new project #
Over the last 15 years I’ve been on an active mission to get completely away from Google. I moved all services off fairly quickly, but there were a couple I just couldn’t find great alternatives for.
One of them was Google Drive. Although there are decent paid alternatives, and several self-hosted, opensource, options, none really quite offered all of the features I wanted. I ran Nextcloud for several years, but got tired of maintaining the whole suite for just a single feature. Private sharing and cheap storage were top requirements that several paid services offered, but there were several other features none offered; file versioning, specific retention times, diff delta uploads and file mapping, walled gardens with fine grained access, invite only access, and very specifically, no public sharing.
you say potato #
Hey, what’s this? I build software, why not just make exactly what I want?!
<several weeks later>
Introducing potatopotato. A fast, private, invite-only way to share very large files quickly and securely.
I say potato #
Potatopotato stores to an s3 compatible service (not AWS, because fuck Jeff Bezos [0]), encrypts in transit and at rest, uploads and stores just the diff delta for each version of the file so storage costs stay low, and chunks the file upload so it’s WAY faster that Google Drive.
Users can share sets of files called “gardens”, which have fine grain control over the rights you allow per user. Users with edit permissions in gardens can upload new versions, and if the owner deletes a version containing your edit, the copy you uploaded is moved to your garden so nothing is lost.
how can I use it? #
Well, you can’t. I built this to share stuff with my friends, and I’m not entirely sure I want to open it up to John and Jane Q Public. Maybe [1].
[0] eat the fucking rich. Seriously, just fucking pay taxes, asshole.
[1] I have a full time job and several hobby projects that keep me busy, let alone time with my wife and dogs which I don’t want to spend in front of my computer. If magically, without any advertising or marketing, word were to get out about how amazing this project is, and there were a chunk of users throwing money at me, sure maybe. But until then, no. I SAID NO, GEEZ!