Magic Wormhole: get things from one computer to another, safely

I wasn't yet planning for it, but what the heck.

https://zynk.it is a new project I've been working on together with a small team aimed at delivering a truly easy, fast, efficient, unlimited, privacy-respecting and pain free file-sharing experience. It’s peer-to-peer, E2EE and avoids centralized storage, aligning with the ethos of control and transparency we often discuss here. It allows users to send and receive any file(s) or folder(s) without any limits whatsoever between any device/OS and any device/OS, send and forget, Zynk takes care of all the heavy lifting.

What I hope sets Zynk apart is that it is built to literally be used by anyone, be it a power user, or my mom.

One of my main goals with this project is to remove any pains associated with data transfer once and for all, for any use case.

I'm curious if this resonates with you—would you use it? What would make it indispensable for your workflows?

I'd be happy to discuss it more if anyone is interested. Feel free to sign up for early access on the site.

I'm assuming it won't be open-source? I don't really see why I would use a propietary/non FOSS version of this (magic wormhole).

The great thing about magic wormhole is that the protocol is open, and anyone could implement it for themselve.

For example there is the reference implementation in python, then there are implementations golang, rust and haskell. Flutter bindings so you can use it in flutter. Multiple GUI implementations for all operating systems, even mobile and the web (via WASM). It has also been implemented into other open source projects like tmux or termshark. https://magic-wormhole.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ecosystem.ht...

Also other comments in this thread mention many already existing alternatives e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41276443

Basically what I'm saying is, I'm locked to the applications you and your team have built. I couldn't "hack" something quickly together to integrate it into other things, I couldn't extend your clients by modifying the source code and I also couldn't verify that your code really does what it says (E2EE, privacy-respecting).

> What I hope sets Zynk apart is that it is built to literally be used by anyone, be it a power user, or my mom.

I'm sure that a more friendly UI/UX for non power users would be great, but IMO it would be even better if it used an open protocol like magic wormhole, this way the receiver does not also need to install a Zynk Client, but can use whatever he is already using. There is for example https://winden.app/about already exists, which seems to be a very user friendly UI, is open source and works without installing it.

Maybe I'm just too much of a "power user" (I use Linux on my computers/servers and a custom ROM on my phone) to understand what zynk could provide to me.

But I think (which means I don't have sources to back this up) the audience which does not care about e2ee/privacy already uses the solutions implemented into their OS (like AirDrop/Quick Share, share via iCloud/Google Drive/OneDrive/...) and from my experience the audience that cares about privacy/e2ee has a large overlap with the Open Source community which is more likely to use solutions like magic wormhole or croc.

Hey.

We are not planning to open source it, but who knows what the future might bring.

I too love and appreciate open protocols and tools, heck, I also tend to gravitate towards that by default as well, but when something better comes up that's not open source and I can use it better/easier, I do.

We'll release a CLI for Windows, macOS and Linux which will easy to use and flexible/scriptable so you could use that to hack together anything you need.

You definitely are a power user. While I don't disagree on the P2P/privacy overlap with open source I do think the world has yet to have the final say about data transfer. Yes, literally countless tools and methods of moving data exist out there, but they aren't universal (AirDrop/Quickshare don't work between all platforms), they pretty much always have both random limits, and limitations, and in most cases aren't really efficient nor pain free -- we're trying to do better, hope we make it! :)

Stay tuned and if you or anyone else would like to give it a try in the mean time drop me a line, m <at> zynk.it