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Comment by kentonv | Hacker News Reader

FWIW, the most-active Sandstorm developers over the past couple of years, such as zenhack (to whom you replied) and ocdtrekkie, are not Cloudflare employees, and never were. (They were never Sandstorm employees either.)

For my part, I am indeed mostly focused on Cloudflare Workers today and don't have much leftover energy to spend on Sandstorm. This has nothing to do with Cloudflare telling me how to spend my time. I make my own choices. I still love what we were building with Sandstorm, but what can I say, Workers has been a lot more successful and so I am drawn to focus my energy there.

Note that Cloudflare has no affiliation with Sandstorm, other than employing some of the former team members. Cloudflare did not acquire Sandstorm itself.

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One problem with Sandstorm is that it didn't have something like miniflare. (Cloudflare didn't either until recently, and that's fixed now, but the value prop was high enough otherwise that this wasn't fatal.)

Another is that it lacked (and still does, from what I can see) a killer app. It had the perfect conditions last year with the Twitter acquisition, but to my knowledge didn't seize upon it. (Likewise, Cloudflare had a similar opportunity, but the Wildebeest project comes off as a celebration of Cloudflare's infrastructure for the sake of it and/or aimed at those who love devops stack complexity, generally—a fairly tonedeaf response to what would drive someone to want to run their own fediverse node that's not backed by Mastodon.)

The weird URLs—or rather: the constraints that led to them, and the downstream consequences to UX—didn't help.

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.

I share ocdtrekkie's confusion here.

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".

Please reply indicating whether you agree or disagree with the following statement:

"The Cloudflare developer experience with miniflare is worse than that of Sandstorm."

The experience configuring sendmail is worse than configuring icewm if you want to play audio files.

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.)

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