Computer networking has been around for a bit. And yet, it is still super annoying to send files from one device to another. Don’t get me wrong. If you’re in one software ecosystem it is made somewhat easy. Take Apple’s Airdrop for example, which does some magic to send files using a temporary WIFI network that is just set up automagically. But because we can’t have nice things this is not an open standard but just proprietary Apple software. There are some reimplementations, but this kinda looses the “automagic” portion of the whole ordeal.
One software I really enjoy using is KDE Connect. Using its iOS client I can easily transfer stuff from my phone to my desktop. However, it doesn’t really seem to work the other way around. Don’t know why and honestly I’ve never taken the time to really investigate that.
And even then. Trying to just ad-hoc send something to someone without first setting up some software would be really nice. Sure you could use a middleman like a cloud service, but… The privacy minded person in me just doesn’t fancy involving a third party and potentially sending my data into another jurisdiction just to get it from one device in the same room to another.
Still, the third party route is the easiest of the bunch. You don’t need to
worry about any peer-to-peer networking headaches and browser based tools mean
no installation. So I used this small annoyance to dust off my Go-fu and write
a small little self hosted thing. I call it drop.janw.name and I bet you
can’t guess where I host my instance of it. It is super minimalistic I give it
that. There is no multi-user functionality planned. Uploading files is
protected via a username/password combo. Files are stored for 24 hours (and
currently they only live in memory). They are addressed using a random 8
character token and can either be public or private. If they are private, the
username/password combo is required to download them. Also it displays a QR
code to the download once the upload is finished. So if you want to send a file
to some device with a camera is super helpful.
I’ve used this countless times by now and just wanted to share that. I don’t plan on adding any more features unless I feel a need for them myself. Btw. this mindset is SO FREEING if you build stuff for yourself. Just build what you need, don’t jump into the treadmill of adding stuff just for the sake of adding stuff.