This is sad because the project looks interesting, it is not the usual quick kludge or vaporware, but the bad or inexistent documentation is a terrible disservice to the project.
> And here it is, renamed!
> Perkeep (née Camlistore) is a set of open source formats, protocols, and software for modeling, storing, searching, sharing and synchronizing data in the post-PC era. Data may be files or objects, tweets or 5TB videos, and you can access it via a phone, browser or FUSE filesystem.
I checked archive.org and that text has been there for a couple of months at least. Looks interesting, I've been in the market for this kind of self hosted backup/replication/tagging/search thing.
Not for me. Almost all of what you copied there seems like intrinsically meaningless fluff. "a set of formats"? "a set of protocols"? "software"! Of course it's software! "for modeling"? "in the post-PC era"?
I would have preferred GP's ~"imports data/files from cloud services into a local database and provides a search interface for it". Because THAT tells me what it does, not any of the other words you posted.
Someone made a really well done cartoon mascot for it, but the copy isn't _helpful_.
It does not.
The first sentence on the site ("Perkeep [...] is a set of open source formats...") describes literally what the thing is, but not at all what it _does_.
Not to slam on these cats, because marketing copy is _hard_. For project collaborators, or open-source dorks who live in this kind of world anyway, the sentence on the homepage is probably perfectly descriptive.
But I agree with my GP post. Reading the homepage I had no idea what Perkeep actually did.
> modeling, storing, searching, sharing and synchronizing [...] files or objects, tweets or 5TB videos, and you can access it via a phone, browser or FUSE filesystem
I mean maybe it could have been more explicit or they could have added more detail, but having this as the first sentence is WAY better than most of the 'professional' landing pages for startups that get posted here. 'Harmonizes synergy and increases your ability to wow your target space with your aspirations', now that's meaningless.
You: “Well I’m sorry it wasn’t clear to you but it was clear to me and better than these other things and here’s why it should have been clear to you.”
If someone tells you something is unclear to them, arguing about it doesn’t change the fact that it wasn’t clear to them.
> files or objects, tweets or 5TB videos
means rsync, curl, and Twitter API integration. It obviously does more than this, since I can throw something together that does that in a few hours. Where is the list of everything it supports?!?
That should be front and center.
"Your data should be alive in 80 years, especially if you are." To which you might add, "We're here to help you make sure that's what happens". Then follow that with the "Things Perkeep believes ..." section.
After that, the mission is clear, how it works is clear (though many people might have -no idea- what 'Open source' is good for). Only Then (IMO) can you get away with going all technical on them!
Is it for a nas? Is it distributed? Is it some backup yoke for a cloud service? Do you run it on your own hardware? Is it all of the above? What does your data look like? Where and how are you searching through it? Is that part not for muggles either or is there a frontend? And so on basically forever.
It really depends on the audience for the product, targeting regular users does require more thought on the UX, etc which almost invariably means more funding.
When someone says "permanently keep your stuff, for life" do they mean some sort of pay-once eternal backup, like permanent.org? Something censorship-resistant, like Freenet? Something peer-to-peer and distributed-ledger based like Filecoin? Backing up data locked up in cloud services? Converting obscure file formats into ones with more longevity? Bypassing defunct DRM? Activism against civil forfeiture?
It looks more like "wealthy Googlers helping out a friend with a short term gig" than "financing a professional product".
Perhaps you could donate your time as a UX specialist to help these folks who are more versed in backend systems and libraries.
I considered it for my use case (archiving and deduping dozens of terabytes / millions of files on several personal NAS boxes), really wanted to use it - as I find some of its ideas pretty cool, but in the end decided it would be simpler to just write something from scratch instead. It took less time to write it than it would have taken perkeep to ingest my data.
"Overview: The original motivation and background for why Perkeep exists and what one might use it for."
And there I found a great description.
it’s like git but for all your stuff.
why would you want to use it? you probably wouldn’t, quite yet. but it’s an interesting attempt at doing something a little more sophisticated than a plain file system.
So it seems to have a bunch of scripts to import data into its database from a variety of sources (including cloud services), and provides a search interface to navigate that historical data. And it has a lot of under-the-hood stuff about replication, and it's entirely self-hosted.