Idea, still not sure.... it may stink badly

[boelle]

so the idea has beens doing circles and donuts in my head for months now

but in simple terms a community satellite with a twist,

where the twist is the storage nodes are paid out via paypal in either Euro € or USD $ depending on where the storage node is located

i would have put this in the project and stories category but of course that one is read only so that was a no go… are there a better fit?

not sure i would change much on the customer side other than maybe set up pricing packages

for both sides no traffic metering to keep things simple

how bad does the idea stink ?

[Roxor]

Paying SNOs has never been a problem. There are dozens of ways of doing it. And we’ve had the ability to run community satellites for years.

The problem is attracting customers. With so many other S3 providers out there… who would pay to use this new community version?

If you built all the other pieces of a community-run Storj competitor… at the very end of the process… finding SNOs to hold the data would be the easiest part: they’ll work for pennies, no matter how they get paid

[boelle]

yep, but that is where my version of good moral says that they should be paid fair and in a way they can go buy bread without to much loss

but yeah, the customer would not care how the data is stored, just that its safe etc

so yeah, why should a customer pick me over storj or any other competitor for that matter… will make a hard think on that at least.

[kocoten1992]

Where do you get the code for satellite? Don’t think it open source (even if it is, don’t think a community version can afford google spanner anw).

If you can inferred back the source code of satellite from storj client, what if storj client slightly change the api, would you able to keep up or this will be a hardfork?

[arrogantrabbit]

So, in nutshell, you want to compete directly with storj, and your competitive advantage is… slightly different payout method to operators, who are not even the most important entity in the whole process? What will you put into your marketing materials? Here, service like storj but more expensive and less trustworthy but we pay operators in cash!

Why not focus on that then? Create a service to automatically convert tokens to dollars and send to people’s bank accounts. Oh wait…

[Roxor]

@kocoten1992

Where do you get the code for satellite? Don’t think it open source…

It has been available for years now. But yeah nobody really wants to donate the resources needed to run it in their homelab (or pay to run it in a Cloud provider). There’s not really a point: lots of work for little gain…

[kocoten1992]

I see.. it was right on storj/storj. Honestly, I can see this might work, I’ve only use about 1/3 of my storage, the rest is wasted (about 80TB).

@Roxor

they’ll work for pennies, no matter how they get paid

You are right, for me it can go down further, storage not in use is a waste anyway, so create a satellite with $1/TB or less and I still even consider.

[boelle]

well i need to create an admin interface to control all the settings, that does not come default and will take a good amount of time, also i need to learn about the settings as there are very little documentaion on them

but hey, i’m on a pension so time is not an issue

[arrogantrabbit]

@boelle

well i need to create an admin interface to control all the settings, that does not come default and will take a good amount of time, also i need to learn about the settings as there are very little documentaion on them

So, about two evenings worth of prompting LLM, I’d estimate?

[boelle]

i’m a bit of tired so sorry for asking stupid, but what is LLM ?

[kocoten1992]

Large Language Models, it is the Artificial Intelligence stuff, you ask and it answer - eg: ChatGPT, Claude, you could give it the link to storj github and ask it how to set thing up.

[boelle]

yes but AI still needs to find the information somewhere, or else it would just be guessing

but you are right, it could be used as a kind of “wingman” for some of the work

[arrogantrabbit]

I meant this: https://cloud.google.com/discover/what-is-agentic-coding

@boelle

yes but AI still needs to find the information somewhere, or else it would just be guessing

Yes, the key is to prompt it correctly, to go find information, brainstorm the idea, bounce ideas off of another agent, etc.

Human is no longer needed in the loop for small-to-mediup projects. Welcome to the future.

@boelle

but you are right, it could be used as a kind of “wingman” for some of the work

Yes. it started like that. Now it’s more of a contractor, third party software vendor. In teh future it will be even more self-encompassing.

I like this quote form Alexandrescu’s recent talk:

[kocoten1992]

While you are at it, you may try multiple servers with different pricing range, eg: $1.5, $1.2, $1, 80¢, etc.. For example: I might set 80TB for $1.5, but after sometime without customer, I’ll split 30TB to $1.2 server, of course if it too low, I won’t border. Let see where demand meet supply. May also get rid of /24.

[boelle]

getting rid of the /24 requirements is also in my plan.. its simply to strict, but i plan to add an option so that nodes inside the same ip(address) dont get the same data

ie the same idea as /24 but not as strict

[kocoten1992]

How it going? You figure it out yet?

[boelle]

well i thought i would split up all the settings in 3 categories depending on who they impact: Customers, Storage nodes and then the rest would logical concern the satellite itself

I “think” i have managed the customers ones and i’m now at the satellite ones, where i started out with a “branding section” that should allow doing things like logo’s and links and in the end also the few pages that i found out so far, like privacy policy and such

i use github copilot as a helper tool (the pro tier) since my skills at the go language is shit, someday i get a lot done and sometimes not so much, it all depends on how many of the prem. request that goes with the subscription it takes to get things done, when they are used up i have to wait intil the first day of the month before the counter is reset

but what i got so far:

at admin loging i manged to get TOTP installed so you need a one time code from an auth app, i use google auth. app. first time you set it up on the command line, and it gives you a QR code to scan. from there everything is done on a webinterface served at port 7777 locally

as part of this i also made a feature that requires a usb stick to be inserted to change settings, without it everything goes read-only. the stick also serves as a backup location for the config.yaml

landing page after this is customers accounts:

above that in side left hand sidebar/menu i also have a small services status thing that allow me to start and stop the different services the satellite runs

now all the settings i think and assume concerns the customer looks like this:

there are far to many to show at once, but the most important one is pricing packages

this allows to setup “packages” the customer can upgrade too

below it i have stripe that is used to collect money from the customer

now the most important one you think about is the thing that does check /24 requirement

i decided to use ip-api.com when a storage nodes contacts the satellite the satellite knows where its located, and the satellite can either do as storj does where the same data will not be sent to the same /24 segment or it will not be sent to the same address so the old option is still there

but as i and many have said, why should the guy next door be punished because i have a node or the other way round

i also made a payout section for the storage nodes:

yes paypal not tokens (“funny money”), why? while crypto is great and all you never know what you get, exchange rates go up and down so much. if i where to bring this to market i think nodes should be paid in something stable that they can go and buy bread with

fee’s yes they are true in both crypto and fiat world, paypal take a cut even when you use their mass payout feature, paying out small bits is not good as the fee’s will eat up the payout, i did a ballpark estimate and for things to be reasonble i think a minimum payout of 20$ is about right

hmm… i would have shown the entire menu as it is now, but how… maybe just a video where i click each setting at 5 sec interval maybe?

and the reason i have not made it further is simple: i do it with my own money and on disability pension that is not much, and i got an old house 4 years ago that needs renovation and that comes first

but at some point i will get to where i could launch a satellite and maybe compete against storj if i wanted to

[boelle]

looking through myself here is another one i added:

i have not tested it yet fully but the idea is that any customer or storage node within a sanctioned country are rejected automatic, customers are served a landing page that simply say we cant serve them since they are inside a sanctioned country, the same for the storage node

and about storage nodes, when i get to them, also here i plan to make a webinterface for setup, its not much required but since there is a dashboard at port 14002 why not include settings etc so we get rid of the command line as much as possible

[boelle]

another one i added to the mix:

so a keycard with 10 codes that are one time use, just in case you loose your phone and cant use the auth app, normally you would not allow this but for testing i had to have this setting

[boelle]

while at it looking at the customer side:

not much is changed, the dropdown in the upper right is moved to the left sidebar

but i have added a feature that allows a company admin to set up a org and invite users so they can access company projects, they should be able to do so without their own account present first, one will be created when they click the invite link