2024-01-15
Sharing files is a problem. Or rather, receiving files.
These days the vast majority of users share files like photos or short videos by messenger. Of course that’s convenient, but the problem is, that a lot of our contacts seem to hardly remember how else to share files. At any rate, whatever way is chosen, it’s bound to be less convenient than sharing by messenger.
That’s not so much a problem for our own convenience. But here we are: by having made a commitment to reduce our own device usage, we actually inflict a certain extra workload or at least inconvenience on our friends and contacts, who’d like to share files with us.
That’s odd. That’s something we’d rather not have.
Obviously we receive much less shared pictures and stuff, which is o.k. if we didn’t ask for it.
However, when we ask a friend if she could share that funny new years eve video with us, we have to ask her to send it by email. And because the file is rather large, what actually needs to happen, is a manual upload to some kind of file sharing or file hosting service. A clunky solution at best, especially if said user isn’t used to utilize such services.
Then again, what actually happens when you share a file by instant messenger is precisely the same thing: The file gets uploaded to the messengers File Hosting space and a link to the file get’s included into the actual message. That video is not really in the chat, the chat just contains a link to the file, that’s hosted elsewhere. In your messenger app all of this happens automatically, and the file is displayed in the time line. There are however file hosting services, that can be used to the same end - independently of any messenger.
Chances are you already have an account at Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud, OneDrive or WeTransfer. So what you could do is, upload the file you want to share to one of those services and then send us the link to the shared file by email. If for some reason you can’t send email, send us the link by text message. Though, that would entail us copying the link character by character from the phone to the computer. You could even write the link on a post card and send that. For me that would still count as “sharing the file”.
Lesser known options for file hosting would include NextCloud, something like the Null Pointer, or you could share a file by uploading it to your own web space.
Which brings me to the solution I use myself. On my Laptop I have a script called “mshare”. It takes a file, checks it’s size and if it’s too large to send by email directly, it uploads the file to my web space and returns a link to the file to the clipboard. All that’s left for me is to paste that link into an email, an online chat, or a Mastodon message. Of course the script can also send multiple files and directories, and let’s me select from various compression formats and file hosting services. Now that’s what I call convenient 🤓
Please send any comments or questions to lkh@betola.de or @lkh@social.sdfeu.org
Copyright: ~lkh • So 14. Jan 22:14:05 CET 2024 • License: CC BY-NC 4.0 • Hosted by: SDF-EU Public Access UNIX System - https://sdf-eu.org