This seems unnecessarily snarky. You can make anything sound silly by reducing its functionality to the most basic level possible, ignoring all aspects of ergonomics and packaging. And you could make this comment about any storage engine. Like the infamous Dropbox comment here.
And syncing between file systems across a network is hard. (Before you say it's easy you can just do X, Y, and Z... remember that infamous Dropbox comment.)
It was easy to share public links to values hosted on the file system in 1995 with Apache. It remains easy today with Nginx and other web servers.
Syncing filesystems across networks with rsync has worked well for years.
If you are considering a personal key value store, you are probably already familiar with web servers and rsync. If not, they are two general purpose tools which are likely to be useful for other projects as well.
I was absent the day of the infamous Dropbox comment.
You're just parroting the original comment which was proven to be so so wrong in practice. Most people aren't able to / don't want to duck-tape random systems together like this.
I could snakily ask you what's the point of Nginx? Why not just run a dial-in BBS? Don’t you have the skills to do that? Why do you need this fancy Nginx and why did anyone bother writing it? That’s what you sound like.
There's value in building something that is integrated.
I read it. Im pretty clear on what it does. Im still not feeling the why (or the differentiator from other things that store files and give you URLs).
Remember when Dropbox explained itself by telling you you didnt need to carry around USB sticks in your jean pockets that get washed or lost? I thought that was pretty neat.
A distributed file system seems like way more work to set up.
Also not everything has to follow the Unix philosophy. Plenty of very useful things are better off less Unix-y eg ffmpeg. But this doesn’t seem to do a bad job - it’s a very dedicated tool to do one thing, it just doesn’t store everything as files.
The gist is the original yc debut of Dropbox had a comment that described a pretty technical way to get the same functionality as drop box. It's commonly referenced when folks on hackernews dismiss a product when they can do the same with 10 unix commands, not realizing they might not be the target customer. Interestingly I think this situation is the exact opposite, Kvass seems to be more complicated for a non technical user than file systems as the top level comment responded with.
> What's wrong with Dropbox comment? ... IMO Dropbox is useless.
That's just repeating the original ignorant Dropbox comment. Over 15 million paying users don't think Dropbox is useless. And hundreds of millions of non-paying users don't either.
There are literally hundreds of distributed networked KV stores used by software developers for all sorts of projects. Showing how to store “hello world” seems like a pretty good intro.
Why can’t people see a use case for this? It maybe doesn’t compare as unique against the hundred other KV stores but it’s also a toy project and a KV store seems to have an obvious use?
Personal, I’m going to try this out since I was actually looking for a similar KV store. Only because I was looking and HN presented it to me tbh.
My use case is that I have a few Raspberry Pis at home (aka low powered) that I wanted to have a distributed config on. I wanted something easy to manipulate with a command line that was lightweight (eg not redis or consul or a password manager). Since it’s for LAN use (or actual Tailscale) the security wasn’t really important.
Heh. Snarky but true. I store just about everything in a “notes” folder which is mostly markdown files. Easily searchable / editable with any tool you like.