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Really sorry to hear about Ian. Sandstorm is an excellent project. I sort of consider it the platonic ideal of self-hosting software. It does everything the "r

Really sorry to hear about Ian. Sandstorm is an excellent project. I sort of consider it the platonic ideal of self-hosting software. It does everything the "right" way, especially with respect to security, but ultimately isn't compatible enough with the broader ecosystem for general adoption. I've been wondering if a lot of self-hosting platforms are targeting the wrong level of scale. On one extreme you have single user instances (SUI hosting). The other extreme is centralized platforms like Google. I used to think the ideal for most people is the "nerdy cousin" approach, where each family has someone capable of running something like Sandstorm or Nextcloud. The problem is that I would much rather trust Google with my private data than anyone close to me. There's so much more incentive for them to go looking through my stuff. This makes me think SUI might be the way to go. Or maybe large federated providers, similar to what we have for email.

ocdtrekkie 3y ago
The biggest thing we have to accomplish for single user hosting is what Sandstorm excels at: Removing security footguns. Self-hosting can't just be for folks who can sysadmin. Ultimately, it'd be nice to have Sandstorm available preloaded on a box someone can just plug into their home router and set up from a mobile app... but we're a long way from there yet.
- apitman 3y ago
  But for that to work Sandstorm itself has to be as easy to install as an app on your phone, and there needs to be way more apps.
  - abdullahkhalids 3y ago
    What particular killer app do you think is missing?
    - palata 3y ago
      Can Sandstorm host a Matrix server? Or a Mastodon server?
      - nullcipher 3y ago
        It's really not meant for public facing servers. Now people will say it can but sandstorm like any other software can be hacked into doing whatever. It's meant to host "documents", think Google docs style hosting. You can make documents public which is quite different from a public server.
      - ocdtrekkie 3y ago
        This is definitely something we'd like to do with Tempest. The primary issue is that Sandstorm makes it intentionally very hard to have a well-known URL that can run app code, and services like Matrix and ActivityPub generally expect a reasonable address that represents that server. Since Sandstorm servers can have many users who do not interact, you do not want one of them able to install Mastodon and define it as the server's Mastodon... probably. There are probably a couple interesting approaches. One might be to have users point some other domain at a Sandstorm API endpoint, end-running around Sandstorm's own domain, which might work in scenarios remote servers are only fetching. But another idea would be to sort of "special-case" an ActivityPub server deeply integrated into Tempest, and instead of letting a user install "Mastodon", they are installing a custom frontend that creates a user account on the server's ActivityPub. Because Sandstorm was intended to work as a large scale hosting service, it avoided pretty much any design which could let one user know about another user on the server, but Tempest may end up making choices more suited to smaller deployments where we assume a Tempest server hosts either one organization or one family or one group of friends, etc.
  - wmf 3y ago
    IMO Sandstorm should be preinstalled like the OS on your phone.
- abdullahkhalids 3y ago
  I don't see why we are a long way away. At the sandstorm end, we need to get to the point, where all updates (of both sandstorm and the apps) on the user machine are automatic. Much like they are automatic on various OSes (mobile OSes in particular but also MacOS/Windows). This is not impossible if a single OS like Debian-testing is targeted. Mailinabox [1] almost does it. They target Ubuntu stable, and upgrades are mostly silent. But they needed user intervention when Ubuntu had to be upgraded from 18.10 to 22.04, which was quite challenging. If sandstorm can get there, then putting it into a RPi box is simple. What's difficult is helping the general public understand the importance of protecting their data, so such a product has a reasonable market. [1] https://mailinabox.email/ https://mailinabox.email/
  - apitman 3y ago
    How is the average person supposed to install it? It needs to be as simple as installing an app on Windows or your phone.
    - abdullahkhalids 3y ago
      GP suggested "Sandstorm available preloaded on a box", which I think is possible because that makes things a lot easier for the average user. As long as the box takes care of updates and backup without user intervention.
ilaksh 3y ago
Looks like the new version Tempest may address some of your thoughts.
ianopolous 3y ago
What you really want is something e2e encrypted so you don't need to trust the server.
- nyanpasu64 3y ago
  That would be a good idea for file sync and documents, but wouldn't be as effective for RSS readers where the server needs to know the list of URLs to fetch, and terminate the TLS connections itself (unless the client does the fetching and pushes up articles in an encrypted format).
- ocdtrekkie 3y ago
  There are ups and downs to that approach: If we're hoping for a solution that works for the average person, e2e encrypted solutions often lead to people who do not fully understand the risk of losing their keys to lose all of their data. Even without e2e, you'd be surprised how many people I've personally interacted with who have gotten permanently locked out of a Gmail account and unable to convince Google to give them access again. One idea I think is really neat though is decentralized backup solutions, where an e2e scheme would work really well: Your home server could have a key to store encrypted versions on someone else's server (and vice versa for theirs). Losing a key would still be problematic, but only in the case you also have lost your primary server.

ocdtrekkie 3y ago

The biggest thing we have to accomplish for single user hosting is what Sandstorm excels at: Removing security footguns. Self-hosting can't just be for folks who can sysadmin. Ultimately, it'd be nice to have Sandstorm available preloaded on a box someone can just plug into their home router and set up from a mobile app... but we're a long way from there yet.

apitman 3y ago
But for that to work Sandstorm itself has to be as easy to install as an app on your phone, and there needs to be way more apps.
- abdullahkhalids 3y ago
  What particular killer app do you think is missing?
  - palata 3y ago
    Can Sandstorm host a Matrix server? Or a Mastodon server?
    - nullcipher 3y ago
      It's really not meant for public facing servers. Now people will say it can but sandstorm like any other software can be hacked into doing whatever. It's meant to host "documents", think Google docs style hosting. You can make documents public which is quite different from a public server.
    - ocdtrekkie 3y ago
      This is definitely something we'd like to do with Tempest. The primary issue is that Sandstorm makes it intentionally very hard to have a well-known URL that can run app code, and services like Matrix and ActivityPub generally expect a reasonable address that represents that server. Since Sandstorm servers can have many users who do not interact, you do not want one of them able to install Mastodon and define it as the server's Mastodon... probably. There are probably a couple interesting approaches. One might be to have users point some other domain at a Sandstorm API endpoint, end-running around Sandstorm's own domain, which might work in scenarios remote servers are only fetching. But another idea would be to sort of "special-case" an ActivityPub server deeply integrated into Tempest, and instead of letting a user install "Mastodon", they are installing a custom frontend that creates a user account on the server's ActivityPub. Because Sandstorm was intended to work as a large scale hosting service, it avoided pretty much any design which could let one user know about another user on the server, but Tempest may end up making choices more suited to smaller deployments where we assume a Tempest server hosts either one organization or one family or one group of friends, etc.
- wmf 3y ago
  IMO Sandstorm should be preinstalled like the OS on your phone.
abdullahkhalids 3y ago
I don't see why we are a long way away. At the sandstorm end, we need to get to the point, where all updates (of both sandstorm and the apps) on the user machine are automatic. Much like they are automatic on various OSes (mobile OSes in particular but also MacOS/Windows). This is not impossible if a single OS like Debian-testing is targeted. Mailinabox [1] almost does it. They target Ubuntu stable, and upgrades are mostly silent. But they needed user intervention when Ubuntu had to be upgraded from 18.10 to 22.04, which was quite challenging. If sandstorm can get there, then putting it into a RPi box is simple. What's difficult is helping the general public understand the importance of protecting their data, so such a product has a reasonable market. [1] https://mailinabox.email/ https://mailinabox.email/
- apitman 3y ago
  How is the average person supposed to install it? It needs to be as simple as installing an app on Windows or your phone.
  - abdullahkhalids 3y ago
    GP suggested "Sandstorm available preloaded on a box", which I think is possible because that makes things a lot easier for the average user. As long as the box takes care of updates and backup without user intervention.

ilaksh 3y ago

Looks like the new version Tempest may address some of your thoughts.

ianopolous 3y ago

What you really want is something e2e encrypted so you don't need to trust the server.

nyanpasu64 3y ago
That would be a good idea for file sync and documents, but wouldn't be as effective for RSS readers where the server needs to know the list of URLs to fetch, and terminate the TLS connections itself (unless the client does the fetching and pushes up articles in an encrypted format).
ocdtrekkie 3y ago
There are ups and downs to that approach: If we're hoping for a solution that works for the average person, e2e encrypted solutions often lead to people who do not fully understand the risk of losing their keys to lose all of their data. Even without e2e, you'd be surprised how many people I've personally interacted with who have gotten permanently locked out of a Gmail account and unable to convince Google to give them access again. One idea I think is really neat though is decentralized backup solutions, where an e2e scheme would work really well: Your home server could have a key to store encrypted versions on someone else's server (and vice versa for theirs). Losing a key would still be problematic, but only in the case you also have lost your primary server.