I was never much into torrents or other file-sharing techniques, but these days I find that I often want to move files between devices and since I don't really use any of the cloud service providers I end up doing hacky things like sending files through keet (which works surprisingly well, if you don't mind closed source software...)

But here is Casey Rodarmor attempting to make decentralized filesharing much more user-friendly:

The goal of filepack is to make decentralized filesharing as appealing and easy to use as centralized services. When you share audio, images, and video they should look good and be easy to search and play.

Existing filesharing technologies are hard to use because they transfer unstructured data: individual files or directories of files. With no structure or metadata, many desirable features are hard or impossible to build. For example, structured search, graphical user interfaces with package artwork, and automatically locating, playing, and transcoding media.

Filepack packages include structured, machine-readable metadata describing the package and its contents. This allows them to be presented in an attractive way, supports structured search, and for any media in the package to be automatically previewed and played.

All metadata displayed by the filepack.com demo server is served directly from the metadata included in each package. This includes package titles, artwork, image thumbnails, and video placeholder images. Filepack metadata also identifies the media type of the package and each individual media item, including its file format, and details like resolution, codec, and duration.

Considering that Rodarmor came up with ordinals, it is not surprising that metadata is where his mind goes. Maybe filepack could be called magic metadata more than any kind of particularly cool innovation in the actual filesharing technology.

I've been slaving away for months on this thing, so I would absolutely love it, and you, if you gave filepack a whirl.

You can download the latest release from GitHub or build it from source with cargo install filepack.

Try creating a package and running the server, for yourself or others.

Filepack only supports a limited number of media types and file formats, but I'm very happy to add more if there's demand.

As I've been spending a lot of time on old webpages lately (and relying heavily on services like archive.today and the wayback machine) it has occurred to me that it might be handy for a community to attempt to archive old pages that may be vulnerable to getting scrubbed from the internet and perhaps something like filepack would work well for that.

One of the most potentially powerful ideas in Filepack is the web package. It enables web content to be packaged and shared, and when mounted, web packages have access to the Filepack server's API. I want to demonstrate this with a single-page media player app which exposes the content of a Filepack server in a interface that is competative with existing streaming services and media players.