I don't understand why you're being downvoted because you make a valid point. It has no iOS or Android client, no cloud storage (unless you buy your own), no versioning and sync conflict behaviour is very different. Ergo, it's not a replacement.

> no cloud storage (unless you buy your own)

That's kind of the whole point, isn't it? It's clearly meant to be a Dropbox replacement not for everybody, but for those who consider the lack of mandatory cloud storage a feature. So yeah, technically more a replacement for BitTorrent Sync than Dropbox, but not everybody knows about that.

Missing features can be added. Mobile clients by third party devs will surely crop up if/when this thing gets traction. The protocol is open, after all.

Not to be condescending, but what did you expect from a "roll your own" solution? Of course you have to host it yourself. This has been the case forever, OwnCloud being the biggest example right now.

That's fine, but call it what it is. I only objected to calling it a "replacement". There's a big functional difference between P2P and centralized architectures.

Syncthing is less purely peer-to-peer. It's easy enough set up a central server and have your devices only sync to that server because of the way connections are made.

It seems as if you explained that it was useful as an always on central server to replace Dropbox, though.

Yes, absolutely. But that is a significantly greater requirement, each end user or workgroup running their own server. I'm not sure why I'm getting downvoted for pointing that out. It's not an apples-to-apples replacement.

This + a hosting provider would be more like an actual Dropbox replacement (e.g. owncloud.org links to a bunch of hosts).

That's not what I'm looking for. I do have a computer at home that is always on.

edit: Do people generally still turn off their home computers?

edit2: After thinking about it - what you seem to be describing is an alternative and not just a replacement. I want to replace the service that Dropbox offers with one of my own, I don't want to switch to an alternative Dropbox clone service.

Huge numbers of people only have a laptop at home which sleeps when they're at work. So the only sync service that's going to work for them is something with online storage as an intermediate step.

>>edit: Do people generally still turn off their home computers?

Yeah. My desktop computer eats up a lot of power even when idle. I do want the convenience of never turning it off, but I'd rather be environmentally friendly.