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"Bloom Drive" is a paid service. 30GB free, then it starts to cost. "Secured by SSL", which probably means the data is not encrypted against access by them.

The Bloom Drive site is one of those sleazy "sign up and then maybe we'll tell you something about what we're selling" sites.[1] You can almost hear the sucking sound of the onboarding funnel.

[1] https://bloom.sh/drive



Hi, Thank you for the the harsh feedback.

Bloom being open source, if you want a more private option than the hosted service bloom.sh you are totally free to host it yourself.

On the other hand, It's just a beta launch, we made it work (and free and open source), and thanks to your feedback, we will make it great :)


I appreciate your generous work, but I think this person is commenting on the lack of any screenshots. That is normally a "smell", no matter how wonderful your intentions are <3


+1, thank you for clarification.

Just didn't had time to setup it before launching.


You should be more transparent with your pricing. What's the charge after free trial?

The gripe is about the scummy bait and switch artifice to get people to sign up!


The project claims a position of moral superiority over Google, but, from the terms and website, has little to act superior about.


Disclaimer: i'm part of the cryptpad team.

If you are interested in a similar alternative but which is adding the challenge of end to end encryption to the table, check out cryptpad.fr It is Open source and has now 3 years of developpement to bring realtime encrypted documents.

Tackling Google's non open source business model is an important task. There are already quite a few products that are going after that, including NextCloud, OnlyOffice, etc. Most of them target the enterprise where there is money.

To go after the end consumer the main problem is the "surveillance capitalism" issue which you cannot just tackle with the promise of not looking at things and just be open source. End to End encryption is needed, which is what we are working on at CryptPad (on hackernews Time to Encrypt the Cloud https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13692856). Other products are proposing zero knowledge email or drives. End to end encryption is key, because it guarantees that the surveillance business model won't be activated down the line. It also protects the data from cloud hacking.

From there the biggest challenge is funding. Without revenue from reading the data like Google, or selling super expensive devices like Apple, or selling to the large Enterprise like Microsoft, how do you provide a good service to end consumer. Open source can help solve the hosting part by distributing it and by self hosting but it won't solve the R&D issue. To fund this level of R&D help is needed. At cryptpad we have subscriptions and Open Collective.

Ludovic from CryptPad.fr


Yes, it definitely needs a feature list. My top questions:

- do you support rsync?

- how is my data protected (encryption...)?

- do you offer snapshots?




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