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by muxator 1087 days ago
At the dawn of browser sync technologies, it was possible to self host a Firefox sync server. I think I remember there was a component for authentication and one for storage proper. You could use each one of them, or both.

Is this still a thing? How would today's firefox handle a custom sync server?

4 comments

Theoretically - yes.

Practically, it's poorly documented clusterfuck of very confused technologies (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18448125). I hope they've possibly sorted that out over the years, but I don't have much hopes. Although they seem to went monorepo for FxA stuff (IIRC, it used to be that Accounts and Content services were separate). Still, no end-user docs - best you can get is assorted bunch of articles aimed at developers: https://mozilla.github.io/ecosystem-platform/tutorials/devel... - summing it up, it's a project that no one seem to have ever meant to be able to use outside of Mozilla, an ability to self-host it is an accident.

It used that one could've host a single simple program and have everything working. After switch to Firefox Accounts, trying to deploy all those services and their dependencies (and keeping up as it grew) quickly became complicated. I used to maintain my own half-assed almost-all-in-one re-implementation (https://gitlab.com/drdaeman/firesync, still required Kinto as a dependency), but I gave up.

Why don't they just use Nextcloud or SyncThing or similar for syncing? Too much wheel reinvention everywhere!
It'd handle it fine, considering that's still an option. The account hosting side of things is a little trickier but it's doable.

https://mozilla-services.readthedocs.io/en/latest/howtos/run...

As far as I know you can still self-host Firefox sync.