This comment confuses me: Sandstorm itself is entirely local, and the vagrant-spk dev tool assembles local Sandstorm dev instances in virtual environments with three commands. I'm not sure what "thing like miniflare" we are missing!
As far as the killer app, Sandstorm has some really awesome Sandstorm-only apps, but probably not enough yet for our "exclusives" to be a draw to the platform on their own. Sandstorm currently has some limitations that make it difficult to use in federated environments, and we are working on it, but yeah, it meant we didn't have a fantastic story for social during all this Elon stuff.
> This comment confuses me: Sandstorm itself is entirely local
The hosted version wasn't. Having to prop up your own Sandstorm instance pretty much compromises the project goal—ease of app installability means little gains when you're still responsible for running Sandstorm infrastructure that it relies upon.
Your original complaint was the lack of a "miniflare", i.e. a simulator for local development purposes. But you can run Sandstorm itself locally and there are in fact tools to streamline the process of doing app development using a local Sandstorm server.
Now you seem to be arguing something about how running Sandstorm locally is too much work for end users, who would prefer to use the hosted version? But I thought we were talking about app developers. End users don't need a "miniflare".
If what you're looking for here is someone to confirm that your crummy false equivalence is crummy and false, then that's doable. (Say the word if so.)
As far as the killer app, Sandstorm has some really awesome Sandstorm-only apps, but probably not enough yet for our "exclusives" to be a draw to the platform on their own. Sandstorm currently has some limitations that make it difficult to use in federated environments, and we are working on it, but yeah, it meant we didn't have a fantastic story for social during all this Elon stuff.