
Sandstorm is returning to its community roots - cjcole
https://sandstorm.io/news/2017-02-06-sandstorm-returning-to-community-roots
======
educar
Oh dear :( Sorry to see sandstorm go. I attribute the failure to many reasons:

1\. The UI was very sloppy. For the user, one had to learn many new concepts
(what is a webkey? why do apps not work on mobile?)

2\. New app developer model meant that it was impossible to create apps easily
without insane complexity. If you see all the apps, they had to fork from the
main code base and generally lagged behind because packaging for sandstorm
required a LOT of work.

3\. The web frame that they added around each app was annoying. This frame
could not be disabled and thus made many use cases like having a public forum,
blog impossible.

4\. Their own infrastructure was not self-hosted including using github (when
gitlab exists), google groups (when nodebb app exists). They continued to use
irc despite having a rocket.chat app as the main showcase. They should be
dogfooding.

The alternatives today are at [https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-
selfhosted#self-hosting-...](https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-
selfhosted#self-hosting-solutions). I recommend
[https://cloudron.io](https://cloudron.io). They focus simply on installing
things and don't invent a new developer model (it's based on docker)

~~~
kentonv
Thanks for the feedback!

1\. We know the UI needs work and have plans to improve it. We are very aware
that webkeys are not user-friendly; they were always meant as a stopgap
measure while we build better UI. Some things about mobile here:
[https://github.com/sandstorm-
io/sandstorm/tree/master/roadma...](https://github.com/sandstorm-
io/sandstorm/tree/master/roadmap/platform/mobile)

2\. The amount of work an app port requires varies a lot depending on the type
of app. Self-contained apps that don't talk to the outside world can often be
ported in a few minutes. But, indeed, some apps need work to integrate with
the appropriate Sandstorm APIs. We've been working to make this easier by, for
example, setting up an HTTP proxy inside the app which can make communicating
with external OAuth services mostly transparent, while still respecting the
Sandstorm permission model. With better tools we think we can automate most
things, we just haven't gotten there yet.

3\. There are multiple Sandstorm apps which let you post e.g. blogs with no
Sandstorm UI frame around it. We have some features in-progress which extend
this to more apps. But note that part of the goal of Sandstorm is to
generalize a lot of the UI such that apps don't have to repeatedly build the
same things, like login, access control, notifications, etc. We need to hang
that UI somewhere, hence the need for that frame. But we have ideas that will
make it look a lot more like an integrated part of the app UI in the future.

4\. We dogfood a lot. We write design docs in Etherpad, manage tasks in Wekan,
etc. Our github, google groups, and IRC existed before Sandstorm was
functional. The main reason we haven't switched over is because switching is
costly and it seems like there are better things we could do with our time.

~~~
educar
I apologize for not thanking you for the project and just criticizing. Thanks
for the amazing project, Kenton. I meant for it all to be constructive and I
hope you take it well.

About 4), please do consider the fact that this is the exact same issue most
of your users face. We have existing wordpress blogs, forum that we would like
to migrate but cannot. Most apps have import/export which is broken (including
wordpress which is supposedly mature) :/

~~~
kentonv
I agree, import/export in Sandstorm rarely works today, and that's a problem.
It's one of those things that we've wanted to address but haven't been able to
get to, because there are so many things.

But we're getting close on this one. We recently made some big strides
implementing the Powerbox, which allows apps to request permissions to talk to
each other and to the outside world. We've also implemented the basics of the
in-app HTTP proxy which allows HTTP communications to feel transparent. With a
little more work, an app like Wordpress could make a powerbox request to
connect to your old Wordpress blog in order to migrate data.

Honestly, a _lot_ of what's wrong with Sandstorm boiled down to "we need the
Powerbox to do that, and we haven't had time to fully implement it yet,
because we need to focus on things that generate revenue in the short term."
We finally implemented some critical pieces of the Powerbox in the last month
(app-to-app powerbox is now functional) and, as the Powerbox was always my
favorite part of the whole design, I'll probably be working on it more soon.

------
mynegation
Sad to know the business did not work out. Sandstorm is a wonderful piece of
software, I was able to install and play with it without too much trouble. I
hoped that would be the project that would take open source software to new
heights.

Software (at least software for consumption, mot for creative work) moves from
desktop to cloud + mobile devices in droves. And there is no widely successful
FLOSS app ecosystem that works in that direction. Basically I want to be able
to get a server, install it at home or maybe in the datacentre, and I want to
be able to install FLOSS server-side software that works through the web
browser and mobile apps. Think my own pinboard.in, feed reader, IRC or Slack-
type server, dashboard etc. Sure you can do it with Linux right now, but the
amount of work you have to do configuring all this is well beyond the
simplicity of 'apt-get install'. The closest thing to this is what QNAP and
Synology do, but their systems are proprietary.

Sandstorm has the potential to be that system and did a lot of things well,
package installation experience probably the most notable. What I did not like
is the grain model. I understand the security reasons behind it, but it felt
like a straitjacket and URLs were ugly. There was no accompanying mobile apps
(not Sandstorm's fault per se, but something to think about when building
systems like that in the future)

------
xg15
This is avery sad thing to hear and one can only wish the best of luck to the
open source project. I think especially in current times, user-friendly
alternatives to the cloud are badly needed.

By the way, I really appreciate the honest style of the message. Sentences
like

 _Unfortunately, Sandstorm the business has now run out of money, and we have
been unable to raise more._

are refreshing in contrast to the usual "the next chapter of our journey"
speeches.

------
azirbel
Sad to hear this news, but also excited to hear that Sandstorm is continuing
as an open source project.

I'm mainly excited because Sandstorm makes indie web apps viable. I've been
amazed to see how quickly members of the Sandstorm community can spin up
sophisticated apps like collaborative editing or file sharing. If you have a
framework like Meteor to handle sync, and Sandstorm handles authentication and
sharing, then you can make a serious multi-user app in a weekend.

Even better, once you've made your app, you don't have to worry about security
or scaling. So a junior developer could make an app which stores my sensitive
financial information, and I'd still try it because I trust Sandstorm to keep
my data safe even if the app is poorly written.

Sandstorm's foundation is solid, and I think a few UI and developer-happiness
improvements will make this a reality. Wishing the team all the best!

------
marknadal
So sad to see yet another blooming Open Source technology make a
business/financial shutdown statement. I've been a fan of how much kentonv has
hustled, not only in code, but also being a role model about being fearless to
get out and post to HN about his technology. Very impressive.

I'm in a similar place, and just recently wrote an article on the
RethinkDB/Parse shutdowns and spoke on the Changelog podcast about it as well:
[https://hackernoon.com/the-implications-of-rethinkdb-and-
par...](https://hackernoon.com/the-implications-of-rethinkdb-and-parse-
shutdowns-c076460058f7#.rvz4w04lz) .

Given what I say there, I actually want to encourage the sandstorm team to not
give up yet - they are in the right space. Maybe wait out a year, and then
hustle some marketing/bizdev/enterprise/government sales, they are in the
right space and have some big opportunity ahead. Sometimes, being too early
can bite though, but please please try again - don't give up.

As a great example of this, look at Bitcoin. Crypto currencies were all the
rage in the 90s and went nowhere. A decade and a half later... the market
timing matched up, and it exploded.

~~~
bureado
I read the article and my key takeaway was that licensing was a significant
culprit. But Parse and Sandstorm are different. Do you think there is
something systematic to open source or to VC-backed startups or to developer
tools or something else?

~~~
marknadal
Great question, if I were to tackle it, I would take it like this:

1\. Parse, to non-developers, was a wild success - not a failure. An $85M exit
( [https://angel.co/parse](https://angel.co/parse) ) on a $7M investment, that
is a 10X+ return in 3 years. This doesn't seem to be talked about much,
especially compared to the darling Firebase.

It represents exactly what an affluent ecosystem would want: A business savvy
and technically proficient team that can be sold off to the highest bidder
that investors vet. However, it is a "shut down" in the eyes of developers
because the tool was overlooked.

2\. Sandstorm is so advanced that it isn't quite understood yet, partly
because nobody has invented the catchy phrase for it (even if they did, the
timing is still too early). While most first-world users now have multiple
devices, they only use 1 at a time, and they don't see these two problems: (A)
They don't know their devices should sync more than what Apple tells them they
should (B) They don't know that their devices, which they own physically,
should be their private servers for all their services.

That is why I think Sandstorm shouldn't give up, because with the addition of
5B+ new people coming online, I don't care how scalable
Google/Amazon/Apple/Microsoft are, things are going to be a lot more
powerful/reliable/customer-satisfaction if people own and run their own
services (fully automated by things like sandstorm). This isn't just a
privacy/ownership thing, it is a customer expectation "thing" \- using a
service is like using a public bathroom, but owning that service is like using
your apartment's bathroom. It doesn't matter how gross/nice any 1 experience
is, ultimately the consistency of expectation wins out.

So yes, there is something systematic to VC-backed startups (like Parse,
they're ultimately a hiring/resume gig - or randomly big industry creators,
like Dropbox, Uber/Lyft, AirBnB), and there is something systematic to Open
Source and developers (we often value different things). Developer Tools
aren't particularly unique, other than the fact that they are either industry
causing/creating architectures, or unfortunately on the tail end of a dying
architecture. They are black and white in their success, high risk, with no
middle ground - and since risks often fail, and humans are loss averse, the
failures often seem to outweigh or overwhelm the successes. The important
thing to remember though is that the winners cause and create prosperity for
entirely new industries/sectors, for people and companies around the world,
and for generations to come.

------
losvedir
Oh no! I really believe sandstorm (or something like it) is what we need the
future to be. Rather than having everything get sucked up into Google,
Facebook, Apple, or these other few centralized services, imagine where
everyone has a personal (or family, or church group or whatever) server, and
they can one-click install their email apps, their document apps, etc.

The basic issue is that everyone wants "cloud" apps, so that their emails and
chats appear on their phones _and_ their tablets or home computers. But
unfortunately it seems we leapt straight from the PC paradigm where your email
is stored on your computer straight to the "centralized, 3rd party cloud"
paradigm, where Google owns all your stuff. But with a "cloud" that you still
control, tough problems like end-to-end encryption fall away, since it only
needs to be encrypted from one person's cloud to another, while the messages
themselves could be synced between all the user's connected devices.

Linux was a beautiful, world changing thing. If we could establish an open-
source platform seeking to replicate a lot of things Google and Facebook do
now, but without the privacy implications, that could be equally world
changing.

Sandstorm, at least as far as I understand it, definitely has the vision
right, so I'm hoping despite Sandstorm for Work not panning out, the
technology will continue to grow.

------
azinman2
I just don't see a big market for hosting FOSS apps. There are few apps, if
any, that are better than a commercial equivalent already on web/iOS/android
with support teams, marketing, etc. Ordinary people don't have much qualms
about using a commercial service despite all the privacy warnings in the
world: just look at the 1B+ users on Facebook.

So if we're left with a small crowd who does care, they're also largely the
same crowd who feels comfortable getting a DO droplet and apt-get installing
whatever app.

I fee bad for the sandstorm guys, seems like they put a lot of energy into it,
but they approached it as an engineering challenge rather than from a market
research "build what people want" challenge.

~~~
kentonv
It's definitely true that we've been more focused on technology than market
research, and that this is a huge factor in why our business didn't work.

However, I don't believe you can really make revolutionary changes based on
the "lean startup", "do lots of market research and test everything with
metrics" strategy. It's absolutely a great way to make incremental
improvements -- even big ones -- but not paradigm shifts.

Sandstorm's vision is a long-term one, and it actually isn't primarily focused
specifically on self-hosting, privacy, or even FOSS, but rather on creating
infrastructure that allows decentralized software to stand on equal or greater
footing compared to centralized services. There is a lot of work that needs to
be done for this to function, and you can't justify it by saying "look, these
customers asked for it" \-- you justify it by laying out the vision and
saying: "Look, there will be these clear enormous advantages if this works."

For reference, here's our technology manifesto: [https://sandstorm.io/how-it-
works](https://sandstorm.io/how-it-works)

This is always a tough sell, because people rarely agree on hypothetical
outcomes that can't be measured in advance. And if it were clear, someone
would be doing it already. So, I don't expect you to agree. But I'm going to
keep working on it.

~~~
azinman2
"allows decentralized software to stand on equal or greater footing compared
to centralized services."

While that's great from a CS/FOSS/EFF/hacker perspective, the question is
what's necessary for such software to be on equal ground in the eyes of
ordinary users? My guess is that the decentralized/centralized split isn't
(yet?) it, but rather the UX and functionality. Few open source end-user apps
are entirely original and cutting edge; most are poor knockoffs of commercial
products or are failed commercial products that got open sourced.

To me that's why sandstorm didn't make much sense. I applaud your efforts, I
really don't want to rain on your parade -- I poured my sweat and tears into a
startup that failed as well so I get it -- I'm just reacting to what seemed
like not-honest-enough reasons for failure on the website. It's really
important to know what didn't go right for next time lest you make the same
mistakes again.

~~~
kentonv
It sounds like you're assuming that Sandstorm is a platform strictly for open
source software, but that was actually not our intent. In the ten-year vision,
there is a thriving ecosystem of both open source and proprietary / paid
applications that build on the platform because it provides many advantages
both to developers and to users, allowing for better-quality apps.

We've used open source apps to seed the app market, because we can do that
without the upstream developers' help. We also are big fans of open source
ourselves, obviously, and I feel open source is especially disadvantaged in a
SaaS world, so Sandstorm will make it more competitive. But in the end what I
really want is high-quality decentralized software in general.

------
ar-jan
Sorry to hear this! :( I use a self-hosted Sandstorm instance almost daily,
and I'm very happy with it.

I don't really agree with some of the critiques posted here regarding the UI
and UX. Sure, it could have used further improvements, but I feel it's simple,
functional, and intuitive enough. Not at all a critical shortcoming imo (well,
perhaps for use cases where mobile support is essential).

For me a limiting factor is that some of the apps do not have feature-parity
with their regular version. In particular, plugin support, which is very
important for example for WordPress, ShareLaTeX, and IPython.

Another thing is the pace in which new apps are packaged for Sandstorm, and
the trust that there will be regular and timely updates. Of course this also
depends very much on the community, and the ease with which things can be
packaged, but it felt like app porting lost a bit of momentum.

Regarding the future of the project, are there any other potential avenues for
financing further development, other than buying Oasis hosting?

I very much want to see this project continued!

~~~
kentonv
I'd love to see the community using Bounty Source or the like to finance
projects, e.g. packaging particular apps.

For my part, I don't need any financial incentives -- I'll keep coding
regardless.

------
hobofan
So the paid offering of Oasis still exists and you are advertising it in the
end of the blog post.

It is not directly said in the post, but it sounds like you are trying to
still make it work in the long run by minimizing the team and going with the
slow organic growth that you have?

No criticism intended there, I personally think that would be great and in the
long run probably the most healthy way to make something so idealistically
grounded like Sandstorm work.

~~~
kentonv
Yes, exactly.

Oasis brings in enough revenue to cover Sandstorm's serving costs (for Oasis
itself, Sandcats, updates, etc.). Oasis is also very low-maintenance for us,
since Sandstorm in general is designed to be easy to maintain. So there's no
reason to shut it down.

Our other paid offering, Sandstorm for Work, brought in very little revenue,
so it made more sense to make it free to drive growth.

I do believe there's a future business in Sandstorm, perhaps centered around
the app market and supporting paid apps. I believe that as long as we keep
improving Sandstorm, a few years down the road we may be in a place to revive
the business. But mainly I want to keep working on it because, honestly, I
really enjoy it, especially now that I don't have to think about boring
business-y stuff. :)

~~~
e12e
I really hope this works out! I've yet to use Sandstorm in anger - but I
strongly believe the "correct" model for a project like this is offer paid
hosting managed by system experts (ie: you, the creators) - along with an easy
back-and-forth transition path from self-host to paid hosting and back.

Charging for ldap always felt a bit wrong to me - supporting open federated
standards is kind of a selling point of Sandstorm in the first place - leaving
it out felt like "demanding" payment rather than providing a tantalizing
service I'd want to pay for.

People point at wordpress - which are a successful business built on a rather
terrible code-base, along with a rather nasty walled garden with a half-open
gate (the theme ecosystem). A better model might be Ghost - they also offer
paid hosting, but doesn't draw such a hard line between self-host and "ghost
host" IMNHO. (I don't know how well Ghost works in terms of revenue, though).

Would you be able to share some number wrt. hosting costs and current
recurring revenue? How many paying users do you have, and how many more would
you need to pay for the size of team you'd like?

~~~
kentonv
On Oasis, we have 2132 monthly active users and 284 paying users accounting
for $2376 in monthly revenue -- although some of these users are still paying
from credit they received by supporting our Indiegogo campaign, so the
physical revenue number is lower (and isn't on my dashboard for some reason).

Our hosting costs from Google Cloud are confusing because currently we have
some startup credit (which will expire in about six months), and the way they
account for that in invoices is weird... But if I'm reading right, we spent
$1552 in January, before applying the credit. We also pay for $35 for
Cloudflare, $35 for G Suite, $25 for Github, $80 for Sendgrid, $50 for
Mailchimp, $50 for eShares, and probably some things I'm forgetting at the
moment. So, around $2000 monthly. We also pay an undisclosed but surprisingly
small amount for Sandcats.io TLS certificates which we pass on free to users.

To support any full-time developers we'd need Oasis paying users to increase
by at least 10x, so something like 2500. Yesterday was a very big news day for
us, which resulted in 6 new signups.

~~~
e12e
Thank you so much for taking the time, and writing such a candid reply.

Also:

> Yesterday was a very big news day for us, which resulted in 6 new signups.

Ouch. (otoh, a steady 2% daily growth is nothing to sneeze at - you'll be at
10x in 116 days!)

In all seriousness; best of luck. I think there should still be a bright
future for sandstorm - a few more rounds of polish, a bit of luck and pr and
sustainable growth should be very much in reach.

------
omouse
This is something that I would love to see happen with open source projects:

1\. company is created around the project 2\. other companies started using
the project and find it handy 3\. companies need maintenance and support:
consulting companies start opening up shop and serving them 4\. parent company
gets more customers because they're the first/official supporting company

This similiar to the Wordpress model I think and they're fairly successful,
they've got a whole ecosystem.

 _We have added the Sandstorm Technology Roadmap to the Sandstorm repo, where
you can learn about everything Sandstorm has built and plans to build._

Perfect, now another company can take a chance on raising VC funds for this or
bankrolling it themselves.

~~~
CiPHPerCoder
> This is something that I would love to see happen with open source projects:

That won't happen. But not for lack of trying!

My consulting company, Paragon Initiative Enterprises, has produced over a
dozen high quality open source projects that make it easier to write secure
PHP software.

For starters, we wrote an entire CMS that has secure automatic updates baked
into its core as a first-class feature (including for extension developers):
[https://paragonie.com/project/airship](https://paragonie.com/project/airship)

Worried about SQL injection? EasyDB makes it easy and intuitive to use
prepared statements.
[https://github.com/paragonie/easydb](https://github.com/paragonie/easydb)

Need Content-Security-Policy headers quickly and easily? You want CSP-Builder:
[https://paragonie.com/project/csp-builder](https://paragonie.com/project/csp-
builder)

Want all the security of libsodium with an even simpler interface and a
separate class for dealing with the filesystem? Check out Halite:
[https://paragonie.com/project/halite](https://paragonie.com/project/halite)

Want to stop CSRF (including replay attacks)?
[https://github.com/paragonie/anti-csrf](https://github.com/paragonie/anti-
csrf)

Want to quickly examine the differences between two PHP Archives (e.g. for
reproducible builds)?
[https://github.com/paragonie/pharaoh](https://github.com/paragonie/pharaoh)

We even wrote the community's accepted interface for generating
cryptographically secure random numbers in PHP 5 projects:
[https://github.com/paragonie/random_compat](https://github.com/paragonie/random_compat)

And coming soon (pending an audit), a pure-PHP implementation of libsodium
that will likely be adopted by WordPress so its automatic updates are Ed25519
secured:
[https://github.com/paragonie/sodium_compat](https://github.com/paragonie/sodium_compat)

And even more:
[https://paragonie.com/projects](https://paragonie.com/projects)

Guess how many clients we've gotten from all this open source software we
wrote over the past two years that demonstrably improves the security posture
of software written in PHP?

Zero.

My solution: Our next project isn't going to be OSS, and it's unlikely that
any of our future ones will be unless it's intended to be a giveaway.

The open source + consulting business model may sound good in theory, but it
simply doesn't work. (Though, I will grant that it's possible that the
"consulting about someone else's open source project" is more sustainable, due
to near-zero investment in said project itself.)

~~~
omouse
The reason I mentioned it is because it has worked for Wordpress, Drupal and
Magento in general. There's countless shops that build plugins and themes for
those and are hired for things ranging from small changes to full-scale
development.

I would love to see that happen with Sandstorm or other projects because maybe
the consulting model doesn't work for the parent company but I'm sure there's
hundreds of smaller consulting firms that would love to support it.

~~~
CiPHPerCoder
Generally if a whale ends up dead on a beach lots of parasites feast upon its
bloated corpse.

But that's not to say we need more beached whales.

------
shezi
Just this week, I was on the fence about whether I should get a hosted
environment of Sandstorm on the Basic level. Your sad tale of failing as a
business gave me the push I needed and I just subscribed.

Sorry to see it go this way, and sorry I couldn't help sooner.

~~~
kentonv
Thank you!

------
TeMPOraL
Sorry to see the business fail. I was recommending people to check out the
project since the day I learned about it here. I hope the development will
continue without problems though :).

A quick question, if I may: say I want to test Sandstorm, first on Oasis, but
then I want to migrate to self-hosting. Is there a way to move all the data I
stored on my Oasis instance to the self-hosted one?

~~~
kentonv
Yes. You can click the "download backup" button in the top bar when you have a
grain open to download a zip file of all its contents. You can then upload
that to any other server to restore the grain there.

Currently there is not a mass-download or mass-transfer feature; you have to
do each grain one at a time. But you probably won't generate that many grains
if you're just testing it out, so it ought to be OK. We plan to add mass-
transfer in the future.

See also: [https://github.com/sandstorm-
io/sandstorm/tree/master/roadma...](https://github.com/sandstorm-
io/sandstorm/tree/master/roadmap/platform/grains#backup)

~~~
TeMPOraL
Thanks!

------
mwcampbell
I think Sandstorm missed out on a potential business opportunity that I will
call, for lack of a better term, SaaS as a service.

Here's what I mean. Suppose I develop an application that fits nicely into
Sandstorm's grain-based model. But I don't want to give it away. And just as
important, I don't want my users to have to deal with this weird Sandstorm
thing. I want to sell the app as a SaaS subscription, like so many other web
applications that people are used to. Yet, I don't want to deal with recurring
billing, hosting my users' data, 24/7 availability, etc.

So I develop my product as a Sandstorm app, then pay Sandstorm to host it
under my own domain, with Sandstorm being invisible to the user. As far as the
user is concerned, it's a SaaS product that I'm providing, like any other SaaS
product. But I don't have to implement recurring billing, back up users' data,
worry about availability or security, etc.

Does this make sense to anyone else?

~~~
simplehuman
I think you are talking about developing a market place. Very different ball
game than sandstorm.

~~~
eitland
IMO closely related though.

I wanted something like this: crowdfunding of apps, preferably open source.

But while I though it could fit well in on top of sandstorm I understand it
would be hard to pull of in a balanced way.

------
koolba
Regarding open sourcing previously paywalled features:

> We no longer have a business model to protect, so the code can now be set
> free.

I'm pretty sure this is a big decider in whether a company open sources a
piece of software.

~~~
kentonv
Technically our "paywalled" features in Sandstorm for Work were actually open
source all along. The paywall existed in official builds but you could easily
remove it in a custom build.

The line you quote is actually with regards to Blackrock, which is our scale-
out technology, which we never got around to selling (except indirectly by
using it to run Oasis).

------
ocdtrekkie
I am always a little nervous when the status of a project I rely on changes,
but I'm pretty confident Sandstorm.io as a platform is still just beginning.

~~~
eitland
Seems they have - at least for now - given up the commercial project.

I would have loved it if they were successful and made a small fortune so as
to encourage more innovative in this niche.

That said, seems they are once again proving what they are made of and making
everything available as open source.

~~~
kentonv
I indeed wanted Sandstorm to succeed as a business in order to support
Sandstorm's development -- but to me the business was always a vehicle rather
than the end goal. For now, the business hasn't worked. I'm actually somewhat
relieved, as I've always felt more comfortable building pure-open-source
projects rather than business-driven ones. The contortions we went through to
try to get revenue felt very unnatural to me.

~~~
rmason
Have you considered using [https://www.patreon.com/](https://www.patreon.com/)
? If there's enough interest among the people using it maybe you could pay for
one full time developer. I know of multiple projects where this has happened
like Vue.js and Hapi.js.

~~~
kentonv
It's unlikely that we'd collect enough money to pay a developer in the near
term. Developers are expensive. But if people want to contribute financially
to the project, the easiest way is to sign up for Oasis. This avoids the 5%
fee that Patreon charges.

------
notheguyouthink
How simple is Sandstorm to run? I want to use something like sandstorm, but i
want _stupidly_ simple deployments, even if at the cost of features. Eg, my
killer "sandstorm" like feature would be a single binary, or perhaps 1 binary
per service type, that i run with no auth, not exposed to public, a single
backup dir, no config, etc.

I want low maintenance from the user side. How much does Sandstorm fit this?

Also, as a side note i feel quite sad for Sandstorm. It's a difficult concept
to monetize even if for continued development. Ie, even if i can be convinced
that this will be "easy enough" to use, i'd be hard pressed to pay for a
service.. i want to keep it on my network, that's the point to me. I'd have to
donate, i suppose. Which is unfortunate.

Perhaps they could offer an encrypted backup solution? Eg, i want to self
host, but they could easily store an encrypted and versioned backup of my
entire sandstorm db? I'd pay for that! I'm doing that from someone anyway, why
not sandstorm.io?

~~~
kentonv
> How simple is Sandstorm to run?

Extremely so. Installation is via an interactive process (no config files) and
optionally automatically provisions DNS and TLS certificates for you (if you
choose a hostname under sandcats.io). Once installed, Sandstorm auto-updates
without any intervention. Apps are installed as easily as installing apps on
your phone, and also auto-update. The system is intended to be feasible for
non-technical people to manage.

I suggest trying it out. :)
[https://sandstorm.io/install](https://sandstorm.io/install)

~~~
notheguyouthink
Do you have any plans to monetize users like me? Eg, i want to run it at home
behind a firewall. I'd love to purchase _something_ , but not at the cost of
privacy/etc.

How do i fit in your long term goals?

~~~
kentonv
Well, we had a product called "Sandstorm for Work" which was self-hosted and
which people could pay for, and a lot of people said they'd love to pay for
it, but very few people ever did. :/ So now we've removed the paywall and the
Sandstorm for Work premium features are available in all self-hosted Sandstorm
servers for free.

If you'd like to help the project monetarily, you can sign up for an Oasis
account, even if you intend to primarily use Sandstorm self-hosted.

That said, at present, we've stopped worrying about monetization and are only
worried about making the platform better and getting more users. Simply
installing a server and using it helps us! The more users we have, the more
interest there will be from developers, and vice-versa.

~~~
notheguyouthink
Sounds good, really appreciate your time on this! I'll give this a try this
weekend :)

------
redindian75
I tested Sandstorm just last week, the technology maybe cutting edge but sadly
the UI design /UX was from the the 90s. The various apps did not gel with
either sandstorm frame or other apps at all (conceptually, not technically),
almost as if they are iframed and glued together.

Hope the team spends time and polish the presentation layer.

~~~
kentonv
One thing we want to do to improve the UI is to remove the current black
topbar and replace it with a top bar that melds better with the app. Most web
apps these days have a colored topbar that contains a name, logo, document
title, share button, account settings button, etc. In Sandstorm you see a lot
of apps still having such a topbar of their own, but then the Sandstorm topbar
lives above it, and half of the usual topbar functionality actually ends up in
the Sandstorm top bar, confusing people.

In order for Sandstorm to defend against app security vulnerabilities, we
can't simply let the app handle its own access control, so we do need a place
to hang this trusted UI.

What I'd like to do is have Sandstorm render a modern-style colored top bar
with all the usual elements an app would put in it -- with the ability for the
app to customize the color and contents to some degree. This top bar would
feel like part of the app, but would be trusted, so we could put access
control and account settings there, etc.

------
Nadya
I'm glad to hear the plan is to continue the dream. When I first heard about
Sandstorm I thought it was a _fantastic_ concept. Unfortunately it wasn't
user-friendly enough and I walked away.

I'd always peak at updates whenever the name popped up but I was waiting for
it to be more user-friendly. Outside of what sounds to be a lack of a
sales/marketing team - the UX/UI is what prevented me from forking over cash.

I hope it works well enough to try and bounce back for a round 2. Best of
luck.

------
api
I'd love to see a meta-analysis of OSS-oriented companies that have succeeded
vs. those that have failed and what they did.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
The best thing, IMHO, is that pretty much every OSS-oriented company that has
"failed" has left behind valuable work for the community. And non-OSS-oriented
companies that failed largely have not.

------
simplehuman
So the business has failed but the managed hosting is still available? What
does that mean? Who keeps it running?

~~~
kentonv
I do. (With help from some trusted people if I'm unavailable.)

Oasis pays for itself and Sandstorm is intentionally designed to be low-
maintenance (for the benefit of self-hosters), so keeping it going is actually
not very hard. We don't foresee any need to shut down any of Sandstorm's
services.

~~~
simplehuman
Thanks for clarifying. So you are going to run Oasis full time all by yourself
? Would be great to put this as part of your post since it's not clear how
much one can depend on Oasis.

~~~
kentonv
I will handle most of it, but there will be fallbacks when I'm not available.

FWIW, Oasis takes only a few minutes of work per week to operate...

~~~
eitland
_FWIW, Oasis takes only a few minutes of work per week to operate..._

Well, today I learned. A bit humbling I guess as someone who typically use
more hours to support smaller infrastructure:-]

------
notheguyouthink
As an aside, how easy is it to create your own apps for Sandstorm?

 _edit_ : Found this, [https://docs.sandstorm.io/en/latest/vagrant-
spk/packaging-tu...](https://docs.sandstorm.io/en/latest/vagrant-
spk/packaging-tutorial/)

------
dyu-
Saw this coming :-/ I anticipated this one after app.net shut down. Next one
up, cozy.io?

------
mempko
If only sandstorm sold a box with it pre-installed. Kind if like a Pogo plug.

~~~
skinnymuch
Pogoplug did stop selling their hardware years ago. So it probably wasn't
working out either :/

------
ben_says
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HQaBWziYvY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HQaBWziYvY)
I can't help it...

