Years ago, I wanted to send photos and various files to friends online, but the services I was uploading these files on had strict restrictions on filetype, file size and ease of use.
I had found a project called QuadFile which was perfect for my needs. Suprisingly, this service got incredibly popular, and the old python server wasn’t able to cope. I optimised the python server as much as I could to extend the life of it, and I worked on learning Rust (an incredibly fast, memory safe programming language) and rewriting QuadFile in it.
After a while, and a lot of friends helping me to learn rust, I had finally finished the ‘Ephemeral’ Program, which had all (and more!) features that QuadFile did.
More recently, I’ve added in authenticated uploading, which requires a user to provide an API Key to upload files. This allows me to keep the file storage down, and reduces the amount of unknown users uploading malicious content.
This server now stores roughly 3000 files at any given time, with almost 7 million total views, all taking up less than 15GB of total filestorage.
My personal server instance: https://cz0.au
Project link: https://git.volkor.me/Volkor/Ephemeral/