I've seen probably four or five different brilliant file transfer solutions that totally solved the person to person file transfer problem posted to HN and every dang one of them was shut down or abandoned.
Because the problem doesn’t exist. Non tech folk use stuff like imessage to send things and rarely deal with large files at all beyond images or video. That works fine for them. Tech people use proven existing tooling like rsync or ftp. The only market that exist for this I’d guess is resumeware which explains why these projects are all built then abandoned.
Tech people don't use rsync or FTP because those are terrible solutions. FTP is insecure and requires setting up a server. Rsync requires an account on both machines.
In my experience companies usually end up paying for a service that solves this problem for their employees. Yes really.
or RustDesk. RustDesk has a nice GUI and file transfer has a really nice two pane file explorer view but that is obviously not great for transferring files to people you don't fully trust.
> Non tech folk use stuff like [messengers] to send things
Yes, and tech folks too, but what about if you're not already connected friends? You don't want to invite your entire audience at a conference to send them slides.
You either need to already have a website and say "click on News and find the entry for today", have them type over some long URL with perfect accuracy, or use a link shortener to the same effect. It always requires having hosting, unless there exists file sharing services. That's the problem these things solve.
Also mind that there are size limits in most messengers on the order of a few hundred megabytes. You don't run into them that often, but whatcha gonna do when you do? A dedicated file sharing service that supports in the gigabytes range solves that situation as well.
I can recommend PicoShare which I've been self-hosting for a while.
It's a couple of years old now and still maintained. Also, it's very simple and allows for guests too.
For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
I was unaware there was copypasta on HN. I know this might be generally the sort of post that the site wants to avoid, but the phenomenon of copypasta within a given community still makes my heart smile a little bit.
Now that we’ve shifted our company’s focus to https://socket.dev, I’d love to open source Wormhole. I’m quite proud of the code - I’ve worked on P2P and file transfer systems for so so long that I think this might be some of the best code I’ve worked on.
It’s just a matter of finding the time, but I expect this will be open source eventually.
I use `python -m http.server` on the sender side, and https://github.com/Densaugeo/uploadserver on the receiver side if Python or the network is problematic to setup on the sender. This is simple and works well for my use cases, since I don't have a need for those features you mention. The only feature I miss is encryption, which could be done via an SSH tunnel with a bit more work, but I usually don't bother if I'm on my home LAN.