The overall UX is very similar to my vision of the future of selfhosting. It should be as easy as installing an app on your phone, then going through a quick OAuth2 flow to set up a tunnel on a domain, and you're up and running.
I don't think app packaging could be said to be the achilles heel -- how much work it involves depends a lot on the app (some things are very easy, others can be painful), but it is certainly not the case that Sandstorm didn't take off because packaging was too hard.
Sandstorm the business was shut down 6 years ago https://sandstorm.io/news/2017-02-06-sandstorm-returning-to-...
And Sandstorm Oasis the hosting service was shut down almost 4 years ago https://sandstorm.io/news/2019-09-15-shutting-down-oasis
This codebase is basically abandonware at this point and can’t be trusted for anything serious these days. If CF brought this on as an official product (and renamed it), it would go a long ways to build back trust
Security can just be a OTP: https://github.com/tinspin/rupy/blob/master/src/se/rupy/http...
But if you built your entire application assuming you're shipping it via Docker, untangling the sheer amount of redundant garbage you need to pare down to a single-document app that accepts outside authentication and security, ends up being a ton of work to package and then maintain it long-term.
Ideally, I think having apps not made for Sandstorm originally is mostly just a strategy to get enough people operating on Sandstorm's model for people to build Sandstorm-specific apps in earnest.
But yeah, Sandstorm has been in a state of "not dead but not moving fast" basically since the company went under; things picked up a bit in 2020, and I got oriented-enough on the codebase during that time to keep it floating along, but, per the post, it's never been easy going.
Anyway, I wish I were answering this question in 6 months time, when I'll be able to show off a variation of Tempest that is relatively usable and can do a few tricks that Sandstorm can't.
Are there primary areas in which contributions would be most valuable, especially from those without Golang experience/skills?
Once umbrel is setup apps are are just as easy to update and install as an iPhone. I also appreciate how it has a dependency system so apps can build on one another. Umbrel is more for personal homelab rather than sharing with friends, there is no public endpoint you would want on the clearnet, you need to VPN in, but that also makes it more secure.
Fancy website hints on prevalence of form over substance, although perhaps it's just me. People who are concerned about privacy and big corporations don't need fancy rotating boxes, rather clear and concise explanation of the matter.
Just my 2 cents
I've done plenty of manual self-hosting. I explored sandstorm for a year or two in the mid 2010s. It worked as promised, but the complexity of integrations, fraying, showed.
I switched to yunohost 6 years ago. I almost entirely don't think about it. I use a few services, wallabag and Uptime Kuma. Tried Nextcloud, HedgeDoc /HackMD/CodiMD, and Monica PRM because it was so painless to give them a go.
My initial motivation for exploring it, came from the hope it could install NextCloud. My attempts at installing OpenCloud and NextCloud, with scripts that would make non-idempotent changes that fail on a second run after first pass fixes, left me sensing an unfriendly forced upsell environment.
I have had to do some manual fixing to complete an upgrade or two, but it has workflows for backups, and some stringent, but fully automated configuration, sanity checking. I don't worry about the complexity.
Every app is run by a special user created to do just that. This app user only has permissions for the app and data folder.
(I don’t have much security/hardening experience)
I'm wondering if taking something like Fedora CoreOS/IoT, Cockpit, linuxserver.io images & develop a nice GUI & documentation on top wouldn't have much greater chance to succeed. People who will try to self host & will most likely stick to it are already familiar with tech & willing to tinker anyway.
Engineers and QA/useability/marketing people tend not to mingle in these projects. I am broken record at this point, but Blender and Godot tackled this problem.
Take sandstorm, it looks like a informative website but just looking at it I see a ton of friction installing it. Whether or not that is true, but the optics are against it.
The only way to make Sandstorm easier to set up would be to partner with hosting providers to offer one-click installers. In the absence of that, Sandstorm's current install is about as easy as it could possibly be given the constraint of "should run on a generic Linux host".
(Aside: People have always given Linux flak for being hard to install. But have you ever tried to install Windows from scratch? It's sooooo much harder. But no one cares because it's preinstalled on every PC you buy.)
(Aside 2: How did Chrome become the most popular browser? Sure as hell not because it's so easy for people to install. Most people don't know what a browser is. It got there by Google paying a lot of people to bundle it. It's honestly amazing that Google pulled it off, against competitors who owned their respective operating systems.)
Anyway, back in the day, Sandstorm actually offered its own hosting service, which you didn't need to be technical to sign up for. So it was actually quite easy then. But it was a first-party service. In retrospect I think building the first-party service was a mistake. It distracted too much engineering time away from actually building out the platform and ecosystem. It meant we could offer a better price point than a VPS provider would, but I think the people actually interested in the product at that point weren't so price-conscious. If I did it again I'd focus on partnerships.
But it's such a good system, I wish we could use it.
Hosted services will always offer more convenience. If the price is fair, they are likely better options in general.
Have you considered or tried nextcloud?
It’s also open source, so you can choose to host Sandstorm yourself, instead of using their service.
You didn’t ask what Sandstorm is, so I’m assuming you already understand what it is.
Similiar and a little bit more mature is also YunoHost, https://yunohost.org/, or for professional environments, UCS https://www.univention.com/.
My personal favorite is Cloudron, as they have an app concept that only needs minimal human maintenance. And you could even combine it with an LDAP server like ucs for the user management.
Sandstorm is for users/admins to deploy many apps together.
I was considering Mattermost over Rocket Chat, but it’s not currently supported/listed.
Is this a remote server where you can install and use web apps from third parties?
Or can you actually build a web app there so that users can employ it? Something similar to Digital Ocean.
The installation is a few simple CLI steps. From there everything is in the browser, including the admin. Each user, once logged in, can install whatever apps they want from the app store. Or they can upload their own if they want. This is safe because everything is containerized. Apps have to be specially designed (or retrofitted) for Sandstorm, though.
Also how does sandstorm makes money then ?
It doesn't. It is an open source project. Originally Sandstorm was offered by a startup, but they stopped [0] in 2017. You can make donations though [1].
[0] https://sandstorm.io/news/2017-02-06-sandstorm-returning-to-...
[1] https://sandstorm.io/news/2021-06-17-sandstorm-community-fun...
There's been attempts to do this without the opinions e.g deploy docker containers but the reality is we do actually need a cohesive vision for the end user for anything like this to take off. Catering to the developers alone in the self hosted model is very hard. And I know Kenton tried hosting too. It's just a tough business all around.
App Examples - github.com/peergos/example-apps
API Docs - book.peergos.org/features/apps.html
Disclaimer: I work on the project.
The idea of applications has been stale for a long time, it just takes a long time for people to get there.
Microsoft doesn't want it to happen quickly because they like selling Office as a package, but they're slowing decomposing it. OLE was a micro step, now with a cloud graph model and AI they're going much deeper.
Ultimately, your "table" can be generated from data in a "spreadsheet" or "database." And your AI can interact with this data precisely. At a certain level, you really shouldn't need to care where something was generated or viewed. It's data. But the more strongly it's "typed," the more accurate everything becomes.
Yes there's some hype over AI, but it is just incredibly useful, even the most basic and stumbling step of importing your documentation to an app or browser based AI to answer questions. Anything that doesn't include it as a first class consideration is last epoch, in the same category as Visicalc, 1979. Unfortunately, that includes the vast majority of Open Source. KDE was way ahead of this, but they stumbled. I hope they can catch up. Local, Open Source AI needs to leap ahead or computing is going to collapse.
So the first step is to give all the data a schema, ideally a domain-relative one so it's interoperable. See Linked Data.
The space of Linux distros specifically for self-hosting data has always been a little fragmented, which is a shame since it's really useful for the intended audience. A bit like Linux distros in general, perhaps.
Maybe if one of the bigger distributions, like Debian or Fedora, got behind one system it would improve. But that's also how we ended up with Flatpak and Snap, so it could be either way really.
In the end, I find the LAMP stack the best for self-hosting, especially with an interface like cPanel. You can simply upload files and the app works (PHP), you can view the databases (PHPMyAdmin), most hosting companies support it, there are many apps built on it.
Do you just run Docker or do you combine it with Docker Compose?
Do you instead opt for Proxmox in combination with Podman?
Maybe you opt for something simpler like this tool; Sandstorm.
Or even more complex of a setup with a K8 cluster with combined with Gitops.
It is interesting and a lot of really good tools to chose from but it is not obvious to me.
