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Camlistore (renamed to Perkeep) author here.

It is true that the website needs some love & updated docs. We've been working on Camlistore for 8 years now (with a few drier spells) but our focus has never been marketing. If anything, we didn't want too many non-nerd users for a number of years because it wasn't ready for non-developer usage. That's starting to change.

We have pretty good docs for configuration and such, but we lack some concise high-level text about what the project is and why.

I'll prioritize that.




For everyone else reading this, here's more context. I once tried creating durable physical storage that spanned multiple external hard-disks with a single logical schema, but then discovered Camlistore and git-annex and decided to let more competent people build it.

The idea is that we should be able to own and manage our personal data - which runs into terabytes across one lifetime - without having to trust and/or pay the big cloud companies. So Camlistore from its earliest days had integrated photo gallery since multimedia is where most of the bytes are consumed.

The whole thing once had the label the IndieWeb movement (which we should revive), and Wired wrote about it here - https://www.wired.com/2013/08/indie-web/

Brad Fitzpatrick is also the creator of LiveJournal where he wrote the original version of Memcached in Perl. He also wrote OpenID, and then went on to work with Rob Pike and team on the Go Programming language. Camlistore was one of the earliest projects written in Go (before Hashicorp made it cool) and I imagine that had something to do with him getting into the language itself, but that's for Brad to clarify :)


Brad also wrote MogileFS (omg files!) at LiveJournal, a self-hosted precursor to cloud object stores like AWS’ S3.

https://code.google.com/archive/p/mogilefs/


It would be interesting to have a line or two about the differences and potential synergies with Upspin (https://upspin.io).


Brad, the Perkeep author, previously answered this briefly here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13700968


Thanks a lot for chiming in.

Sorry to say I'm still confused by what Camlistore does.

Would it be fair to say it's similar to Syncthing[1]?

[1] https://syncthing.net/




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