There’s a lot of room for improvement in file sync and share, and the open source community is in the ideal position to add the killer features we’re all waiting for.
The file sync and share movement started over a decade ago, led by the likes of Dropbox, Google Drive, and others, and became popular very fast. The killer feature was having all your files available on all your devices. No more forgetting to bring that important document to a meeting, emailing files, or handling multiple USB sticks. Files were always there when you needed them! That its growth happened with the start of the smartphone age made file sync and share even more useful.
But its popularity wasn’t just about having access to your own files on all your devices: it also made sharing easier, enabling a new level of working together. No longer emailing documents, no longer being unsure whether your colleague’s feedback came on the latest version of your draft, no longer fixing errors that were already fixed.
Very quickly, open source projects emerged that provided the same functionality as commercial products but allowed users to host their own instance. Unlike Dropbox and the like, where you had to give up control over your files in order to sync and share them, open source made it possible to host the server yourself. Home, business, and government institutions started to host their own solutions.
Federation became popular and open source projects built ways for different sync and share servers to collaborate and exchange files. I was at the center of these developments, having started the most popular file sync and share project, now named Nextcloud, and inventing Federated Cloud Sharing with Bjoern Schiessle, working with others like Pydio to get it implemented across projects.
But it was always clear to me that this was only the beginning. People want more than just having files from other people popping up on their computer or changed in the background by other users.