4 ms·

I'm personally a fan of Sandstorm.io and hope it can continue growing and offering an alternative much more aligned with individual's interests than what the la

I'm personally a fan of Sandstorm.io and hope it can continue growing and offering an alternative much more aligned with individual's interests than what the largest few software companies in the world are creating.

robot 7y ago
Wow this really looks awesome! It requires polish as most oss but this idea of an open web app store / cloud that is not tied to a vendor is amazing.
ScottFree 7y ago
> hope it can continue growing :/ > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20312789 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20312789 "Unfortunately Sandstorm is basically dead at this point. I kept actively working on it for a while in my spare time after the company failed in early 2017, but I haven't found any time to do serious work on it in probably a year now. I do push monthly updates to keep dependencies fresh but that's about it. Oasis takes in about $1800 per month, which is just about enough to cover serving costs and business expenses (e.g. annual tax preparation). For a while it was making only $800, with me making up the difference out-of-pocket. Then, last October I stopped offering a free plan. Remarkably, revenue more than doubled and has even gradually continued to increase over time -- I had expected a smaller spike followed by a drop-off. But now it's getting to the point where it feeling really awkward to let people pay for a service that hosts a library of apps that mostly hasn't been updated in 2.5 years or more. In theory developers could still be updating their apps and submitting new ones, but basically the only app actually getting updates is Wekan. So, not sure how long long this can really continue... :("
- AlchemistCamp 7y ago
  Ouch. I hope that $1800 grows to enough to be sustainable for Kenton to invest some time or hire someone's time to grow the product, even if slowly.
katet 7y ago
I don't want to dismiss what sandstorm is doing. They've been around for a while and they've shown some incredible persistence in pursuit of their vision. I'm also a little out of date since I last checked up on it. IIRC, one example of the SSO thing I mentioned is exemplified in sandstorm. They either (I can't recall specifics) wrap or fork the relevant projects to make them "fit" within the sandstorm ecosystem. SSO, ACL, and overall storage / permissions are handled by sandstorm, which is why there's a list of supported apps - other apps that haven't been "wrapped" don't integrate with sandstorm APIs so they can't be used directly (I may be wrong now its 2019) That's...kinda my point. There's OIDC, OAuth, Unhosted, IndieWeb, microformats (repeat ad nauseum) and yet there's still somehow a need to create the XKCD #927 situation (yet another standard). There's already schema.org (OK, Google influence :shrug:), the ActivityPub vocab (still new-ish), RDF / Linked Data etc. It's not a slight against any of these projects, particularly sandstorm. IMHO the effort and onus should be placed on the component projects to play well with others. GitLab and Nextcloud deserve shout outs for exploring or working on federation strategies that should remove the need for things like sandstorm, but we should keep fighting for and implementing similar things for other projects. (This discussion is now convincing me to open a second pull request to Wallabag implementing OIDC login)

robot 7y ago

Wow this really looks awesome! It requires polish as most oss but this idea of an open web app store / cloud that is not tied to a vendor is amazing.

ScottFree 7y ago

> hope it can continue growing :/ > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20312789 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20312789 "Unfortunately Sandstorm is basically dead at this point. I kept actively working on it for a while in my spare time after the company failed in early 2017, but I haven't found any time to do serious work on it in probably a year now. I do push monthly updates to keep dependencies fresh but that's about it. Oasis takes in about $1800 per month, which is just about enough to cover serving costs and business expenses (e.g. annual tax preparation). For a while it was making only $800, with me making up the difference out-of-pocket. Then, last October I stopped offering a free plan. Remarkably, revenue more than doubled and has even gradually continued to increase over time -- I had expected a smaller spike followed by a drop-off. But now it's getting to the point where it feeling really awkward to let people pay for a service that hosts a library of apps that mostly hasn't been updated in 2.5 years or more. In theory developers could still be updating their apps and submitting new ones, but basically the only app actually getting updates is Wekan. So, not sure how long long this can really continue... :("

AlchemistCamp 7y ago
Ouch. I hope that $1800 grows to enough to be sustainable for Kenton to invest some time or hire someone's time to grow the product, even if slowly.

katet 7y ago

I don't want to dismiss what sandstorm is doing. They've been around for a while and they've shown some incredible persistence in pursuit of their vision. I'm also a little out of date since I last checked up on it. IIRC, one example of the SSO thing I mentioned is exemplified in sandstorm. They either (I can't recall specifics) wrap or fork the relevant projects to make them "fit" within the sandstorm ecosystem. SSO, ACL, and overall storage / permissions are handled by sandstorm, which is why there's a list of supported apps - other apps that haven't been "wrapped" don't integrate with sandstorm APIs so they can't be used directly (I may be wrong now its 2019) That's...kinda my point. There's OIDC, OAuth, Unhosted, IndieWeb, microformats (repeat ad nauseum) and yet there's still somehow a need to create the XKCD #927 situation (yet another standard). There's already schema.org (OK, Google influence :shrug:), the ActivityPub vocab (still new-ish), RDF / Linked Data etc. It's not a slight against any of these projects, particularly sandstorm. IMHO the effort and onus should be placed on the component projects to play well with others. GitLab and Nextcloud deserve shout outs for exploring or working on federation strategies that should remove the need for things like sandstorm, but we should keep fighting for and implementing similar things for other projects. (This discussion is now convincing me to open a second pull request to Wallabag implementing OIDC login)