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0 pointsskinkestek1y ago0 comments

Perkeep has (at least until last I checked it) the very interesting property of being completely impossible for me to make heads or tails of while also looking extremely interesting and useful.

So in the hope of triggering someone to give me the missing link (maybe even a hyperlink) for me to understand it, here is a the situation:

I'm a SW dev that also have done a lot of sysadmin work. Yes, I have managed to install it. And that is about it. There seems to be so many features there but I really really don't understand how I am supposed to use the product or the documentation for that matter.

I could start an import of Twitter or something else an it kind of shows up. Same with anything else: photos etc.

It clearly does something but it was impossible to understand what I am supposed to do next, both from the ui and also from the docs.

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4 comments · 4 top-level

breakingcups1y ago

Perkeep is such a cool, interesting concept, but it seems like it's on life-support.

If I'm not mistaken, it used to be funded by creator Brad Fitz, who could afford to hire a full-time developer on his Google salary, but that time has sadly passed.

It suffers from having so many cool use-cases that it struggles to find a balance in presentation.

mdaniel1y ago

I was curious to see if I could help, and I wondered if you saw their mailing list? It seems to have some folks complaining about things they wish it did, which strangely enough is often a good indication of what it currently does

There's also "Show Parkeep"-ish posts like this one <https://groups.google.com/g/perkeep/c/mHoUUcBz2Yw> where the user made their own Pocket implementation complete with original page snapshotting

The thing that most stood out to me was the number of folks who wanted to use Parkeep to manage its own content AND serve as the metadata system of record for external content (think: an existing MP3 library owned by an inflexible media player such as iTunes). So between that and your "import Twitter" comment, it seems one of its current hurdles is that the use case one might have for a system like this needs to be "all in" otherwise it becomes the same problem as a removable USB drive for storing stuff: "oh, damn, is that on my computer or on the external drive?"

tgulacsi1y ago

Beside personal photo store, I use the storage part for file store at work (basically, indexing is off), with a simplifying wrapper for upload/download: github.com/tgulacsi/camproxy

With the adaptive block hashing (varying block sizes), it beats gzip for compression.

lockyc1y ago

I agree 100%

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