Discussions

Hey folks,

So I’ve been messing around with BTFS for a few weeks now mainly just testing stuff, poking around with how pinning works, trying to understand how file shards get distributed across nodes, etc. I’m not super deep in the weeds yet but I get the general idea and I’m pretty into it. I think it’s got real potential. Like, real potential.

The problem is...no one I know IRL has any idea what I’m talking about

A couple days ago I was hanging out with my roommate and tried explaining BTFS to him. He’s a nursing major (more on that later lol) and super smart, just not a tech guy. I started off with, “It’s kinda like Dropbox but decentralized, no central servers, no company owning your data,” and he just stared at me. So I backed up and tried, “Imagine if your files lived on a million computers instead of one,” and he was like, “Why would I want that??”

Fair question. But I couldn’t come up with an answer that made sense to him, not just to me. And that’s when it hit me decentralized stuff still feels kinda niche. Even though I believe in it, I’m struggling to explain why it matters to someone who doesn’t already care about privacy, ownership, or tech politics.

I get that BTFS is solving a legit problem centralized storage sucks for a bunch of reasons: data loss, censorship, privacy breaches, server outages, etc. But these problems feel abstract to most people. Until you get hit with a Google Drive lockout or your Dropbox subscription lapses and nukes half your stuff, you don’t really think twice about centralized storage.

Anyway, my main question is: how do y’all talk about BTFS with non-technical people? Or better yet, how do we show people why it matters without sounding like tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorists yelling about big tech?

Also: anyone working on actual tools or apps built on top of BTFS that make it easier to explain? Like, a use-case that hits closer to home for everyday people. I was thinking about how some professions like nursing deal with a lot of sensitive files (patient records, etc.), and that got me thinking about a convo I had with my roommate. He was telling me about all the crap he had to go through just to get his documents submitted for nursing school. Multiple logins, emails not going through, his documents getting flagged for being “incomplete” when he swore he uploaded everything.

And I was like… imagine if there was a secure, verifiable way to share documents that didn’t rely on janky school portals or email chains from 2009. Not just for school stuff but later on, when he actually becomes a nurse and needs to handle secure files on the job. That’s the kind of thing BTFS could do, right?

Speaking of which, if anyone’s curious about how to become a nurse, the process is actually way more chaotic than I thought. Like yeah, there’s the expected stuff classes, clinicals, exams but the admin side of it? Total mess. That’s why I think decentralized storage could sneak in as a silent fixer. Nobody cares about the tech, they just want it to work and make their lives less annoying.

But again… how do we bridge that gap? Between “this is cool tech” and “this solves my real-life problem”?

I’ve seen people online talk about NFTs and blockchain stuff like it’s the future of everything, and while I don’t totally buy into all of that, I do think BTFS has real-world utility. But if we can’t explain it to people outside the dev/crypto bubble, it’s gonna stay underground forever. Which is kinda fine for us nerds, but not great for adoption.

So yeah, would love to hear how y’all explain this to your less-techy friends or fam. Do you use analogies? Do you show them something? Or do you just give up and say “it’s like Google Drive but cooler” and move on?

Also open to seeing any side projects you’re working on. Like I said, if there’s a front-end or mobile app or anything that puts BTFS in people’s hands without them needing to know what a node or CID is, that’s the stuff I wanna check out.

Thanks y’all