Sandstorm – An open source platform for personal servers

Things like Sandstorm are really important as they allow people options without becoming a full-blown sysadmin. Just look at how many crowd funding ideas are based on 'personal cloud' concepts. However, we also need to work on the fundamental problems to make it easier to build decentralised products in the first place (not everything is a web-app). Namely, how such apps are built, how they store/sync data, and how we deal with identity. The current tools simply aren't designed for…

Sandstorm was (is?) way ahead of its time. Fortunately a lot of its ideas live on (a la capnproto). My understanding is the achilles heel is the amount of effort required to integrate and update apps, since each app needs to be rather invasively modified to work with the centralized authorization framework. Also the general difficulty of managing a VPS or port forwarding. But once integrated it's really slick and secure. The overall UX is very similar to my vision…

For massive take-off, Sandstorm is almost-there with making everyone's online world de-centralized. It's solved half of the problem beautifully -- it's very easy, once setup, to launch any new app on your server. The other half of the problem is moving of server/data. Right now, either you use their self hosted instance of sandstorm, or setup your own server. There's the hassle of keeping track of data/server. There's pseudo-centralization happening here, given the difficulty of changing compute or storage by…

There's the traditional webmin-like console where you can install "apps", all NAS have something like that but it requires that all apps are trusted to be secure. This looks like a model that would go beyond that and provide a sandbox with capability-sharing mechanism.