The funny thing to me about this is that Trifecta is still less lean than the minimal “image sharing site”: copy the images to a web root (for drag and drop, use Samba, NFS or your favorite remote mounting protocol over an internal network). Have a minimally-configured web server serve the image (perhaps with some html generator to make an actual page).
A while back, I wanted to host a pastebin for sharing bits of code and other text. Then I realized that about 10 lines of (compile-time) elisp gave me everything I needed to turn any webserver I could ssh to into a pastebin with no runtime dependencies aside from nginx:
https://fwoar.co/pastebin/3daaf7ce49ca221702c70b0d10ac5caec8...
I don't disagree, but few non-techies will be able to download an image off of an FTP server or mount an NFS share. Thats where such a service adds value.
I know my perspective is really skewed, but don't filezilla and the like make ~FTP easy enough? Or failing that, even Windows must have the hooks to (implement an add-on to) mount SFTP and treat it like a thumb drive? Why is it harder to use FTP/SFTP than a fancy web frontend?
Because a lot of people nowadays just use a browser. That’s 99% of what a computer is to them.
“What’s a filezilla?”
“go here, drop files there” instead of “download this, put this here, connect, drop your files here” makes the difference between people using your service and not using your service.
> Because a lot of people nowadays just use a browser. That’s 99% of what a computer is to them.
Doesn't mean they could not learn that it is not. I think that developers underestimating users is a problem. "They are too dumb to run a desktop app, so let's put everything in the browser" is a weak argument to me.
This is less true of software like the one mentioned in the article that are intended to be self-hosted, though: I have to walk my users through using it anyways and so I can show them FileZilla or install a SFTP filesystem on their computer or setup syncthing/dropbox for them to handle uploads. There’s lots of ways to avoid exposing a custom file upload service for this sort of thing.
A while back, I wanted to host a pastebin for sharing bits of code and other text. Then I realized that about 10 lines of (compile-time) elisp gave me everything I needed to turn any webserver I could ssh to into a pastebin with no runtime dependencies aside from nginx: https://fwoar.co/pastebin/3daaf7ce49ca221702c70b0d10ac5caec8...