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Stashpad launches Google Docs alternative you can use without any login
- thorncorona 3y agowhat is the point of this? you can’t store any important info if there’s no login unless your links contain the key. and at that point you might as well just use a login instead maintaining your own list of docs
- geek_at 3y agoagreed, would be nice als selfhostable service though
- inhumantsar 3y ago> The product is browser first and document history is stored locally, so users can search for docs without querying the server. The company said that while there is no offline support at the moment, it is a feature that the startup will introduce in the future. > > You can easily share these docs for others to look at and collaborate with. However, some of the features like read-only sharing are behind a login. it took you longer to write that comment than it would've taken to get the answer.
- thorncorona 3y agoi see no reason to use this product over gsuite when it’s both cheaper, has more functionality, and a data/privacy policy
- omoikane 3y agoAccess control appears to be a paid feature: https://www.stashpad.com/pricing https://www.stashpad.com/pricing Using the free version for anything sensitive might not be a good idea, especially since I can't find anything about their retention policy or something like terms of service.
- ryandrake 3y agoThe lack of needing an account is a (or the) key feature: one I wish more online services copied. How much better and more frictionless would the web be if we weren’t having to log into an account everywhere we went?
- warkdarrior 3y agoHow do I get back to my docs from a second device?
- ryandrake 3y agoIf each doc has a unique URL, then bookmarks? Most browsers already do this. I’d be willing to argue that browsers should make sharing bookmarks from one device to the other easier and account-less, too, but that’s a different rant.
- ilikehurdles 3y agoThere once was an incredibly nice product like this called hackpad. It even had a similar theme IIRC. It was a yc company, lovely polished product, and the folks I was founding a startup with loved it with zero effort spent on convincing them. 10 years ago Dropbox bought it and shut it down. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=hackpad https://hn.algolia.com/?q=hackpad
- rigid 3y agoI loved etherpad but it was a pain to host back then. I'd love to have something similar that's lightweight and not serverside node.js
- aedocw 3y agoTake a look at https://github.com/ekzhang/rustpad https://github.com/ekzhang/rustpad
- Shank 3y agoHackpad still quasi-exists as Dropbox Paper, but it's definitely not the same. I really like this product because it reminds me a lot of Hackpad!
- unspecified 3y agoI just got hedgedoc (nee codimd, nee hackmd [1]) setup for my own purposes. It does have the advantage of splitscreen edit/preview, and it has the option to use vim/emacs keybinds in the editor, but if I'd had stashpad, I probably would not have bothered setting up a selfhost hedgedoc. [1] https://hedgedoc.org/history/ https://hedgedoc.org/history/
- rapnie 3y ago+1 for hedgedoc. Only weird thing missing is an admin interface and easy way to check if no one is abusing any of those forgotten public pads that are hanging about.
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y agoThe real secret we need to know here is how to convince TechCrunch to write about you when you have the most generic product on the planet. Knowing journalists is the secret?
- turnsout 3y agoIf it makes you feel any better, news articles make almost no impact on a product’s revenue or success.
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y agoYes and no. In this case it won't make a difference.
- jhanoncomm 3y agoThey raised $2M on the original idea this pivoted off which is insane. https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/30/stashpad-is-a-notepad-for-devs-with-a-dm-to-yourself-interface/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/30/stashpad-is-a-notepad-for-...
- theamk 3y ago> The product is browser first and document history is stored locally so.. for throwaway documents then? browser storage is one of the worst data places imagineable. Hard to backup, very hard for user to access, impossible to sync or share. And very unreliable too: many troubleshooting procedures for web apps start with "reset browser profile" or "clear site data"
- RajT88 3y agoThe new and improved Pastebin
- willsmith72 3y ago"document history is stored locally" doesn't necessarily mean "document history is not stored in the cloud/elsewhere"
- SahAssar 3y agoIt sort of does. Not in a strict semantic sense, but I don't think any user of a service that says it stores stuff "locally" expects it to upload that to somewhere else without explicit consent. It sounds like your interpretation is like if I said "our data is stored on our servers" but that actually meant "our data is stored on our servers, but also on AWS, GCP, Azure, Alibaba and shared with FSB, CIA, CCP, and the public and other parties (including but not limited to the Royal Bhutan Police)". That would be true, but misleading to the point of being meaningless or (hopefully) potentially criminal.
- willsmith72 3y agoI guess, but local-first is a huge movement which means exactly "data is stored locally" AND usually "data is synced to the cloud" Just saying it's not a novel concept if that's what they're doing (I couldn't tell from the article)
- SahAssar 3y agoThere is a huge difference between "document history is stored locally" and "works offline". The local-first movement might sometimes talk about privacy and offline availability in the same breath, but those are very different concerns and if someones says "data is stored locally" then I assume they should check both the privacy and offline boxes but with a huge "I might loose all my data" caveat. If it still uploads my data to some cloud then I would not describe it as "document history is stored locally".
- sigmonsays 3y agoIt needs to support some table of contents concept, pretty limited tbh. This looks like a very basic app. Who do they know at TC?
- neom 3y agoI have a bookmark on my bookmark bar that just does data:text/html, <html contenteditable> It's great for quick notes between tabs or copy/pasting things together into a cohesive comment.
- ajcp 3y agoThis truly delighted me to learn, thank you!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- blisterpeanuts 3y agoThanks for this. Very clever and handy. I've been wanting to make a simple web app with persistent notes, a homegrown Google Keep clone, to run on my shared host, just for privacy purposes. But this is a neat little non-persistent solution for single-location use.
- jddj 3y agoIf it's just for you (and in some cases even if not), you can also just save the innerhtml directly to a database to get the persistence. Run it through a sanitizer before serving it back, but otherwise it'll work fine.
- maxmcd 3y agoMy slight modification on this is: data:text/html,<html><head><title>Notepad</title><style>html,body{margin:0;padding:0;}textarea{padding:10px;font-family:Courier;font-size:16px;height:100%;width:100%;border:none;outline:none;}</style></head><body><textarea style="height:100%;width:100%;font-size:16px;padding:10px;"></textarea><script>document.getElementsByTagName('textarea')[0].focus()</script></body></html>
- nbbaier 3y agoThis is great! Is there a way to persist the state across refreshes?
- acheron 3y agoBut if there’s no login how do they track you for marketing purposes? This doesn’t sound like a web app at all.
- ImPleadThe5th 3y agoInstead they'll record all your keystrokes and feed that to their proprietary AI and sell it back to you
- stevage 3y agoI wonder how you compete with Google docs while charging $8 a month?
- bombcar 3y agoA full office suite with email from Microsoft is only $13/mo so the bar is pretty low.
- Aachen 3y ago"only", when 99% of the people are perfectly well served with the featureset of yesterdecade's LibreOffice suite, the three problems being the network effect (if everyone else is on another "network" or standard, you're forced to as well), that it looks like 2002, and that they have to spend 10 minutes on the first day to figure out that some buttons are in different places (I'm lost in Office nowadays, it really is just a matter of habit and not that either of them has an inferior layout). With the only functional defect being "it looks old", a modern style is what you pay 150€ every year for when buying into the Office monopoly. Except as a student: they're happy to help you gain the habit and experience the network effect. I guess this is why Google Docs has been the first to make a dent: you seamlessly download the software to render the file format upon pageload, so there's no network effect on file formats anymore. Add a modern look, reach into your pockets to make it free until you've established a good market share, advertise for it in your already popular products (costing them nothing), et voila
- jahewson 3y agoThis is a Google Docs alternative in the way that a pair of shoes is a car alternative.
- xwowsersx 3y agoA pair of shoes is a great alternative when a car would be overkill!
- LegitShady 3y agoTo be fair that's what I consider Google docs relative to office.
- catapart 3y agoAwesome. This functions exactly like I expect it to, and without any unnecessary nonsense that I've come to begrudgingly accept. Clean, simple, intuitive, and local-first. A really great product that I'm happy to have found! Thanks!
- uptownhr 3y agoThe thing that immediately stood out to me is `stash.new`. I thought that was only for google apps.... How is this accomplished? I does one register with chrome?
- uptownhr 3y agowow - did not know this but found it. https://get.new/ https://get.new/
- prattmic 3y agoIt is just a TLD. https://get.new/ https://get.new/
- bluish29 3y agoThanks for the link. I discovered that you can create new repo or gist on github using repo.new gist.new That's very handy and useful.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- soared 3y agoIs this not exactly the papier chrome extension? https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/papier/hhjeaokafplhjoogdemakihhdhffacia https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/papier/hhjeaokafpl...
- killerstorm 3y agoHow is it better than Emacs?
- xenodium 3y agoI’m seeing scratch solutions shared, so here’s mine for iOS https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/scratch/id1671420139 https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/scratch/id1671420139 I tried to optimise for least number of taps to quickly write something down. Here’s a blog post by a user https://irreal.org/blog/?p=11202 https://irreal.org/blog/?p=11202
- insane_dreamer 3y agowhy not just use something like Notational Velocity?
- lewisjoe 3y agoI tried using the product and out of curiosity inspected the editor. The editor is basically a CodeMirror plugin with all the tech heavy-lifting like realtime collaboration is enabled by CodeMirror itself. It's clearly an overstretch to call this a Google Docs alternative, especially since Google docs is powered by insane levels of engineering. I know because I work on a competing word-processing product. It's mildly surprising seeing such a shell product receiving millions of dollars in funding and even a published post in TechCrunch!
- somenameforme 3y agoI'll be swapping over. My usage for Google Docs is little more than pastebin + formating + access control. I suspect this is also probably a huge chunk of their overall use-case as well. In general, the least engineering amount possible to deliver what's actually needed is best IMO!
- vander_elst 3y agoNot sure where the data is actually stored, but assuming the last version is stored in the cloud, how can they prevent users from sharing data e.g. music though the docs? And how can they they stop users from doing that?