Filemap

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fiatjaf December 28, 2017

filemap solves the problem of sending and receiving files to and from non-tech people when you don't have a text communication channel with them.

xkcd file transfer comic

Imagine you want to send files to your grandfather, or you don't use Facebook and your younger cousin who only uses Facebook and doesn't know what is email wants to send you some pictures, it's pretty hard to get a file-sharing channel between people if they're not in the same network. If even the people have a way to upload the files to some hosting service and then share the link everything would still work, but you're not going to write somehostingservice.com/wHr4y7vFGh0 to your grandfather -- or expect your cousin to do that for you and send you an SMS with dozens of those links.

Solution:


Initially this used ipfs-dropzone, but IPFS is broken, os I migrated to WebTorrent, but that required the file sender to be online hosting its own file and the entire idea of this service was to make something easy, so I migrated to Firebase Hosting, which is also terrible and has a broken API, but at least is capable of hosting files. Should have used something like S3.