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by hacb 895 days ago
I'm using LocalSend for local network sharing needs (typically stuff between my laptop and my phone). It works like a charm, and is really easy to use

https://github.com/localsend/localsend

2 comments

I did try a bunch of these peer-peer file sharing, the best ones the worked well are localsend and LANdrop, as I have a screen (basically a custom android tablet) in my car and I needed to send files without the car accessing any wifi, those two worked well. The others I tried that didn’t work well were: Arc, Sharedrop, pairdrop, and snapdrop.
SnapDrop was so buggy that the transfer speed was very slow, sometimes hitting the send button did nothing, and need to open browser on the target machine first and recently somehow it stopped working completely, I figured installing NextCloud client on my Android phone solved it easily to have the file arrive instantly without complications.
Having to download an app for each platform to use it is a huge drawback for me. LANdrop seems to require this (unless I am not understanding it well).
Maybe a drawback for your case, but it’s the feature I was looking for, one of the devices (my car screen) has no internet access at all, so I loaded the APK file there, and used it to transfer the files from my iPhone to it without internet, it wouldn’t be possible with the likes of snapdrop, and it didn’t even work properly in other two devices that had internet access.
Been running a selfhosted PairDrop instance for about a year now and it's amazingly useful. No apps to install, just web based "AirDrop" that works across macOS, Windows, iOS, Linux...

https://github.com/schlagmichdoch/PairDrop

Out of interest, What’s the advantage of self hosting vs using the web version on the main page? Are there security or convenience benefits?
The main ones for me are not being dependent on someone else's server, and being able to use my own domain name.