At one point in his demo, he uploads a file but terminates the upload more or less halfway. Then he begins downloading the file - which only progresses to the point it had been uploaded, and subsequently stalls indefinitely. And, finally, he finishes uploading the file (which gracefully resumes) and the file download (which is still running) seamlessly completes.
I recall we had special apps to queue and schedule our downloads, and resume them where servers supported it. They were a dream compared to the boredom of staring at progress bars.
I remember redownloading Liero over and over again and failing. And then cherishing it once getting a successful download. It would barely fail to fit into a floppy.
bittorrent needs to know the complete file at the beginning to make the pieces. This tool doesn't need to know the complete file to start the upload, nor the download...
Copyparty is an amazing piece of software. I recommend watching the recent YouTube video for an overview[0]. The developer is a personal friend and my household is proud to own one of 20 limited edition copyparty disc releases.
The video BGM was quite familiar to me, as popularized by a certain former detective. (Those who don't assign that any special significance may nonetheless find it as royalty-free music from Dova-Syndrome: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKg-aXVS1YI)
This is the wet dream of every power-user. It has tons of features on top of the file server.
And it also seems developed by a 10x (100x?) developer, I mean, just making/editing the video is a work of art and humor.
If the author is lurking here, are you doing all by yourself? Do you use any LLM/agent?
Yup, this is 97% just me hacking away in vscode -- I use pylance and the debugger but have everything else disabled, easier to focus that way. The only time I use any sort of AI/LLM is for translating new strings into Chinese, since it seems decently capable at that :-)
The remaining 2% is friends coming up with new usecases/features, and sometimes finding bugs.
But now that the project got way more attention than I'd anticipated, pullrequests have started appearing, so it doesn't look like those statistics will stay true for much longer! Really cool having more eyes on it spotting the things I overlooked, really enjoying that.
The only thing I'd like is some way to run it behind a cgnat. I was on starlink and I'm on an 5g device now.
If there was a way to integrate with Google drive mega Dropbox, githubs etc where I could drop a file list request document one of those services, and your server is pinging that (intermediate) storage service, detects the file listing request or file push request, or file upload request doc, and then does it.
I know each of those is an integration headache but man that would be useful.
Ok so GitHub has a built in markdown editor, so the request docs could be markdown templates. Or maybe static html/js files that generate markdown request docs, and file listing responses can be markdown or more static html docs.
> seafile … and nextcloud … their license is problematic
There’s nothing problematic about the AGPL, really. It protects users. It protects developers against someone taking over their projects. The only people it bothers are those who wish to take a free software project and integrate with an unfree one. That seems like a feature to me!
Wow that nasty. I didn't click on the links because I thought it was one of these weird licences that pretend to be open source but are actually sketchy, but it's actually the very normal and very open source AGPL.
It's a huge feature. It won't prevent forks but it will stop corporations from making proprietary enhancements for SaaS. They have to publish the source code.
I even emailed Stallman about it. The only way to make a proprietary version of an AGPLv3 project is to pay the original copyright holders for a special proprietary licensing deal, thereby supporting its development. Forks don't have the same privilege.
In addition to being an awesome piece of software, their self hosted demo server is the fastest web app I have seen in a long time ... and this is while trending on HN !
Amazing.
Now I am wondering, would it be technically possible to build a similar app but based on the syncthing protocol?
I really like syncthing but it would be cool to have a version where you could just easily share specific files with peers.
Ohh that would be cool! Love syncthing but I wish the relay and discovery servers would be part of the same/main syncthing binary.
I've also seen quite a few semi-technical youtubers make videos about it but not mentioning that it uses public relay and discovery servers usually by default (but maybe that depends on the distro). It's not a bad thing but something one should know before using it.
I thought I was going to be rick-rolled, but the video is actually very good, and if the functionality is as described, well then hats off to the creator of copy party. Fantastic work!
Heh... I have one... have always wanted to make a little solar-powered "library" on my front-lawn...
(You know, like the neighbourhood "take-a-book, leave-a-book" little libraries, except for... digital content... It would fly an appropriate "skull + crossbones" flag...)
I've wanted to do something like this, but I live within WiFi range of a school and am concerned someone would put something "harmful" on there so have never done so.
I created a PirateBox on a little GliNet router a while back with the intention of sharing public domain content but didn't do so beyond having a quick play around with it myself.
And like most things nowadays, it would get filled with highly illegal content within hours of you putting it there. The good old (innocent) days are gone and the society we’re living is not mature/educated enough for such ideas.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding something, but wouldn't this work great (albeit huge overkill) for the extremely common problem of trying to get files from one device to another (especially when one of those devices is a phone)? I see tools that are supposed to do that posted to HN all the time, with the comments usually pointing out one or another problem with any given utility. This seems like it would be pretty great self hosted, open source, solution to that problem?
I have been having a lot of luck with Blip[0] recently regarding phone <-> laptop file transfer. My biggest issue so far is that it does support iOS, Android, MacOS, Windows ... but not Linux.
Termux and python -m http.server. I use that embarrassingly often, except for cases where I can just use scp or rsync (e.g. between two Android devices that both have Termux installed and I have bothered to copy the public ssh key from one to the other).
Readit News
At one point in his demo, he uploads a file but terminates the upload more or less halfway. Then he begins downloading the file - which only progresses to the point it had been uploaded, and subsequently stalls indefinitely. And, finally, he finishes uploading the file (which gracefully resumes) and the file download (which is still running) seamlessly completes.
I found that particularly impressive.
That’s really cool. I’ve never seen that work before.
IIRC webtorrent /can/ do streaming though....
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15_-hgsX2V0
This is underselling it by at least three orders of magnitude. This is astonishing tool, you have to watch the demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15_-hgsX2V0
If the author is lurking here, are you doing all by yourself? Do you use any LLM/agent?
It really is impressive.
Yup, this is 97% just me hacking away in vscode -- I use pylance and the debugger but have everything else disabled, easier to focus that way. The only time I use any sort of AI/LLM is for translating new strings into Chinese, since it seems decently capable at that :-)
The remaining 2% is friends coming up with new usecases/features, and sometimes finding bugs.
But now that the project got way more attention than I'd anticipated, pullrequests have started appearing, so it doesn't look like those statistics will stay true for much longer! Really cool having more eyes on it spotting the things I overlooked, really enjoying that.
I noticed this which brought a SMB question to mind:
>login doesn't work on winxp, but anonymous access is ok -- remove all accounts from copyparty config for that to work
>win10 onwards does not allow connecting anonymously / without accounts
Is this an intentional limitation in copyparty itself, or maybe just the progressive difference in Windows versions?
The only thing I'd like is some way to run it behind a cgnat. I was on starlink and I'm on an 5g device now.
If there was a way to integrate with Google drive mega Dropbox, githubs etc where I could drop a file list request document one of those services, and your server is pinging that (intermediate) storage service, detects the file listing request or file push request, or file upload request doc, and then does it.
I know each of those is an integration headache but man that would be useful.
Ok so GitHub has a built in markdown editor, so the request docs could be markdown templates. Or maybe static html/js files that generate markdown request docs, and file listing responses can be markdown or more static html docs.
Were you a part of the efnet ansi/ascii scene?
There's still some of us floating around!
Great project btw, nice work!
> seafile … and nextcloud … their license is problematic
There’s nothing problematic about the AGPL, really. It protects users. It protects developers against someone taking over their projects. The only people it bothers are those who wish to take a free software project and integrate with an unfree one. That seems like a feature to me!
I even emailed Stallman about it. The only way to make a proprietary version of an AGPLv3 project is to pay the original copyright holders for a special proprietary licensing deal, thereby supporting its development. Forks don't have the same privilege.
Amazing.
Now I am wondering, would it be technically possible to build a similar app but based on the syncthing protocol?
I really like syncthing but it would be cool to have a version where you could just easily share specific files with peers.
I've also seen quite a few semi-technical youtubers make videos about it but not mentioning that it uses public relay and discovery servers usually by default (but maybe that depends on the distro). It's not a bad thing but something one should know before using it.
Never mine, it's back now.
[keeps watching video] what the fuck
By the way, the youtube video showcases this project really well.
(You know, like the neighbourhood "take-a-book, leave-a-book" little libraries, except for... digital content... It would fly an appropriate "skull + crossbones" flag...)
I created a PirateBox on a little GliNet router a while back with the intention of sharing public domain content but didn't do so beyond having a quick play around with it myself.
[0]https://blip.net/