We evaluated QUIC (and many other approaches). Turns out it's a lot harder than you might think to move traffic at high speed across the world, over residential-grade internet, and not drain your battery.
I wonder how widely usable is file sharing nowadays when most of the non tech people just use cloud services for their data, be it google docs or some cloud photo storage
That's right. We actively manage load across our relay network to ensure good performance, but we'll prioritize business transfers during peak times. We don't artificially limit the client, but P2P connection speeds can sometimes be affected by router configurations and ISP routing. For example, some ISPs route P2P traffic through slower paths, which can introduce variability.
1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
2. It doesn't actually replace a USB drive. Most people I know e-mail files to themselves or host them somewhere online to be able to perform presentations, but they still carry a USB drive in case there are connectivity problems. This does not solve the connectivity issue.
3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?
Who else needs to share files bigger than 1 TB? Most cloud services, such as Google Drive or OneDrive, are more than sufficient for managing massive files. I don't see the appeal of this new service.
Oddly enough, I would argue the exact opposite direction; really big files are exactly where I want to do a direct p2p transfer without paying to store it in the cloud.
"former dropbox engineers" doesn't mean a whole lot -- it's a large company where tens of thousands of people have worked over the years. It's not like this is by the founders or anything.
This looks really cool. I especially like the "Keep your progress, whatever happens" feature.
The product looks polished and I definitely see myself using it. My only concern is: Are they taking VC money? Is this going to be enshittified to death trying to pursue a 1000x investment return?
Surprised syncthing isn't mentioned yet. It has been the most stable sync tool for me over the years https://syncthing.net/ . Solid product . Great oboarding experience for Blip! Its just working!
Hey! Blip co-founder here. We didn't expect to show up on HN, but really grateful to OP for sharing Blip. Here's a little bit more about it.
We've built Blip because it's still hard to send original quality photos, videos, and large files to your devices and to other people on the internet. We’re designers and engineers, so our goal has always been to keep the product super simple on the surface, but really fast and powerful underneath.
Blip works in a peer-to-peer way at the UI level: you pick the device or person, and Blip takes care of the delivery. Transfers go directly over WAN whenever possible, and fall back to relays when needed. The idea is to send in one click, skipping the usual dance of moving files through cloud drives and managing shared links.
Under the hood, Blip is optimized for large media and data transfers. It supports full-speed acceleration, resumable progress, and we're rolling out E2EE across all clients to ensure sensitive business data remains secure. Many creative pros and teams already use Blip in their daily media workflows.
We don’t monetize data because it doesn't align with the values of our creative and technical users. Instead, we run on a simple donation and subscription model that lets you support the product and use it without limits, quotas, and frustrations. Our goal is to make file transfer feel invisible.
Teams have been building services like this for ~20 years. They very rarely stick. I agree that it’s still too hard, but the market has historically been too small. It’s at-best a hobby side project for a larger company that can afford to burn the cash.
Like Apple offers this for email for iCloud users. I think Firefox Relay offered it too. There was another company in the late 00s that offered a P2P version.
I mean _cool_, but I’ve not seen a company with this as its primary product last more than 18 months before. With that, _good luck_.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 54.1 ms ] threadWe evaluated QUIC (and many other approaches). Turns out it's a lot harder than you might think to move traffic at high speed across the world, over residential-grade internet, and not drain your battery.
https://www.iroh.computer/
> at super fast speeds
Fast speeds aren't a thing, just like cheap prices and wet waters aren't.
Maybe they just mean if you end up with a relayed connection due to NAT issues? Because lower down it says "Send as fast as your connection"
or tailscale's Taildrop as a native application: https://tailscale.com/kb/1106/taildrop
1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
2. It doesn't actually replace a USB drive. Most people I know e-mail files to themselves or host them somewhere online to be able to perform presentations, but they still carry a USB drive in case there are connectivity problems. This does not solve the connectivity issue.
3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?
2. - nothing would by your criteria of an airgap, that's a strawman, this is just an alternative over the wire method (as is bluetooth file transfer)
Not sure why this needs to be a service. Or why data needs to go through their servers.
Android: Wormhole William (https://github.com/psanford/wormhole-william-mobile)
iOS: Destiny (https://github.com/LeastAuthority/destiny)
Some drawbacks to my current approach:
1. Destiny needs to be configured to use the standard Magic Wormhole servers (just once, after installation): https://github.com/LeastAuthority/destiny/issues/259#issueco...
2. Initiating a transfer requires out of band communication and some copy+paste.
The product looks polished and I definitely see myself using it. My only concern is: Are they taking VC money? Is this going to be enshittified to death trying to pursue a 1000x investment return?
[0] https://github.com/n0-computer/sendme
We've built Blip because it's still hard to send original quality photos, videos, and large files to your devices and to other people on the internet. We’re designers and engineers, so our goal has always been to keep the product super simple on the surface, but really fast and powerful underneath.
Blip works in a peer-to-peer way at the UI level: you pick the device or person, and Blip takes care of the delivery. Transfers go directly over WAN whenever possible, and fall back to relays when needed. The idea is to send in one click, skipping the usual dance of moving files through cloud drives and managing shared links.
Under the hood, Blip is optimized for large media and data transfers. It supports full-speed acceleration, resumable progress, and we're rolling out E2EE across all clients to ensure sensitive business data remains secure. Many creative pros and teams already use Blip in their daily media workflows.
We don’t monetize data because it doesn't align with the values of our creative and technical users. Instead, we run on a simple donation and subscription model that lets you support the product and use it without limits, quotas, and frustrations. Our goal is to make file transfer feel invisible.
Happy to answer any questions.
Like Apple offers this for email for iCloud users. I think Firefox Relay offered it too. There was another company in the late 00s that offered a P2P version.
I mean _cool_, but I’ve not seen a company with this as its primary product last more than 18 months before. With that, _good luck_.