<mnutt>
first time I'm hearing about https://deta.space/, looks kinda sandstorm-ish...has anyone checked it out?
<mnutt>
lots of design-heavy apps, they all seem to be on ProductHunt
<mnutt>
oh, I guess they provide more of the infrastructure, maybe more like personally-contained Firebases where the apps are all frontend?
<ocdtrekkie>
So, the HN thread I see it on says it can't be selfhosted.
<ocdtrekkie>
And their privacy policy says they include a half dozen analytics suites including Google Analytics, in order to see how people use it.
<mnutt>
yeah. unclear exactly how it's a "personal cloud"
<ocdtrekkie>
They claim users are sandboxed from each other as the privacy claim.
<mnutt>
they have deta.vc which you can apply for and will give you $1000 if your app launches and another $1000 if you make revenue
<mnutt>
"Applicants who reach the second round will receive more information about Deta Space."
<ocdtrekkie>
But I don't see anything about isolation between even applications, much less any protection from access by the company.
<ocdtrekkie>
So to me it sounds like a SaaS provider they hope folks don't look into the details of too closely.
<mnutt>
the apps mostly seem to be open source. no clue what the API looks like but they might be easily ported to sandstorm.
<ocdtrekkie>
Possibly but it sounds like Deta provides the database, storage, etc. in addition to authentication. So you might need to stand up a pile of stuff in the app to make it work.
<mnutt>
does make me wonder if perhaps there could be some value to a "sandstorm-light" API where sandstorm provides all of that stuff (maybe literally supabase?) with a bunch of the developer ergonomics that frontend devs expect these days (in other words, not having to run virtualbox)
<mnutt>
not saying a node-based deploy is _better_, just that it may cater to a different audience of app builders
<ocdtrekkie>
In theory, a working Node stack for vagrant-spk is supposed to provide that.
<mnutt>
I guess the Meteor stack might actually be closest? Sadly I don't know of anyone building meteor apps anymore
<ocdtrekkie>
"Publishing on Space allowed me to act like I was building this app for one person; I didn't have to worry about authentication" basically sounds like Sandstorm from the developer side.
<ocdtrekkie>
You know, if you don't really care about privacy, security, or self-hosting it. :P
<ocdtrekkie>
Most of the stacks are, if working, very low effort to employ with a self-contained app.
<ocdtrekkie>
It's hard for me to test Meteor and Node stacks though because we don't have test apps for them.
<ocdtrekkie>
But like, the Python and PHP test apps are basically standard hello worlds and it's like five commands to package them as Sandstorm apps... apart from them reading some HTTP headers, they don't require any real integration.
<ocdtrekkie>
...I kinda think Deta Space would probably just be better off selling Sandstorm hosting, tbh.
<mnutt>
I think a lot of it is in the marketing. same-ish sales pitch to users as sandstorm (even if it's not really accurate) but the dev sales pitch is "we're a batteries-included hip place for frontend devs to develop apps". And yeah they could probably run that on sandstorm. But it also feels like sandstorm could credibly pitch that to frontend devs.
<ocdtrekkie>
They're apparently hoping to eventually take a cut from paid apps. That's a scarce resource for a hosted model.