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Ask HN: Side project ideas

7 points by sfilargi ↗ HN
I have a couple ideas for side projects and would love to get feedback.

The ideas are:

1. A poor-man’s cloud storage. The idea is that instead paying monthly for cloud storage you buy this small IoT device and connect usb drives on IT and your files are available to you over the internet. If you want redundancy you can choose to backup you drives to the drives of other users(encrypted of course).

2. A back to basics email service. Text only, whitelist only, with unlimited random one time email addresses. Emails will not reach the user’s inbox unless the sender’s email is explicitly whitelisted(or the user has emailed them first). For online registrations user’s will be able to request one time emails. Nothing fancy really.

8 comments

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jmnicolas
I like 1, however you risk to have the same problem than Freenet : nobody wants to host potentially highly illegal content even encrypted.

2. needs to have a lot of users to be useful.

sfilargi
> nobody wants to host potentially highly illegal content even encrypted.

Good point, I didn’t think about that. Thanks!

brudgers
I like the poor man's cloud storage if, and only if, it scratches one of your itches.

The email idea is still managing email. There was one of the old online services that had a similar feature. A few years ago I dealt with someone who had it. It required a phone call to get whitelisted. I guess a phone call plus manually adding my email address to the white list seemed like less work to that person. It seemed like an artifact from the Fax machine days when business was not done by email. The market today probably smaller...anyone who needs email has it and is making it work.

These days the common solution to the problems of email is to use something else. Messaging platforms have mostly replaced email among teens and replaced big chunks of email among adults. Nobody emails photos of the grandkids anymore. They go on Facebook/Instagram etc. instead.

Good luck.

sfilargi
Thanks for the feedback. The whitelist email idea is basically something that I need. I use fastmail and getting sick and tired of marketing email. They always find the way to my inbox. But yeah, I see what you mean. Hardly anybody uses emails these days.
chrismorgan
> Hardly anybody uses emails these days.

What?

gregalbritton
Both intriguing concepts. #2 is my interesting IMO as it can possibly be used for signing up for services that one doesn't want to display their primary email address. It also has a 'Snapchat' quality to it where email is a 'one off' and the account can easily be deleted, etc.

Also a way to manage accounts online (testing services, etc). It may be able to better manage issue of spam that many experience as all accounts are linked to one email for many users. Email communication becomes unnecessary for many accounts, plus authenticator apps and twilio make email less important.

Let's connect. I have a side project I'm currently creating. Contact details in my profile :)

Beany
#2 - Neat idea, don't think it would be widely accepted though.
zanedb
I have a similar idea to #2 - let's get in touch.