We discussed how to host your files in the previous technology focused post. This also can share a file you have with someone else in a relatively private manner. The issue is the learning curve that comes with setting up your own cloud hosting.
Unless you are like me and go out of your way to be as private as possible you may not want to wade through the learning curve. It is not an easy process, and this leads to most people never wanting to bother setting up their own file hosting service.
Convenience killed privacy.
Let's share a proverbial file. We decide to not use any of the big players like Google, Dropbox, and the rest, due to being privacy conscience. There are many ways to do this, most requiring some level of technical know-how.
We could host it a site but then we need to make the site. Also, we can still be at the mercy of the hosting provider and our site may be shutdown if our content does not agree with the host's ideology. This is no good.
There is BitTorrent, but that has a bigger learning curve than setting up a website. To be honest, that is why BitTorrent is not more popular. I can't imagine having to explain BitTorent to my Grandmother over the phone so she could see baby pictures. I can't describe the levels of hell that would put a person through. Has to be at least a seven...
Even if the person with who you want to share a file with knows what BitTorrent is we still have a problem. What if we only want that person to see the file? With BitTorrent we are stuck with public sharing and this can not be changed (as far as I am aware).
Anyone with the magnetlink to your file can retrieve a copy. While this is useful most times it is not useful in all. Ninety percent of the time we want to share with only a handful of people or an office sized group at most.
There is a cool site called file.pizza that lets anyone send a file to another person peer-to-peer. It is a great service we can use free of charge and they don't save data from the users. We will have to share the link with every person manually though.
Not to mention that we need to keep that page open until the file is received at the other end. This turns into a hassle if we cannot communicate with the other party that the file has arrived.
Well, this is a pickle...
We need something easy for anyone to use, decentralized, secure, and respects privacy. We seem to hit some, of these with the various platforms we talked about but not all. There are many options out there to share a file across the world.
The convenient ones are all centralized, and the decentralized ones are not convenient. At least until I heard about Demonsaw. Strange and creepy name but an awesome service built to share our files.
Demonsaw
Demonsaw 4 is an encrypted communications platform that allows you to chat, message, and transfer files without fear of data collection or surveillance from governments or corporations
That hits me in all the nerd feels.
Demonsaw was originally called Titan and is on their fourth version. At this time the program is not open-soucre but versions one through three were so we may see Demonsaw 4 open-sourced in the future. Being open-source is not a deal breaker for me.
Many of the open-source security focused applications we use only show the code for the app. The server is still closed so you have no clue if it is as secure as they say. With Demonsaw you can run your own server and sniff the packs to see if data is being sent to another IP. If not, then you can be sure your data is safe.
In Demonsaw, you connect to routers. This allows you to chat and share files with everyone on that router or a subset of them. It is as easy as downloading the program, running it, and setting up the directories you want to share from your computer.
No need no mess with torrent files or ask if everyone got the file. If you need a file, there is a search option that will scan all the shared data and return a list of matches for you to download.
image from oia on twitter
After you have the program and running, the default router is filled in and a random username is assigned to you automatically. All you need to do is connect and start playing around. There you will find many files that people are sharing, rooms to chat about certain topics, and the main chat. You may even run into the founder like I did my first evening using the program.
If you are interested in spinning up your own router, they have it all outlined in an easy to follow wiki. Anyone that has used the Linux terminal will find no problem following along. As I was reading over the instructions I thought, "wow, this make Nextcloud look like rocket science". I can't express this well enough. The amount of overhead it took to get Nextcloud working and secure was magnitudes greater than what Demonsaw lays out. Huge kudos to them!
Demonsaw is easy to use. If you can use Discord, you can use Demonsaw. They have versions for Windows, Mac, and Linux, with mobile version in progress as I write this. I am stoked about this project and am surprised I did not come across it sooner.
I plan on buying a VPS and setting up a router for my friends and I to chat and share files. If you would like to connect via Demonsaw, let me know on your favorite social network and I'll point you to the router address.
image from demonsaw.com
Thanks for reading!
If you have any questions please ask and I will do my best to get you the answer.