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0 pointstesternews3y ago0 comments

“Was”, what’s left of sandstorm anymore besides a couple weekender coders whose $dayjob is at cloudflare these days? Doubt CF has anything like 10%/20% time like GOOG.

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

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kentonv3y ago· 2 in thread

FWIW, the most-active Sandstorm developers over the past couple of years, such as zenhack (to whom you replied) and ocdtrekkie, are not Cloudflare employees, and never were. (They were never Sandstorm employees either.)

For my part, I am indeed mostly focused on Cloudflare Workers today and don't have much leftover energy to spend on Sandstorm. This has nothing to do with Cloudflare telling me how to spend my time. I make my own choices. I still love what we were building with Sandstorm, but what can I say, Workers has been a lot more successful and so I am drawn to focus my energy there.

Note that Cloudflare has no affiliation with Sandstorm, other than employing some of the former team members. Cloudflare did not acquire Sandstorm itself.

cxr3y ago

One problem with Sandstorm is that it didn't have something like miniflare. (Cloudflare didn't either until recently, and that's fixed now, but the value prop was high enough otherwise that this wasn't fatal.)

Another is that it lacked (and still does, from what I can see) a killer app. It had the perfect conditions last year with the Twitter acquisition, but to my knowledge didn't seize upon it. (Likewise, Cloudflare had a similar opportunity, but the Wildebeest project comes off as a celebration of Cloudflare's infrastructure for the sake of it and/or aimed at those who love devops stack complexity, generally—a fairly tonedeaf response to what would drive someone to want to run their own fediverse node that's not backed by Mastodon.)

The weird URLs—or rather: the constraints that led to them, and the downstream consequences to UX—didn't help.

ocdtrekkie3y ago

This comment confuses me: Sandstorm itself is entirely local, and the vagrant-spk dev tool assembles local Sandstorm dev instances in virtual environments with three commands. I'm not sure what "thing like miniflare" we are missing!

As far as the killer app, Sandstorm has some really awesome Sandstorm-only apps, but probably not enough yet for our "exclusives" to be a draw to the platform on their own. Sandstorm currently has some limitations that make it difficult to use in federated environments, and we are working on it, but yeah, it meant we didn't have a fantastic story for social during all this Elon stuff.

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