Sandstorm- self-hostable web productivity suite

What could have been? I remember being so excited about this at that point, I was sure it was going to take a significant chunk of [famous web services still around]. They even send me stickers for Cap'n'proto..

I have been thing a lot about why none of those self-hosting solutions never took off and most of them died off over the last decade.

Why are we going dehydrated in the middle of the ocean, with docker and so many open source alternative to the common software and services ?

My conclusion is this: just pick the distro you like, whether it is Debian, Fedora, Arch or FreeBSD. Preferably one with the selection of package you need. All those will be maintained in a few years too, you just need to upgrade.

Because in the end the solution was the problem. A Debian for example was meant to host Internet services, it is well put together and has a large selection of software and can be trusted. It is more than enough security features for hosting your own apps, especially if you access them through something like tailscale.

A lot of people (me included) thought that since containers were the hype we should build something new and setup everything like a corporation would do. Looking back it was a bad idea and it did not work (fact).

> So I would ask for recommendations on similar tools. Not bare Docker containers but fully lanaged platforms wirh one click installs where it is easy to add/remove users.

I've done a similar journey for my self-hosted stuff, started with Sandstorm, moved to Yunohost, but got frustrated with the configuration, and how different every package was and eventually have landed on using NixOS for my home servers. It's not a "fully managed platform" in the traditional sense, but if you're a developer, that's almost what you get. Adding new services is usually just adding the configuration for them.

Bit of a learning curve learning the language, tooling and ecosystem, but once you're over that hurdle, having all declerative configuration in SCM together with easy linking of configuration options together (define service ports once, reference them in other services, for example), and everything being easy to rollback, have been a god-send so far. Been running it for maybe 2 years or something by now, with more or less zero issues besides the ones I introduce myself.

Adding/removing users can be as easy as adding/remove one line of configuration, and redeploying. Simple enough for me and my family so far.

For Sandstorm alternatives with one-click installs and user management, consider Cloudron, Caprover, Umbrel, Unraid, TrueNAS SCALE apps, or Portainer with its app templates - most allow running alongside other services without monopolizing your server.

I loved the idea of Sandstorm as well, but ended up moving my stuff to Proxmox and TurnKey Linux. TKL is a similar idea to Sandstorm, but on the container level, so what you download are LXC images, ready to go after a minimum of user-friendly configuration. They are going since 2008, and they have around 120 offerings.

TKL is integrated into Proxmox, so for example if you'd like a new Wordpress site or a Nextcloud or Mattermost instance, you just click a bunch on the web interface, it downloads the image and installs and runs it, you do the initial setup my giving it a bunch of info on a user interface, and the thing is ready to go.

There are lots — “selfhosted OS” is the term to look for. Umbrel and CasaOS are some other popular ones. I don’t personal experience with any of them though.

There also used to be Freedom Bone [https://gitlab.com/bashrc2/freedombone] ...but, honestly, I've never used it nor am even sure if its still alive as a project.

Yes! Docker Swarm is still being supported in 2025, and we have community and solution resources in an Awesome List https://github.com/BretFisher/awesome-swarm

There are a lot of people talking about Docker, Cloudron, etc. as alternatives, but nothing else approaches Sandstorm's grain concept, which is a huge differentiator.

As an internet random, please believe I have the least creepy intentions when I say I really enjoy following your career. Through Cap'n Proto, Sandstorm, CF Workers and Durable Objects, there's a throughline I feel you have ben chasing. And it's a super interesting thing, a unique emphasis you seem to have brought to the world in several different ways. So, keep up the good work :).

I could have definitely used it in my company nowadays, as a paying org. A refresh of available apps would maybe be necessary now. Sandstorm was so awesome.

> Is it... time for me to take another pass at this?

Yes please. I was very excited for Sandstorm when it first started. Sad to see it's current stage.

Also I think the world around has evolved quite a bit wrt containerization from when Sandstorm first started. I wonder how you would build it today, if you were to build from scratch. Could you utilize docker for most of the containerization?

Sandstorm was like an App Store for any server app. You could install nextcloud with it.

Was a pretty good idea but there wasn’t any sustainable business model/funding and it was also pre docker era which would have made things more secure/containerised and easier to maintain.

Imagine iCloud but you can manage more than 1,000 files at once, the files transfer much more quickly and don't have to use a touch interface that flakes out, plus no rent.

There is a small community working on it (hi!) but there is several hard problems in the way of moving forward, all of which can be solved with time and money, neither of which we have a lot of. :/

I think ten years on there remains nothing even remotely comparable to Sandstorm for a dozen reasons, but I also can't assure you an issue you find would get fixed expediently, for sure.

There is a small community maintaining it - there should be a link to the Zulip on the website - but it is a small group and a complex beast. Some effort is going into a rewrite that keeps the same app/security model, but moves from C++ to Go and simplifies the database layer. I believe that's taking up a fair bit of contributor energy.

They didn’t quite reach the MVP level and so in a way it wasn’t really maintained in the early days either.

I think this particular marketing choice was at the time intended to pursue enterprise users. It's been there since before the original startup shut down.

The entire security model of sandstorm is incredibly strong. This criticism is hard to understand. Can you elaborate at all? Do you recall any specific issues?

Security was their highest priority.

IIRC idea was that all security was done by sharing links (with capabilities) to documents.

That seems to be totally different. Sandstorm was a way of building your own private ~equivalent of Google Workspace out of existing open source web apps running in containers behind a common auth system.