the folders they’re invited to. Authentication is handled via Devise with session-based login (no tokens stored on client). - Key management: Encryption keys are managed by AWS and Heroku. I don’t currently offer user-controlled keys, but I understand how important that is for full control and again definitely something to consider in the future.

The project is still early stages, so I’m open to input on how to evolve these parts — especially from a privacy perspective.

Thanks again for the feedback.

Tony.